The word “angel” in Hebrew simply means “messenger.” That definition implies anyone or anything awakening us to reality is an “angel.”
Unearthly beings could not teach us more about compassion than a beloved dog jumping in our lap when we need it the most. Every expression of life and nature is throbbing with information about our common source.
We are never really alone. “Angels” are everywhere.
Jim Rigby, minister at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church.
Easter Monday is traditionally known in Italy as “Lunedì dell’Angelo”, (Monday of the Angel)
Everything that is tearing us down today will become a memory, and this memory will be shared as an anecdote or a story or a poem or a play or a warning. It will be shared with another human being, who will then understand that he is not alone in his sadness. This is why we show up for others and tell our tales and listen to others.
The great congregation meets daily, and you are someone’s angel today
Tennessee Williams
The future enters into us,
in order to transform itself in us,
long before it happens.
Rilke
You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out; the way forward is still concealed from you.
“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”
You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk, your eyes are blurred; and there is no mirror.
Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust; You know you have to make your own way through.
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free from all you have outgrown.
What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.
John O’Donohue, “For the Interim Time” in Benedictus: A Book of Blessings
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.
We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.
Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
Marion Woodman, Jungian author and poet, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Where is this peace to be found? The answer is clear. In weakness. First of all, in our own weakness, in those places of our hearts where we feel most broken, most insecure, most in agony, most afraid. Why there? Because there, our familiar ways of controlling our world are being stripped away; there we are called to let go from doing much, thinking much, and relying on our self-sufficiency. Right there where we are weakest the peace which is not of this world is hidden.
Henri Nouwen
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