Electric Prayer

The liturgical calendar gives us what you might call spiritual weather. Ordinary weather sets the tone for the day. I am a different person on rainy days, on sunny days, on humid days or windy ones. Or rather, I am the same person but I build my life on a different foundation each time: and so does everybody I meet, because the weather is the same for all of us.

The spiritual weather is the same not just for the people we come across in the street but for almost everyone across the world. Like rain or sunshine, it is a foundation for life. The day is built differently when it is built upon a martyr or a teacher, upon a contemplative or a saint who went out and did things. It is different when the saint is someone like me, whom perhaps I ought to emulate, and different when I feel able to stand back and admire from a safe distance.

(This is why we have the About Today pages in Universalis: and in the apps and programs you will even see pictures to set the scene more clearly. If you are on Instagram, follow the handle universalispublishing.)

The Holy Guardian Angels

Some feast days are easy. Some aren’t quite. Whether you call it problematic, or embarrassing, or just a little bit uncomfortable, the trouble lies not in the feast but in us. Just as a doctor, encountering pain or discomfort or whatever in a particular place, will poke a little harder round there to see what the trouble is, so a badly fitting feast is telling us to wake up and poke a little harder to see what the trouble is. Here is an example from a couple of weeks ago.

October 2 is the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. The discomfort (if you want to call it that) comes from the fact that belief in invisible supernatural beings seems not quite right in the modern age – especially if we live (as so many of us do) in a culture where anti-Catholicism is the dominant religious force. Having survived centuries of oppression, we want above all to keep our heads down, not to have beliefs that other people don’t have… and basically to be just the same as everyone else, only a little bit nicer. It is a true saying that ‘I don’t mind being martyred but can’t stand being laughed at’ – all really efficient oppressions are conducted on that basis. It is difficult not to get sucked into that way of thought. So let’s wake up and fight against it.

Let’s forget all those paintings of androgynous figures embellished with a pair of tall white wings, because angels are purely immaterial beings and they don’t have any appearance at all. Let the existence of angels remind us instead that God’s love for his creation is infinite and that anywhere that life is conceivable, he will create it so that the universe can be still more full of goodness and joy. Why shouldn’t this be as true of the immaterial world as it is of the material one?

Finally, the Holy Guardian Angels remind us that despite all the lurid pictures of Judgement we have in our heads, the fundamental truth is that God wants us to win. And so does everyone else. God can’t do the winning for us, because then we would just be puppets; but whatever helps are possible, from whatever order of creation, they are offered, and offered freely. You might wind up the doctrine of the Holy Guardian Angels by saying simply, ‘The fight is ours; there are hazards everywhere; but practically the whole universe is on our side.’

Here, rather more visually, is J.R.R. Tolkien writing to his son:

‘I thought of the Light of God and I saw millions of motes suspended in it, each glowing white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it… And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalised.’

Reading and Reflection

In the Universalis apps and programs it is possible to view, next to the day’s readings at Mass, commentaries on those readings by Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB of Ampleforth Abbey. Dom Henry is the editor of the New Jerusalem Bible and the Revised New Jerusalem Bible and a noted biblical scholar. One can turn the commentaries on and off in the Settings screen. As it happens, I leave mine turned off, because I find commentaries in general to be like the labels under the pictures in an art gallery: in principle intended to be helpful but in practice a distraction from the picture itself. But many people aren’t that distractable. They do turn the commentaries on, and appreciate them, and they write in to say so.

If you are someone who likes to be able to read a commentary alongside Scripture, we have brought out a new e-book which will suit you perfectly. It is called Reading and Reflection and it contains all the Mass readings for every day of every year, with Dom Henry’s commentary on every one. You can use it to look at today’s readings, or to browse through them day after day. There is an index as well, so you can easily find all the places where (for example) the prophet Amos is read. There is even a calendar at the back for the years 2023 to 2034.

The version we have just published uses the Jerusalem Bible text of the readings and is therefore, for copyright reasons, available throughout the world except for the USA and Canada. (If you are in the USA or Canada, sorry to be distracting you with this story: the only thing we know about you from the mailing list is your email address, not where you live. Don’t worry: we have plans to provide something that is available in your country before long.)

The e-book is available from Amazon for the Kindle and from Apple for the ePub format. Here is a page which tells you all about it.

Thank you all for using Universalis. If you have trouble or questions, or suggestions, do write to us at universalis@universalis.com or use the Contact Us button in one of the apps.

Let us all keep one another in our prayers, as always.