Are there Guardian Angels? Do we have Guardian Angels?
A pious belief? Or something beyond our perception and understanding?
From The Physics of Angels:
"RUPERT: Do you think there are practical ways of making friends with the angels? For example, in various Jewish ceremonies there are invocations of the archangels Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel as the guardians of the four directions. And Christians in the Catholic tradition have a particular opportunity to make friends with the angels at Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, on 29 September. Do you think there are things we can do apart from being more open to God, and the spirit of truth and justice, specifically to invoke the angels?
"MATTHEW: Yes, there are rituals and invocations that are present already in church traditions, and some that have to be resurrected. And we need new rituals to invoke angels; I think that these will come as we allow our minds to wander more into the living cosmos. Technology could play a great role in helping us envision the angels — for example, the wonderful photographs we now have of stars being born and galaxies spiraling. But I don't think we should underestimate the path of the struggle for justice and truthfulness. This is about inner work. Certainly truthfulness is. Hildegard is saying that where there is inner work, it does indeed open the communication with angels.
"The same is true in struggling for justice. Remember that angels often visit people in prison. St. Peter was liberated from prison by an angel. Sometimes I think that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and other great souls that have spent time in prison have found angelic support there.
"So the struggle for justice is not an abstraction. It's a way of learning and a way of opening the heart. I know one Catholic sister, for example, a very fine and holy woman, who tells me her greatest mystical experience is being taken away in the paddy wagon by police when she protests at military bases and nuclear power plants — that is when she most feels the presence of spirits and the angels.
"So the struggle for justice is a path that opens our hearts up and allows angels to rush in. The struggle, certainly around ecological issues, is going to get more intense in our lifetime, and we need to see these struggles as rituals. And angels come to healthy and authentic rituals.
"RUPERT: That's an exciting prospect, the struggle for justice and the struggle for a new relationship with the environment taking place in alliance with the angels and with their help. It gives it a bigger dimension. It is an empowering thought, because otherwise it's just a handful of people fighting against huge vested interests and economic and political powers. We need all the help we can get.
"MATTHEW: And surely then guardian angels of children must be awfully interested in the ecological crisis. The children's future depends on a healthy planet."
(--Guardian Angels Day, October 2, in, Spirituality and Practice,, quoting Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake)
The message?
That we are not alone, in ways we cannot even fathom.
The world is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can imagine.
German mathematical physicist and philosopher Werner Heisenberg’s words were these:
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers)
Russian philosopher Nicholai Berdyaev said that “God created the world by imagination.”
German philosopher Martin Heidegger said: “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
And, finally, the nursery rhyme:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
Science and spirituality share a common unknown:
All the stars, planets and galaxies that can be seen today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend.
These mysterious substances are called dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers infer their existence based on their gravitational influence on what little bits of the universe can be seen, but dark matter and energy themselves continue to elude all detection.
"The overwhelming majority of the universe is: who knows?" explains science writer Richard Panek,... "It's unknown for now, and possibly forever."
(—Space,com)
Some message beckons.
An angelos, an angel, messenger, Greek Original Word: ἄγγελος, ου, ὁ .
We continue to be uncertain whether to look at the finger pointing to the moon, or look to the moon itself.
What we are capable of is the looking.
We look through the nothing that is there and the something that is not there.
Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations suggests we “Don’t think, Look!”