MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS - FIFTEENTH DAY

 

MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS

Fifteenth Day

It is an inexhaustible subject, the marvels which theology teaches of the holy angels; who can properly describe the power of these pure spirits, the greatness of their intelligence, the fire of their holy love? Their graces, their powers, their gifts, their operations, their works, are so diversified that it is with difficulty the mind of man can conceive them and intelligibly speak of them. In several places in the Scriptures we read of the choirs of angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominations, thrones, cherubim, seraphim. Dionysius teaches that there are three orders of angels—three superior, three inferior and three middle: the superior, cherubim, seraphim, and thrones; the middle, dominations, principalities, and powers; the inferior, virtues, archangels and angels. These names are given to them, not for their own sake but for ours; and the individual orders are called from the gifts of grace which they possess. O that we realized that our future eternity is to be with the angels in heaven; that our glory depends on our life here; greater glory for greater work! We should strive to deserve a great place in heaven for the glory of God.

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

Month of the Holy Angels - Fourteenth Day

 

Fourteenth Day

We have seen the great reward the good angels received for remaining faithful to God. What did the bad angels lose by their infidelity? It was to them a final impenitence, which means the loss of the power of ever turning to God; which will in its turn be an eternal regret at the loss of God. Listen to the sentence of the reprobate: “Depart from Me, ye accursed, into everlasting flames, which was prepared for Satan and his angels.” 

In Holy Scripture we often read of the worm that gnaws and dies not; by this is meant the continual anguish and grief of a soul which has lost God—a passionate regret that will seize on it, and never leave it, because the loss is an everlasting one. God spoke, and the depths of hell sprang into existence. Bossuet says that the curse of God against the reprobate contains within itself an imprecation against the unhappy soul, which tears out from the minutest fibres of its being all the capacity it once had to receive enjoyment from bliss, as well as the power to perform the least good action capable of meriting any mercy. This example of the fall of the angels should strike terror into our hearts, and should incite us to pray to the good angels, especially to our guardian angel, so that we may ever remain faithful to the service of God.

 Prayer 

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

 

MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS - THIRTEENTH DAY

 

Thirteenth Day

Oh, what a glory, what a happiness and consolation, were granted to the angels when they had done the will of God! God received His faithful followers with goodness and love, and introduced them into His place of glory, and there He manifested Himself to them and will do so for all eternity. And so the beautiful life of the angels in heaven may furnish us with ample materials for meditation. Our Lord calls our attention to them when He bids us pray that we may do His will on earth, as do the angels in heaven. 

Faber says, “Grace is a better portion than nature for loving God; by grace God can communicate Himself to us supernaturally; by it He gets more love from us, and makes us more able to love Him. O that we had the hearts to know the meaning of this! Surely His love of us should be our measure of love for Him. 

Well might St. Francis run about the woods crying out, ‘Oh, God is not known! God is not loved!” The angels will ever remain in heaven, loving and honoring God, in supreme happiness, in the infinite light of God Himself. Let us also, as some saints have done, offer to God the love of the first choir of seraphim in reparation for all the outrages going on in the world.

Prayer: 

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule, and guide. 

Month of the Holy Angels - Day 12

 

Meditation 

Twelfth Day

Almighty God loved His angels, and made them His friends and favorites. The Blessed Virgin is placed above them all, as the Church on the day of her assumption proclaims: “She is exalted above the choirs of angels in the heavenly kingdom.” Here we have to adore the liberality of almighty God, and the mysterious and adorable way in which He distributes His gifts. He fashions the angels in a natural order, and endows them with greater natural perfections than others. Next He raises them in the first instant of creation to the supernatural order by the gift of sanctifying grace. Then comes the time of probation, and He confirms the good forever in glory, bestows on them the beatific vision, happiness, enlightenment, and splendor according to their acts, but still more in proportion to the natural powers, dignity, and excellence of His own divine hand. Here indeed is the potter and the potter's clay spoken of by St. Paul. To man God acts differently: “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the wise, and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the strong ... that no flesh should glory in His sight.”—2 Cor. i. 27-29.

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

Month of the Holy Angels - Eleventh Day

 

Eleventh Day

Meditation 

 The angels merited the crown of a happy eternity in union with God: For he also, that striveth for the mastery, is not crowned except he striveth lawfully.—Tim. ii. 5. Such is the law of God, not only for men but for angels also. Pope Gelasius says, “That the angels were so constituted as to merit an increase of eternal glory is sufficiently indicated by the fact that they stood in need of nothing more, that none of them could have committed evil.” And St. Prosper says of their trial, “It was the action of the will of the holy angels that, while their companions with their own free will rebelled, they themselves remained faithful in the dignity wherein God had placed them; and hence it came to pass by a divine and most just judgment that what was only up to that a holy desire of remaining with God became thereafter a voluntary and a most blessed necessity of remaining with Him forever.”

We too should strive continually to merit our crown in heaven; we are placed on trial here on this earth, a place of pilgrimage, and we should remain faithful to the conditions of that trial until our journey is over.

