Touched by an Angel?

Article originally published in the October 2020 issue of the magazine of St John’s, Devizes.

Angels guard Christ from above. Folio 220r from the Book of Kells (illuminated ca. 800).

I started my first day as a curate with a swim. It hadn’t been planned in advance. Waking early on a bright and cloudless midsummer morning, I decided to cycle along the canal to Bishops Cannings. Despite noting with concern how narrow the towpath became as it passed the Marina, I felt invigorated by the deep orange sunshine on my face and cool air in my lungs. Due to be commissioned as a Licensed Lay Worker that afternoon, a milestone on a very long journey to ordained ministry, I felt gloriously and intensely alive.

The next thing I knew, my bike had somehow made a ninety degree turn and toppled down the bank of the canal, plunging vertically like the Titanic, and catapulting me through the air like a rodeo rider being thrown. I felt mud in my hands as I scraped the bottom. I couldn’t manage to heave my old boneshaker back up the bank, so I trudged home on foot, soaked and stinking of carp. Worse still, my mobile phone died – it was my only internet connection as my broadband wasn’t connected yet, and I needed to be able to get on Zoom to be licensed. What an inauspicious start to a momentous day!

I said some lairy things to God as I showered. On that day of all days, couldn’t He have protected me from such ignominy? Yet I later began to wonder if He hadn’t arranged that strange swerve to my own benefit. Let me explain.

My mobile was beyond repair, and the nice man in Wine Street supplied a cheapish replacement. I decided not to install Facebook, Twitter or Instagram on the new phone. I had found the atmosphere on social media during lockdown to be even angrier and more depressing than it had already become in recent years, and thought life might feel brighter if it didn’t follow me everywhere. I haven’t given up social media entirely – it has too much potential for good for that. But three months in, it’s wonderful to not have it distract me and ennervate me when I’m out and about; I only use it at my desk. I certainly feel better for it, and more focused on what is useful, online and offline.

Might an angel have arranged my little mishap? 29 September is the feast of St Michael and All Angels. At the Eucharist every Sunday, we proclaim that we join our praise with that of angels and archangels as we say “Holy, Holy, Holy”; the Biblical witness to angelic beings is persistent. Yet I can feel the more rationalist among you wondering if the new curate bumped his head on the canal bottom.

I had a season, a decade or so ago, of rejecting the mystical and transcendent in favour of a faith that was solely about putting Christ’s message into practical effect in the present. It coincided with the most miserable period of my my life. There were various reasons for that, but partly it was because I knew my own gifts and resources were without God’s help barely capable of getting me through a working day, let alone building the Kingdom of Heaven.

I look at the trinket shops full of angel-related memorabilia in every town during this supposedly secular age, and note that the presence of angels is a belief Christians share with our Muslim neighbours, and ask myself if we shouldn’t be more open to being touched by an angel. Just don’t expect the touch to necessarily come in a form one might choose for oneself.