Guardian Angels Are Terrible Bodyguards

So what exactly are they guarding?

A monk named Father Boniface had been teaching my friend Kristie about spiritual direction. Unable to keep it to herself, she told me, you need to hear what Father Boniface said.

Kristie asked him whether we have guardian angels. If we do, he replied, and their job is to protect us, they are doing a terrible job.

I laughed out loud.

He is right. If the angel’s job description is to keep you breathing, the results are pretty poor. People die all the time. Christians die. Good people die, at the wrong age, in the wrong way, with their prayers still going up to heaven. Angels have been relegated to tinsel on a tree, a silhouette on a card, a soft-focus figure at the shoulder of a sleeping child. Or as an emergency service, on call for the near miss on the motorway and irrelevant to everything else. We shrank them down until they fit in our hands as decorations, or in our pockets as lucky talismans.

Then Father Boniface said something stunning.

The angel is not guarding your life. The angel is guarding the story of your life in Christ.

I have not stopped thinking about this since Kristie told me.

Scripture has been saying these same things the whole time, and it says them plainly for us to see.

Gabriel stands at the threshold of the Incarnation and speaks God’s future into the ear of a young woman. Then he waits. He waits for her yes, because the story cannot continue without her consent. Angels come to Jesus in the wilderness when his fasting is over, and to the garden when his sweat falls like blood, and they do not lift a finger to stop what is coming next. Instead, they strengthen him to go through it. And on the third morning two of them sit in an emptied tomb and ask the women, why do you seek the living among the dead?

Here an angel corrects the story the women are telling about their own lives. They have the facts right but the story wrong, and heaven has come to tell them so.

The real role of an Angel. Announce, atend/escort and interpret. None of that is a Christmas decoration, or charm against harm. All of it, however, is participation in a particular story.

My Guardian Angels

Acts 12 is a strange story, and a key to understanding the nature of angels.

Peter is in prison, and the church is up all night praying. An angel comes, wakes him, strikes the chains off his wrists, and walks him out through doors that open on their own. Peter arrives at the house where they are praying and knocks. Rhoda knows his voice. She is so overjoyed that she forgets to open the door and leaves him standing in the street. The others inside tell her she is out of her mind.

It must be his angel.

They can imagine an angel standing so close to Peter that you might mistake the angel for the man.

Earlier in the same chapter, James, the brother of John, has been killed by the sword.

The angel opens Peter’s prison. The angel does not open James’s. Luke sets these two a few verses apart and offers us no explanation. Scripture refuses to turn angelic protection into a guarantee of survival. Whatever the angel is guarding, it is not the body.

I was fifty, and some months into praying the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, when I found myself invited by the Lord to remember the day I became a Christian.

October 5th, 1986. I had gone to church that morning to keep my mother company. My father had abandoned us. She was distraught and mostly in bed. One small brother was asleep beside her. I did not know where my other brother was. Home was dark, the future was terrifying, and I had no way of saying so to anyone.

In that Sunday service, the first I had ever been to, I watched people sing as though the words were true. Tears, smiles, hands lifted. As if the Jesus they sang about was there with them. I had no language for any of it. I only knew I wanted more. When I heard about their evening service, I decided to go back.

At dusk I walked the mile and a half to the school hall. I had walked that road hundreds of times on the way to my own school further along. Cracked paving slabs, kerbs, hedges, street lights coming on as the sun set.

In that prayer, the Lord seemed to ask, what do you remember?

I told him. I remembered being lonely and alone. The house behind me was filled with a darkness I carried along the road, as if it billowed around me and was what made the sky darken.

Then the view widened. Not a different memory. The same one, seen now from further back and above.

The road was lined with angels. They stood the length of it, a phalanx on both sides, turned towards me, the way people in a movie line a route for someone coming home from a long way off. They were guarding one frightened, abandoned adolescent all the way to the door of a school hall, where Jesus was waiting to meet him.

I received this insight as a grace, not as an aerial photograph of heaven. Ignatius is careful here, and so am I. He taught people to pray with their imagination, but he warned them not to mistake the doorway for the room. The vivid picture is not the point. Chasing a feeling makes faith fragile, because the pictures always fade. What matters is what is left the next morning.

What grew in me was gratitude. I was not the hero of a private epic. I was a boy being gathered into a story bigger than my abandonment and despair. My loneliness, trauma and suffering had been real, but they had never been the whole truth.

That is the shape of the Gospel. It is a story we are put inside. Creation, Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, Re-Creation. We are re-membered, joined into Christ. We practise dying and rising with him in the small Paschal mysteries of an ordinary week. Surrendering. Repenting. Forgiving. Loving when it costs. Beginning again on a Tuesday. At the table and altar he hands himself over under bread and wine, and our lives are taken up into his body.

He comes into our story. Our story is gathered into his. That night when my family lay dismembered, torn asunder, Jesus gathered me into his own life. I was re-membered into him. And the next morning I was his, and he was mine.

Perhaps that is what the angel is guarding. Not our escape from death, but our participation in His.

Which leaves a question.

What story am I telling with my life, and what am I asking God to come and bless?

Because of life's pressures, most of us are running a small one. Get through the week. Keep the plates spinning. We ask God to bless this, and he is so kind to us, and he does. But a larger story is already underway. The whole of heaven and earth leans towards it. This story wants more than our recognition or even admiration. It wants us inside it, to take part.

Say yes to that story, and you will spend the rest of your life finding out what has been going on behind you and around you.

The road was never empty.