Angels Don't Need Wings

I knew my post the other day would yield a guardian angel story or two. I was not disappointed. This one was my favorite:
My mom insists that she was protected by her guardian angel when she was a kid growing up in Louisiana. She was picking blackberries and as she reached up, she got pushed backwards really hard and fell onto the ground. She looked up into the bush and there was a huge snake on the branch. She swears up and down she never saw it or heard it and no one was around her. 

Score one for the guardian angel! And I guess for your mom, as well. Paving the way for our next comment.

Sister St. Aloysius is too narrow in her intellectual view of the role of Guardian Angels. If saints who are earth bound can bi locate, who is to say that angels cannot? I see nothing contradictory in my Guardian Angel eternally adoring the face of the Father and simultaneously protecting me from temptations and errant buses.

Neither do I. I think perhaps I didn't explain very well. I believe I more or less said this if you re- read. I must have confused you with my last comment about invisible winged creatures protecting us from getting hit by a bus.

As the risk of confusing everyone further, I must admit that I am sometimes baffled when watching some poor jamoke on the news, covered in bandages from head to toe, after being accidentally shot out of a cannon they crawled in to inspect, saying something along the lines of, "My Guardian Angel sure was looking after me!"

I know. They mean they shouldn't have survived. But I can't help but think, "Where was your Guardian Angel when you crawled in there?"

Maybe I am more of a "glass half empty" person than I care to admit.

The thing that intrigued me about Sister St. Aloysius' comment was that it took the burden off guardian angels to stop people from showing up on "Dumbest Home Videos" and onto the true job of your guardian angels, the protection of your soul. I didn't mean to imply that they can't or don't do both, although I certain ended up implying just that.

Perhaps my real point in talking about it at all is to dispel the notion of big winged creatures, as angels don't have feathers, I'll wager. They aren't former people who earn feathers in Heaven. They are an entities with free will and that's where the similarity between angels and us ends. Did you know that the Church frowns on the notion of naming your Guardian Angels? Yep.  That's to pull you back from thinking about them as winged people from Heaven that you get to call by name. You don't know their names and unless you have a mystical vision, you never will. They are not to be "PERSONified".

I admit that I bristle sometimes at the notions people have. The other day I was walking to the Post Office along a very narrow sidewalk that stretches for blocks on end all along the marina here. It's a beautiful walk with all the boats in the harbor on one side and a bike path on the other.  But for a long stretch it's a narrow sidewalk right next to two lanes of on coming traffic and a big curve in the road. I can't tell you how many times I've walked it, and every single time I worry that one false move by any driver, distracted by a phone call or text, or the guy in the next lane crossing his lane line and the driver next to me swerving just slightly to miss him and I'm mowed down like a corn stalk in the fall.

So imagine my shock when, returning from the Post Office that fine day, just where I had been walking, a car had done just that. Jumped the curb and come to rest a little sideways in a giant hedge. Anyone walking there at that moment would have been toast. A woman with a baby in a carriage had just done what I had, and we stood looking at the car and the ambulance and the fire truck agape.

If our Guardian Angels were indeed watching out for us, what about those people in the car?

The hedge, I guess. The glass is half full.