Accountable

Thursday, October 2, 2025

Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Accountable

Do not despise one of these little ones,

For I say to you that their angels in heaven

Always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.

On this day each October I remember our mom’s bedroom, with the picture of a guardian angel watching over a very young boy and girl playing at the edge of a cliff. Behind them a great forest looms. The sky is dark, but the angel is bright. The children pick flowers, and the boy looks out toward the horizon, heedless of the cliff. A tree root reaches up to grab his foot, but the angel, hands outstretched, keeps both children safe.

 

 

Mary Kay, John and I shared the treasures from Mom’s world after she died in November 2021. On the 10th it was, on Wednesday, in the wee small hours of the morning. I was grateful to receive this painting, and it’s been on my wall since, visible behind me during each online video counseling call, spiritual directors’ meeting or centering prayer time.

Angel wings might not be biblical, but their protection is. The supernatural world populated by angels and their relatives sometimes seems more “real” to me than the natural world. My car and breakfast and nap time, the thousands of heartbeats and breaths my body accomplishes each day, the money in our bank account and crops growing in our corn and soybean fields in Illinois … all of that work-a-do in the material world fascinates me, holds me accountable, and offers various promises and warnings.

And then each of those promises and warnings filter through my spiritual mind, where almost as if in another world, angels hover nearby and God never turns his face away. Not from me or any of us. Like a prism, his light shines forever in every direction. Always I’m reminded that there is no fear in God’s love, that in whatever stillness I find, I will know that God is.

Short sentence, that.

God is.

And Jesus has such a simple thing to say about all of it.

Unless you turn, (David) and become like a child,

You will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.

When you humble yourself like this child,

You are the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.

My task ever since I can remember has been to pass through the vagaries of adulthood and back into my personal, unique child-likeness. I learn subtlety and comparison as an adult, and then ask God to sift what I’ve learned and absorb what’s wise. In this way “humbling myself” becomes a moment-by-moment choice. This quiet occupation allows me to look back and forward from today, waiting on what will happen next, remembering that every day with God is holy. And the angels watch, accompanied I think by Mom and others who have passed on, who love more like God … more like children, as Jesus would say … than ever in their lives on earth.

They are present, and present to you, not only with you, but also for you. They are present that they might cover you with protection; they are present that they might do good for you. – Bernard of Clairvaux

 (Nehemiah 8, Psalm 19, Psalm 103, Matthew 18)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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