Meditation for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels
Angels and Argyle Socks
“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress” to talk of angels and how they dress? Whether they wear argyle socks or not and how many can dance upon the head of a pin? “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” With apologies to T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), all our talk is of angels. September closes down with The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We are in the company of Angels.
But argyle socks and dancing on the head of a pin? How absurd and utterly ridiculous! Yes. I have never seen angels wearing argyle socks even in the many, many representations of angels that belong to the history of art and sculpture. Of course, the angels cannot be seen. And so too, the supposed question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is pure nonsense and a complete misrepresentation of the entire intellectual and spiritual tradition to which angels belong. The whole point is that they are immaterial spirits, the pure ideas and the reasons of God in creation, the intellectual principles of things. They are invisible and don’t occupy space. You can’t see them. You can only think and feel them. That is the wonder of the angels. The most important things in life are the things you cannot see, like love and thought, like quarks and electrons, too!
That is the great and wonderful point about the angels. They remind us of an essential aspect of our humanity – that we are intellectual and spiritual creatures, albeit embodied with flesh and blood. The angels remind us of the intellectual and moral nature of reality.
