Angels and Archangels

I was ready to write about angels tonight, not cutesy angels, but the angels of today's Holy Day. We celebrate St. Michael and all the angels with a feast day, which allows those of us who normally mark Fridays with abstainance to enjoy a little meat with dinner. The Archangel Michael is an interesting character. Tonight's passage from Daniel mentions him briefly; he is referred to as a great prince and he promises he will take the side of Israel in the massive conflicts to come. In iconography he is usually pictured with a sword and often has Satan at his feet. He is a warrior for God and for that reason has been claimed as the patron saint of many military groups throughout history.

Remember Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite? He spent a great deal of time ranking the angels in heirarchies, with Michael placed firmly at the top as prince and archangel.

So I was going to write about him... and I was going to talk about how the cutesy angels differ so strongly from angels in the Bible and in literature. Two of the best treatments of angels in art are in the film Wings of Desire and in the Duino Elegies by Rilke:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of the angels?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

...and they are nothing like the porcelain angels with baby faces that you can buy in Hallmark stores.

I was going to talk about all that. I may also have talked about the concept of guradian angels, or even the Guardian Angels of New York City, or even the fact that Googling "Guardian Angel" gets you 11,200,000 hits. Wow.

That's what I was going to write about, until I saw that Evening Prayer tonight points us towards Psalm 104... and guess who makes another appearance! Yes, my friend the Leviathan! And of all the times that his fine and fishy head pops up, this is really my favorite. Because God created him just "for the sport of it." Really. God just thought the world would be a better place with a Leviathan cavorting somewhere and splashing about in it. He created him for sport, or according to some translations, to sport about. But regardless of how you translate the passage, the Leviathan reads like some sort of big fishy lark, an oddity, a uniquely huge and uniquely wonderful scaly beast that appears to have fun sporting and splashing about, or at least bringing a smile to God's face with his antics. Some say he's dreadful, and he may be, but certainly not in Psalm 104. And really, once you get to know him, I'm sure he's quite nice.