The Light of Angels
By: David Price
Tags: Christmas, Life Lessons, Spiritual Growth, Soul, Spirituality

The Light of Angels

Image by Narasimhan Ramasamhi

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy — The Cost of Living

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“At Christmas, time deepens…the Celtic imagination knew that time is eternity in disguise. They embraced the day as a sacred space. Christmas reminds us to glory in the simplicity and wonder of one day.

We have been given such immense possibilities. We desperately need to make clearances in our entangled lives, everyday, to let our souls breathe.

We must take care of ourselves and especially of our suffering brothers and sisters.”

~JOHN O’DONOHUE

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Just the fact that you’re a bright light helps to uplift this planet. The planet needs you here longer. It needs you to nourish yourself so that you can be here. It’s important that you take care of yourself because we need you. — Anita Moorjani

We are not angels but we have angelic qualities in us if we can locate them and give them to the world. We are also animals who learn to live in a physical world, fending off threats to our bodies. We are also spirits who may continue to exist even without a body. It’s confusing to live on so many different levels.

We may be insignificant on the surface of things, yet be essential and much needed on a deeper level. Our “suffering brothers and sisters” certainly do need us. We take care of ourselves in order to be able to offer what we can to help the world thrive. In that sense, we are not insignificant.

If there are real angels, maybe that’s the direction we’re going. Maybe we will evolve into beings of compassion, empathy and kindness. Even if we have invented the idea of angels solely out of our longing for a kinder world, we may still be inspired to become better examples of humanity just by entertaining the idea.

Imitating angels and reminding ourselves to be kinder won’t make us angelic, though. All those non-angelic qualities we are born with need to be redeemed by loving attention, not repression. The animal qualities of our nature look irreducible, set in stone, but are they? Ego and self preservation can make us small. What the world needs are big humans with big hearts. Caring for the world is an act of compassion.

It’s not hard to figure out that the world needs more love and compassion but logic won’t get us there. Somehow the heart has to soften. It’s important to notice the world’s travail and want to help it heal. Living our little animal life of eating, sleeping and reproducing is not enough. We need a big vision and a big heart in order to be of real service. Such an energy is in short supply at the moment. There are too many small hearts with small vision in the mix at the moment.

The visionaries and poets speaking wisdom to our souls are very helpful, but we must each find our own way to wisdom of the heart. I agree that we must advance along the path of questions because there is so much we don’t understand. Finding our angelic nature is a conundrum. We have to pass through our inner swamps and badlands and find the key to the question posed by our existence. Opening the heart is the opus we are all called to.

Our yearly focus on angels and religious ideas reminds us that we have an angelic nature that we have probably neglected until we were reminded by a religious story.

We are the angels we dream of.

Fra Angelico