2 October 2020
Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels
In today’s reading from Job 38 and 40, we hear an excerpt from God’s response to Job and Job’s humble acknowledgment of God’s majesty and grandeur. In truth, these brief extracts barely do justice to the beauty and depth of these texts. In them, we catch a glimpse of the terrible but consoling reality of the smallness of our own perspectives when placed before shimmerings of the beauty and grandeur of God’s infinite vision. Only God is uncreated, everything else subsists as part of God’s good creation, including light and darkness (“which is the way to the dwelling place of light, and where is the abode of darkness” (Job 38:19)), the earth and the heavens, space, and even time itself. It is hubris that leads us to think that we can plumb the depths of being and thus claim that the deep reality of the world is something other than goodness or love. “You know,” God says, gently mocking us, “because you were born before them, and the number of your years is great!”
Our analytic hubris and dogmatic declarations and prescriptions often stand in opposition to the wonder and trust of a child. We adults have little use for genuine wonder: for many it is worthless at best, and an obstacle to profit or progress at worst. If anything, we are more drawn to wonder’s corrupt cousin, concupiscence, which better corresponds to our profit/progress-seeking consumer mindset. But wonder, gratuitous wonder, is not only proper to children, but also to “their angels in heaven [who] always look upon the face of my heavenly Father” (Mt 18:10).
You have an guardian angel, the same one that would look upon the face of the heavenly Father when you were but a child. Today, on the feast of the guardian angels, thank your angel for this “worthless” wonder at God’s grandeur (which is also called “adoration”), and ask your angel to help you to recover something of that wonder yourself. Perhaps this wonder will help us to “turn and become like a child” for only as children, Jesus says, can we “enter the kingdom of heaven.”