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

Month of the Holy Angels - Tenth Day

Month of the Holy Angels

Tenth Day

Meditation 

Father Faber speaks thus of their knowledge of the precious blood during their term of probation:  The angels wonder more than man at the goodness of God in sending us His divine Son to die for us, because they understand it better. From the very first He invited the angels to adore it. He made their adoration a double exercise of humility—of humility towards Himself, and of humility towards us, their fellow-creatures. It was the test to which He put their loyalty. He showed them His beloved Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, in His sacred humanity, united to a nature lower than theirs, and in that lower nature crowned their King and Head, to be worshipped by them with absolute and unconditional adoration.

The Son of a human Mother was to be their head, and that daughter of Eve to be herself their Queen. He showed them in that blood the source of all their graces. The precious blood was as the dew of the whole kingdom of the angels. Well, then, may the angels claim to sing the song of the Lamb: to Whose outpoured human life they also owed so much.

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day [night] be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS - NINTH DAY

Ninth Day

Not only do the angels praise almighty God, pray to Him, and converse with Him, but they do it much more effectually than we do because of their greater purity, and because they know God better than we do. Hence the question might be asked: what do the angels know of God and of religion as it is among us? The answer is that they know what we know, and much more; still there are some things too great because too infinite, even for the intelligence of angels. Can the angels understand God? No, indeed. God is infinite, and no finite mind can comprehend Him. They know that God is one, because even we, in our inferior intelligence, know that there can be but one God; they know too, that there are three divine persons, but it will ever remain a mystery to them as well as to us, because it is a truth of such infinite dimensions; but they understand it much more distinctly than we do.

It is probable that the angels knew the mystery of the incarnation by divine revelation, and they believed in it. St. Thomas and other theologians are of opinion that the bad angels fell because they would not submit to the belief in the hypostatic union. It was therefore fitting, for the glory and honor of the Son of God, Who was to be made flesh, that the angels should know this mystery.

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day [night] be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS - EIGHTH DAY

 

Eighth Day

Faber speaks in the following terms of the rational creatures of God, including men and angels: God became a King by becoming a Creator. Thus He gained an empire over which His insatiable love might rule. Nature is very beautiful, whether we think of angelic or human nature. Created nature is a shadow of the uncreated nature, so real and so bright that we cannot think of it without exceeding reverence. Yet God created neither men nor angels in a state of nature. This, to my mind, is the most wonderful and most suggestive thing which we know about God. He would have no reasonable nature, even from the very first, which should not be a partaker of His divine nature.

This is the very meaning of the state of grace. He would not have it to breathe for one instant in a merely natural way. The very act of creation was full of fondness, of paternal jealousy. O that majesty of God, which seems clothed with such wonderful tranquillity in the eternity before the creation!

Prayer

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day [night] be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

MONTH OF THE HOLY ANGELS - DAY 7

 

                     Seventh Day

The angelic world is most beautiful. St. Augustine says in his “City of God,” “The angelic world in its natural dignity surpasses all other things the Lord has made. Consider this intelligence by which they know so many things so perfectly, the great power by which they can do good to their fellow-creatures, the brightness of those wonderful spirits shining like the glorious luminaries of our universe, the wonderful gifts which almighty God furnished them, and we have a picture of such harmonious glory that all the beauty of the world, all the magnificent actions of the human kind, dwindle into insignificance before this great creation of angelic spirits. In Ezechiel we read of the admirable beauty of the devil that had fallen: “Thou wast the seal of resemblance, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou wast in the pleasures of the paradise of God: every precious stone was thy covering ... gold the work of thy beauty: ... Thou wast a cherub stretching out thy wings and covering, and I set thee in the holy mountain of God, thou hast walked in the midst of the stones of fire.

Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day of thy creation, until iniquity was found in thee.—Ezech. 12-15. And Isaias the prophet exclaimed with regret at the fall of Lucifer, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst arise as the morning.”

Prayer 

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day [night] be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

MONTH OF HOLY ANGELS - DAY 6

                  Sixth Day

The power of the angels is immense. The Scriptures tell us that they destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by raining fire and brimstone upon them. They destroyed the army of Sennacherib when every soldier felt the keen edge of the angel's sword; they strangled the first-born of the Egyptian people in one night. The devil, by permission from God, raised storms that tore down the houses in which Job's sons and daughters were feasting, burying all in the ruins. He afflicted Job with a most filthy disease and robbed him of all his possessions to try to make him revolt against God. When our Lord freed those who were possessed by the devil, the evil spirit asked to be permitted to enter a herd of swine, and when it had received permission, the swine rushed headlong down the hill into the sea and were destroyed. If then, the power of these spirits is so great for evil, the angels are more powerful for good. We will be friends with our good angels whom God has sent to perform favors for us—favors both temporal and spiritual; we will hate the devil, and with the help of God's grace resist his power               

Prayer 

O angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love commits me here. Ever this day [night] be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.