Latest News
Kitchen Chat and more…
Kitchen Chat and more…
Address given at Delegates Conference*
Chicago, Nov. 4, 2005
There are three characteristics of angels that are frequently pictured in artistic renderings. The first characteristic is that angels have wings. We think of the earthly creatures that have wings, the birds: they inhabit a sphere above the earth, the air regions. They live in a world of light and uplift, not limited by earthly gravity.
Picturing angels as having wings is an artistic way of saying that angels too are not bound to the earthly. They are limitless; they live in expanses. They live with the world of eternity at their backs.
In Ezekiel 10:12 there is a mighty description of great angelic beings covered in eyes. Therefore angels’ wings are pictured as having eyes on them. Eyes convey consciousness. They take things in, into a consciousness that is broader, brighter, clearer, purer, and more transparent than human consciousness. Eyes also shine forth; the gaze of an angel radiates love and recognition.
A third artistic motif used in picturing angels is as a musician. A good piece of music opens up heaven for us. In music, spiritual creative forces permeate space, harmonizing souls, ensouling and spiritualizing community; tuning souls to one another.
These three motifs, wings, eyes and musician, can help us understand the relationship between the human and the angelic realms.
There are nine ranks, or choirs of angel above the human realm. The third group of three, the angels, the archangels and the Primal Powers or Archai, are the three choirs we want to look at today.
Angels
The lowest of these choirs, the angels, are the ones closest to the human realm. Angels are intimately connected with individual human beings. We each have an angel assigned to us, a guardian angel, who accompanies us along our paths through lifetimes. Their ‘wings’ give them the overview that it is not possible for us to have. The angel’s ‘eyes’, angelic consciousness, sees, takes in, and remembers everything for us. The angel can remember what we have been and who we want to be. Angelic consciousness is, like that of a chess player, able to anticipate the results of our moves. Our angel is the carrier of our higher self. Angels listen to our thoughts. To become aware of one’s angel is to feel oneself to be watched, seen and recognized. Our angel’s eyes radiate love, recognition.
The Angel in You
Rose Auslander
The angel in you
Rejoices over
Your light
Weeps over your darkness
Out of his wings whisper
Words of love
Poems, tender affection.
He watches over
Your path
Direct your step
Angelwards.
The Revelation to John, the last book of the New Testament, belongs to those four centuries around the birth of Christ, two before and two after, which many people experienced “an open door” in heaven. It’s the time that apocalypse, revelation was rife, that many “apocalypses” have been written. Most of them could remind us of our own dreams – pictures following each other, often without a “logical” sequence, without beginning or end. One of them stands out: this book which made it into the Bible, even when quite some people didn’t like it at all and wondered why it had been taken into the canon of the Bible. Luther, the German reformer, must have said that his spirit could not find itself at ease in it.
Introduction
In the first three verses, John states that God gave this revelation to Jesus Christ, to show his servants what must soon take place. In order to give this revelation, he sent his angel to his servant John, that he would witness to the contents: to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, “even to all that he saw”. Then John adds a blessing, the first of seven “beatitudes” found in the Revelation, blessing those who read aloud, who hear and who keep what is written in this book, “for the time is near”.
As we see in the Gospel of John, the “witness” comes forward with his testimony as John the Baptist did (see for instance 1:6-8 and 10:41-42), as well as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (see from chapter 11 and after 12:17: 19:35 and 21:20-24). That Gospel also knows well the importance of “keeping” the words of Christ (8:51, 14:15 and 15:10).
After having, as it were, legitimized himself as to the source and the revelation he is to be shown, in 1:4-8 John addresses his audience, the “seven churches in Asia”, in the area colonized by the Greeks where he had lived and worked for so long, giving them blessings from the One we would call God the Father (“who is and who was and who is to come”) and from the spirits before his throne, as well as from Jesus Christ in three manifestations: as faithful witness (of the Father), as first-born of the dead (himself, as the Son), ruler of kings on earth (in whom the Spirit has come into its own).
