The trouble with angels: my conversion experience.

Retraction time again. I was wrong to cavalierly dismiss the existence of angels ("Filling the Gaps," March 24, 1995). My allergy to angels, you may recall, sprang partly from my distaste for the angelic hype sweeping the country, and worries that superstitious beliefs detract from the faith.

I now recant on the angel front for two reasons. First, just because a belief is crudely distorted doesn't mean that there's not a core of truth present. Second, there's such a weight of scriptural and liturgical testimony to the existence of angels that it has gradually beaten me down. After all, why belong to a traditional community of faith if it can't push you down paths you'd rather not take?

The fall's daily Masses celebrate the feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, archangels. Then a day later, just to rub it in, we participate in a memorial to the guardian angels. Now of all angels, I have the hardest time with guardian angels, probably because I was never imprinted in childhood with the guardian angel prayer.

I was also biased against guardian angels when early in my Catholic life my devout, highly educated neighbor used to leave her baby alone in her apartment, relying as she said, on the baby's guardian angel to protect her. "Even against fire?" I protested. "Please, please, let me babysit instead."

This is my problem with emphasizing the role of guardian angels--if they cannot be expected to protect against fire, and each robber and bad guy has his or her own angel, then how can guardian angels be intervening in the things going on in the world? One can always answer that without them things would be a lot worse, but disproving a negative is an impossible project.

Since I never could figure out the angel problem, I never taught my children anything about guardian angels. (I never told them there was a Santa Claus either.) As parents in a secularized milieu of rampant skepticism, we had enough trouble trying to defend and transmit even the central truths of the faith.

Yet compelling testimony to angels appears in every Mass when we ask the angels to pray for us in the opening penitential rite and then joyfully join with countless choirs of angels to sing hosannas and praise. I've also faithfully recited the Angelus for years as part of my Marian devotion, not even much noticing the angel element. Finally, I learned that Saint Thomas Was called the "angelic doctor" because he wrote so much about angels. Ergo, angels can hardly be scrapped.

So now I've had a "angelophany!"--a delicious phrase I picked up reading scripture scholar Mary R. Thompson's analysis of Mary Magdala and the empty tomb story (Mary of Magdala: Apostle and Leader, Paulist). When in John's account, Thompson notes, Mary meets the two angels, "Verses 11-13 form an `angelophany' and are a vestigial remnant of a traditional story which is too strong in the tradition to be omitted but which does not advance the narrative."

Aha! thought I, this comment may neatly sum up my present position. Angels are too strong an element in the tradition to be ommitted, but I'm still puzzled how these spiritual messengers advance the central Christian narrative. Naturally, I was happy to learn that for centuries the Jews resisted naming the angels for fear they would detract from the sole sovereignty of God. The angelic function as God's messengers was the main and only point of early Jewish interest. Only much later did elaborate stories about the angels develop. These beliefs were then taken over by the early Christian church communities, as the Gospels attest.

Angels act as God's messengers and show up at very significant and Spirit-filled moments. But what exactly do angels add to the gospel narrative for us? I can see talk of angels as a way of symbolizing or dramatizing God's work in our daily lives; angels can be symbols of all the countless small positive "coincidences" that mark everyone's life.

But a true affirmation of the reality of angels would have to accept them as real, whether humankind believed in them or not. That's what we mean by reality; unfortunately, it's independent from one's wishes or perceptions.

Looking for some help on the modern relevance of angels, I turned to my most recently purchased two-volume work on Roman Catholic systematic theology. Nada. There I found not a single index entry on angels, although the saints and Mary rate a whole chapter. Before I give up and expend energy in a theological library I'm left with my own resources on the angel question. At this point I'm accepting the existence of angels on the authority of the tradition and have only one other hard-won insight.

I accept the existence of angels as an element of the mysterious reality of God's plenitude. Obviously, with angelic choirs the creation must be a more complex, diverse, and manifold reality than one might want to imagine. Angels are a sign that God's goodness must be excessively fruitful; it overflows in creative energy. Infinite varieties of beings can be sustained and flourish in this good and bountiful system.

The moral ecology of paradise must be unimaginable to the likes of us. So if I'm still skeptical about the operation of guardian angels, surely it will be overlooked in my general assent to the good news. Besides, no self-respecting guardian angel would give up on his/her/its charge just because of sincere doubts. On second thought, perhaps all the angels despise the spread of vulgar superstitions about them. Yes, yes, I'm sure they do. Pass it on.