‘You do not walk alone into the next life. With you walks your greatest friend, your guardian angel who was with you when you were born into the physical world and is with you now at the end of your earthly life’.
I quote from the homepage of the Psychics and Mediums Network, not because I am feeling the irresistible pull of the New Age but because the quote’s very existence is evidence for a hypothesis that I accept, that, in this irreligious age, angels are enjoying something of a renaissance.
They are to be found everywhere. Any Registry Office will tell you that among the most popular songs to which brides make their entrance is ‘Angels’, recorded by Robbie Williams in 1997. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide. And if musical popular culture does not convince you then perhaps visual popular culture will. Travel to Gateshead and you will see the country’s most famous and (to abuse a word) iconic piece of public art. It is Antony Gormley’s 1998 sculpture, ‘The Angel of the North’.
The sea of faith may have receded from our shores, but in its place the beating of angels’ wings resounds. Why? I will hazard three reasons for the popularity of angels and for the devotion they continue to inspire.
The first is that they bring a touch of mystery to a world which has a tendency to be information-laden, a tendency which has reached new heights in the last week. We are bombarded with data by countless media outlets: words, statistics, and images. The mention of angels brings blessed relief. They are other-worldly, ethereal, and transcendent.
The second is that they are highly personal. You can conceive of angels in any way you choose. Few will dare to correct you and tell you that your particular image of the angelic is misplaced or erroneous. So there is huge scope for the subjective imagination, for fantasy even. And the angel thus conceived will of course be your angel; your guardian indeed, your friend and your companion.
The third is that angels come doctrine-light. Conceiving of angels does not commit you to an institutional church, or to a church of any sort. It does not requite that you subscribe to any of the tiresome dogmas with which such churches have encumbered themselves – the Trinity, the Atonement, or the Ascension. Angels take their place on the pick-and-mix counter, along with crystals, copper bracelets and the Loch Ness Monster.
So what sort of response can or should we make to a culture apparently fascinated by angels, even if the angels by which it is fascinated are not recognizable to orthodox Christians?
One response, I suppose, would be to ignore the phenomenon and to concentrate on the Gospel we have received, leaving the psychic, Robbie Williams-humming, Antony Gormley-visiting hordes to stew in their ignorance. But you will have guessed that this would not be my preferred course. My preferred course would be to understand the longing for transcendence, for intimacy and for liberty that I believe the angel-fixation represents as nothing other than a contemporary version of the human longing for God, which is as old as history itself.
People yearn for mystery. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as roughly equivalent with someone you might meet in the pub, a wise soul who listens to our problems and looks kindly upon them. God is our friend, perpetually, to employ a modern cliché, ‘there for us’. Or, rather more traditionally, we present him still clinging to his cane and mortarboard, stern, disapproving, incapable of empathizing with our condition. God is the headmaster or, as Rowan Williams would have it, ‘the management’, perpetually out to trip us up and catch us out. Both presentations are useless. If God is the former, then we would be better off in the pub, where the beer is likely to be better; if God is the latter, then most of us already have to deal with tyrants domestic or professional, and don’t need to add more to the pantheon. Yet we are heirs of an apophatic tradition of spirituality, a tradition that insists that there is more that we cannot say about God than there is that we can say about him, a tradition that values silence rather than words and prayer rather than doctrine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their dose of the transcendent, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for intimacy. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as blandly accepting, meeting us where we are, understanding our frailties and failings, weeping over them, and loving us in spite of them. Or we present him as judging us, ruling on those frailties and failings, holding us to an impossible standard, condemning us to disappoint him eternally and offering us cold, impersonal justice. Again, both presentations are useless. Warm affirmation of who we already are is not all we need; neither is everlasting censure of who we have been. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which God was, God is and God is to come, a tradition in which God the Father loves us into being, God the Son shares our earthly life, and God the Holy Spirit promises to remake us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their moments of intimacy and self-knowledge, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for liberty. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present a faith of positions and propositions, of claims and creeds. We enact incomprehensible liturgy dressed up with esoteric language and inaccessible rites, and appear an introspective community concerned only with our own survival. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which faith and liturgy, doctrine and worship have as their end the transformation of the world in which we are set. We seem to be prisoners of our faith; we are in fact the inheritors of a faith that may yet turn the world upside down; we serve a God whom to serve is perfect freedom. We indeed have something to offer those who look to angels for their liberty, or we have nothing to offer at all.
This is the God who I believe the angels still proclaim –a God of mystery, a God of intimacy and a God of liberty. This is the God we too must proclaim – or I fear that we in our way and our whole generation with us will be stuck, ‘loving angels instead’. Amen.
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