Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day, be at my side,
To light and guard,
Rule and guide. Amen.
Are we still meant to believe in guardian angels? If yes, in what exactly are we meant to believe? Are angels real personified beings or simply another word for God’s presence in our lives? Hearing the news about another senseless massacre or storm-ravaged tragedy on the morning of the Feast of the Guardian Angels can challenge our beliefs in God’s protection. Most adults, within all Christian denominations, either see the existence of guardian angels as a pious fantasy or are simply indifferent to the idea. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that scripture scholars don’t give us a definitive answer but suggest that the question can be answered either way. In scripture, the word ‘angel’ might refer to a real personified spirit, or it might refer to a special presence of God in some situations. Church tradition affirms more strongly that angels are real. Where does that leave us? Divided. Conservative Christians generally assert the existence of angels as a dogmatic teaching. Angels are real. Liberal Christians tend to doubt that or at least are agnostic about it. For them, ‘angel’ more likely refers to a special presence of God. For example, they take the statement in the Gospels where the evangelist tells us that while Jesus was praying, “an angel came and strengthened him” to mean that God’s grace came and strengthened him. Who’s right? Perhaps it doesn’t matter since the reality is the same in either case. God gives us revelation, guidance, protection, and strength and does so in ” angelic ” ways beyond our normal conceptualizations. We know now that there are billions of universes (not just planets), and we know now that our planet Earth, and we on this planet, are the tiniest of minute specks inside the unthinkable magnitude of God’s creation. If this is true, and it is, then this is hardly the time to be skeptical about the extent of God’s creation, believing that we, humans, are what is central and that there can be no personified realities beyond our own flesh and blood. Such thinking is narrow, both from the point of view of faith and from the perspective of science itself. So, do we have guardian angels? Yes, we do have a guardian angel, irrespective of how we might imagine or conceive of this. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and God’s solicitous love, guidance, and protection are with us always. At the end of the day, it matters little whether this comes through a particular personified spirit (who has a name in heaven) or whether it comes simply through God’s loving omnipresence. God’s presence is real; we are never alone without God’s love, guidance, and protection.