Then out of the revelation he has experienced, John breaks out in a glorification of him whom we know in three ways: the One who loves us, who has freed us by his blood from our sins, who will make us into self-reliant priests to his God and Father. And speaks of His Coming, with the clouds, so that every eye will see him, “every one who pierced him”; directly introducing the pictures of Cross and Lamb. As a kind of affirmation to what John has written, the voice of the Lord God comes through, of Him “who is and who was and who is to come”, Alpha and Omega, the Almighty.
Now John begins to speak for and out of himself (“I, John”), evoking shared martyrdom over years of “patient endurance” because of “the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (as he had already written). Having spent years of being exiled on the island of Patmos, lying before this part of the coast of Asia Minor, he exactly pinpoints the beginning of his revelation: the Lord’s Day – the day of divine service, when he “was in Spirit”, and received his task: to write what he sees in a book and send it to the seven churches in the seven cities named.
In the autumn fruit trees stand ripe for harvest. The tree offers, sacrifices its own living substance to the earth in its fruit. It makes this sacrifice so that new life, new trees, more fruit can grow and develop. When cared for by humans, the fruit is harvested so that the tree’s abundant life can feed others.
This week we watched in horror as malignant forces harvested human lives. We struggle to make sense of such madness, for we know that human lives are not fruit for the taking.
In our proper horror, it is easy to overlook an important more hidden aspect: that, contrary to appearances from this side of the threshold, human life does not end in death.
Over and against the negative images we have seen, can be set another, more important image:
As bodies fall to earth, grand and gentle beings of light receive and carry the further life of every one of those souls. They are presented to Christ. He gathers them up and takes them home.
Now they are beginning to awaken to the real reasons why their lives on earth were harvested, how the event of their death fits into the pattern of their past and present life, how it fits into our lives, and how it will fit into the future life of the earth.
No one’s real life has been lost. The kernel, the seed, the best of each of those individuals has been gathered up by the good beings in the universe. This best will be sown again, will grow and blossom and nourish.
Their lives were sacrificed, offered; some unconsciously, others, like the rescue workers, with more conscious intent. But their offer only moves toward meaninglessness if we refuse to eat of the fruit they are holding out to us: that human life is actually unceasing; that death has another side-it is a birth into another realm. Death is illuminated by Christ. Death is mad to serve the formation of new life, the sprouting of new trees from the fruit of the old.
In the coming days and months, those us us here on earth can watch and care for that new life. The children who will be born in the near future will have experienced what lives in the souls now released by these events. As approaching souls and newly released souls mingle near the earth, those yet to be born will be inspired to take up the threads, the ideals, the guiding impulses of those whose lives were offered. These approaching souls, as well as those who have just crossed, will be filled with a drive toward true peace, true love, and true human freedom. Even now, we ourselves can feel the inspiring forces of those released.
Today, September 16, 79 years ago, the first Act of Consecration of Man was born. It crossed the threshold into the world of earth. It is a ritual which hallows death. It is a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrificing of himself. And it is the place where we are encouraged to practice dying by consciously offering the best fruits of our souls, here and now, from this side of the threshold. We practice giving back to God and his angels our best thoughts, our hearts’ love, our warmest devotion. We offer these gifts of ourselves so that they can cross the threshold into Christ’s arms, so that he can gather them up and transform them into the nourishment for the angels. With this nourishment the angels can in turn strengthen all of us human beings, on both sides of the threshold, for the times to come.
The message from the world of the angels is always, first and foremost: Do not be afraid. Have no fear.
We may pray:
O Christ, you know
The souls and spirits
Whose deeds have woven
This country’s destiny.
May we who today
Are bearers of this destiny
Find the strength and the light
Of your servant Michael.
And our hearts be warmed
By your blessing, O Christ,
That our deeds may serve
Your work of world healing.
Christ answers: I am with you all days…