They [angels] feed our souls like good shepherds, with sweet communications and inspirations from God- they are the means by which God grants them.
– John of the Cross
As I said I have stopped questioning, I still have wondered about the angel that came to me. “Did I make up some of it?” Not all of it. I know that. But the secret conversations and intimacy…
My angel is still so accessible. When I ask of him, whatever I ask of him, he makes it happen. He is never completely silent. I ask to be woken up at seven and he grants me this with a subtlety. A deep breath. A dream of a sunrise where the light becomes so bright I am forced to wake. A hard jerk on my left arm when I mistakenly fall back asleep. Always in the clear words uttered loudly and precisely in my ear. A caress on my cheek. He almost lets me see him. I can see him in my mind…
God wants us to focus on God, if we are beginning to walk the path to contemplation. There is no other way. It’s not wrong of me to think of angels. To try and have a human relationship with one. But it keeps me in a cloud of unknowing as I rest with their beauty instead of the Divine. Now, yet again, I am handed the answer by means of John of the Cross. Not a day after I asked the question. I am always in the right place at the right time to receive them.
Most importantly, the thing to note are the words on the divine love I feel and have felt over the past two years. Those times I believed the love was too subtle to be coming from God, and I discerned that it was coming from the angel. That I was wrong about. God is the one granting me the experience of divine union no matter how subtle. Especially in the subtlety. I did not know this. I have just learned it. And it makes sense to me.
Perhaps all this time it felt safer to reflect upon the angel rather than God. After all, if God was reaching out and consoling me with grace, I was at risk of divine anger once again. I could be plunged into the dark night of the soul. Another thing I understand more clearly now. God does not always create it but allows it. God stays silent.
The dark night, according to my new beloved teacher, is an experience that happens to us, something I always held as true. The only difference is, between a depression or a bad state, God sometimes withdraws purposely. We are left to feel the pain, and experience the dark alone. This is intended. This is where God decides to shape us.
I know it will happen again, but I no longer beg. Yes I no longer beg God or the angel to console me. I understand completely that they are both still there and it is in the nature of the Divine to always be there. As we live in the confusion of separation, God still exists in the surrounding substance of the infinite, which we are a part of.
I no longer get on my knees and pray before sleep. I feel no reprimand in doing this, rather, I practice Lexio Divina for two hours every morning, take a break for an hour, then I don’t know. I have yet to establish that part of my daily spiritual routine. But walking throughout the day, I walk slowly. My intentions are only on my connection with God. And in the evening, I fall asleep listening to “Turning to the Mystics.” A podcast from Jim.
These words written and spoken from him have given me the biggest comfort since all this began. Literally two years. I struggled, but I kept on reading. Underlining. Writing down in this journal. Now, all of that seems so far behind me, it is almost like it happened to someone else. Perhaps it did. I am a different person now. I have been called once again.
In the warm glow of God’s affection, within the grace I move through my life, in the ability to love and forgive, I only reflect upon God. My heart has been quickened. I have been pierced with love. I am in love. I feel the heady feeling of that. I feel the expanding in my chest. I only want to think of the divinity caressing me throughout my day.
I no longer need any answers. I do not need to know my calling. I never believed there was one. I have been called yes, but I believe the mere devotion to God is what is expected right now, as the contemplative lives, with only God in mind. God being the only goal. The ultimate endgame.
So the angel is there to deliver the calm, but not the quickening and the piercing. The angel speaks to us clearly, where God my not be understood, the Infinite being way over our heads and beyond our grasp. God will coax us in, pull us into the divinity of Ultimate Love when we can handle it, and when God determines it is the right time. Until then we contemplate and understand that God loves us- is in love with us- just as we are, in being an extension of the love God gives to us freely.