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There are angels of mercy, guardian angels and, of course, the Angel of Death, assuming you believe in such things — and perhaps even if you don’t. Recently I decided to educate myself on various angelic functions and discovered there were many more specialities than I had previously realized. There are, to begin with, the various archangels, cherubim and seraphim found in the Bible. Then you’ve got warrior angels, herald angels, healing angels and recording angels, who keep track of human deeds and heavenly records. There are angels who lead celestial choirs and inspire earthly music. Some angels specialize in bringing divine messages through dreams and visions, while others bring solace in times of grief and suffering.
Can you pray to angels? As a Protestant, I didn’t know and had to look it up. It turns out you can. But angels don’t actually answer prayers, they merely intercede with God on behalf those who pray, sort of like saints — another subject about which Protestants are woefully uninformed. (It remains to be seen whether Protestants are better off for it or are merely woefully uninformed.)
Not long ago, I heard a lovely poem by the Irish poet John O’Donohue called "A Blessing of Angels.” O’Donohue introduced me to a whole new catalog of angels, starting with this one:
May the Angels of Awakening stir your heart
To come alive to the eternal within you,
To all the invitations that quietly surround you.
O’Donahue was, among other things, an Irish Catholic priest and therefore presumably better versed in the arcana of angels than I will ever be. For all I know, his poem may itself have been inspired by an angel of some sort. In any event, I was inclined to take it at face value.
As a fine-arts photographer, awakening is my stock in trade. Apart from a modicum of technical know-how, photography is all about awaking up to the quiet invitations all around us. The prerequisite is that you are alert to those invitations. How does that happen? Is this where the angels of awakening come in? I don’t actually pray to any angels of awakening, hoping they will be on the lookout for subjects to photograph. But then, they may operate like guardian angels, mostly working behind the scenes. They may be there to tap you on the shoulder and wordlessly whisper in your ear, “Hey, dummy, pay attention to this!” “
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” said the Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. I doubt she was speaking here of praying to angels of awakening. She was referring to contemplative prayer, which is wordless. “Attention consists in suspending thought, in leaving it available, empty and subject to penetration by the object,” she wrote. She added that “thought must remain empty, awaiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that will penetrate it.” For a photographer, that is precisely the moment when you snap the picture.
In my experience, you don’t have to go hunting for subject matter; it’s there for the taking if you’re paying attention. As the Gerald Manly Hopkins’ expressed it, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Christians speak of the “sacramental imagination,” the ability to see everyday experience as a revelation of God’s grace. The novelist Virginia Woolf would have flatly rejected any such notion — the God part at least — and yet she arrived at pretty much the same place when she declared “the whole world is a work of art.” In her essay, “Moments of Being,” this world lies hidden behind the “cotton wool” of everyday life. It stands revealed during rarified “moments of being” between long stretches of non-being, during which one must attend to all the minutiae of ordinary existence. What is it that triggers those moments of being? Could it be angels of awakening operating behind the scenes?
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