Your angel is aware of the secret life that sleeps in your soul. Without you even knowing it, your angel is always at work for you. It is possible to sense this if you consider for a moment the key thresholds in your life. You may feel that you should contact an old friend or someone you had not seen for a while. You set out to do this, and you discover that the friend really needs you. The visit could never have been more opportune. There are also the times when someone comes into your mind, and the next thing they are at your door or on the phone. This is the secret world of association and inspiration which can never be explained. Artists could never create without the inspiration the angel brings. It is the gift of the angel to watch over that threshold where your invisible world comes to visible form. Any art, belief, or spirituality that lacks inspiration is ultimately dry and mechanical. Something inspired has the surprise, vitality, and warmth of the eternal in it. The Irish word for angel is “aingeal.” This was also the word for a burnt-out cinder taken from the fire. It was often given to children going out in the night to protect them. It was said to represent an angel. The word “aingeal” shows how our Celtic tradition fused a spirituality of the elements with that of the angels.
I imagine that the angels are spirits of light and playfulness. They are often depicted as playing musical instruments. They have none of the seriousness or narrowness that often accompanies dead religion. Angels are specially present around young children. In the West of Ireland, people always recognized that the angels were near children. Fresh from the eternal world, babies are often said to be able to see their own angels. To know that you have a strong and individual spiritual companion is great encouragement not to linger for false shelter in unnecessary prisons. In your angel, you have as much shelter as you need. You are not on your own. If you could see your path with the eyes of your soul, you would see that it is a luminous path and that there are two of you walking together; you are not alone. When loneliness or helplessness overcomes you, it is time to call on your angel for help and courage. This is the tender region of the heart for which your angel is especially competent and helpful. There are lovely prayers the Celts said to their angels:
SOUL-SHRINE
Thou angel of God who hast charge of me
From the fragrant Father of mercifulness,
The gentle encompassing of the Sacred Heart
To make round my soul-shrine this night,
Oh, round my soul-shrine this night.
Ward from me every distress and danger,
Encompass my course over the ocean of truth,
I pray thee, place thy pure light before me,
O bright beauteous angel on this very night,
Bright beauteous angel on this very night.
Be Thyself the guiding star above me,
Illume Thou to me every reef and shoal,
Pilot my barque on the crest of the wave,
To the restful haven of the waveless sea,
Oh, the restful haven of the waveless sea.
Carmina Gadelica, translated by
Alexander Carmichael
The Angel of Attraction and Inspiration
The angel keeps a circle of light around your life, and your angel is particularly active in the region of friendship and relationship. One of the mysteries of friendship is the attraction between two people. Where does it come from? What animates this attraction? How do two people meet? How do they manage to be in the same place at that particular moment so that the whole adventure of longing and belonging can come awake between them? Had they missed that moment, would they have remained strangers? Or would some other moment have gathered them towards this beginning? There is a whole arena of secret preparation and gathering here that we cannot penetrate with our analytical or conscious minds; perhaps this is the domain of angelic creativity. Perhaps the attraction between two people is not accidental; could it be that their ancient angels know how much they have to bring each other and without this their lives cannot become true? The angels are artists in the subtle chemistry of Spirit. If you are in difficulty in your friendship, it is wise to go to your mutual angels for the gifts and blessings that you both need. Because your friendship is now paralysed you cannot give anything to each other. When the metallic distance of pain cripples the sacred space between you and the one you love, it is wise to ask the spirits of light and inspiration to make a path for you towards each other.
The angels awaken the sacred melodies of inspiration and brightness and beauty in the soul. A friendship with one’s angel is a choice for each of us. If we do not open this up, the angel continues to work for us anyway. To make this explicit is to come into a new depth and sense of presence. It releases you from the grey walls of the inner prisons where life gets lost and stale. In a certain sense, your angel is the voice and presence of ancient divine longing within you. This urges you forth from all false belonging until you come into the divine rhythm where longing and belonging are one.
The Angel as Artist of Your Transfiguration
In our post-modern, consumerist culture, anything is marketable. With the yawning abyss of spiritual hunger opening, any little relic of the sacred is for sale. There is a huge market for things of the Spirit that can be easily digested. The angels are now in fashion. They are talked about in the idiom of magic and apparition. It is important to recall that the sacred has both a silence and a secrecy about it. Divine intimacy has a crucial reserve and shyness. Your friendship with your angel is ancient. It is intimate in a way that concerns the very essence of your identity and destiny. A person should never reduce the mystery of his invisible world to the clichéd descriptions of external banter. The very nature of angelic presence is totally alien to this garish, neon attention. Perhaps such empty and undignified talk drives away our invisible companions. It disrespects their reverential and eternal shyness. In the Celtic world, there was a lyrical and natural sense of these divine presences without any of the garishness or voyeurism of the disappointed contemporary mind.
When you begin to awaken to your incredible freedom, the walls of your inner prisons gradually become the thresholds of your new life, your new place of growth. The old walls can become the thresholds of new belonging which is hospitable to the depths and directions of longing within you. Your angel can liberate your soul from the false, tight spaces where fear, limitation, negativity, bitterness, and disappointment hold you. The angel is the inner artist of transfiguration, adept at opening and structuring new configurations of Spirit where longing and belonging live in the most creative tension with each other. Your angel can see your invisible world and knows where you have been imprisoned, where the lost and forsaken parts of your life are locked away. Your angel is the custodian of your deep and ancient memory. In this way, nourishment, courage, and strength are brought from the harvest of your memory to meet the hungry places in your present time. Your angel works in and through your imagination. The divine imagination offers you all the gifts that you need and particularly those blessings for the broken areas of contradiction, suffering, and pain. You could ask your angel to go to the places of nourishment to assuage your present hunger and thirst.