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In our post-modern, consumerist culture, anything is marketable. With the yawning abyss of spiritual hunger opening, any little relic of the sacred is for sale. There is a huge market for things of the Spirit that can be easily digested. The angels are now in fashion. They are talked about in the idiom of magic and apparition. It is important to recall that the sacred has both a silence and a secrecy about it. Divine intimacy has a crucial reserve and shyness. Your friendship with your angel is ancient. It is intimate in a way that concerns the very essence of your identity and destiny. A person should never reduce the mystery of his invisible world to the clichéd descriptions of external banter. The very nature of angelic presence is totally alien to this garish, neon attention. Perhaps such empty and undignified talk drives away our invisible companions. It disrespects their reverential and eternal shyness. In the Celtic world, there was a lyrical and natural sense of these divine presences without any of the garishness or voyeurism of the disappointed contemporary mind.

When you begin to awaken to your incredible freedom, the walls of your inner prisons gradually become the thresholds of your new life, your new place of growth. The old walls can become the thresholds of new belonging which is hospitable to the depths and directions of longing within you. Your angel can liberate your soul from the false, tight spaces where fear, limitation, negativity, bitterness, and disappointment hold you. The angel is the inner artist of transfiguration, adept at opening and structuring new configurations of Spirit where longing and belonging live in the most creative tension with each other. Your angel can see your invisible world and knows where you have been imprisoned, where the lost and forsaken parts of your life are locked away. Your angel is the custodian of your deep and ancient memory. In this way, nourishment, courage, and strength are brought from the harvest of your memory to meet the hungry places in your present time. Your angel works in and through your imagination. The divine imagination offers you all the gifts that you need and particularly those blessings for the broken areas of contradiction, suffering, and pain. You could ask your angel to go to the places of nourishment to assuage your present hunger and thirst.

Some lovely poems by Kathleen Raine link the images of angel, birth, and renewal.

Dear angel of my birth,

All my life’s loss,

Gold of fallen flowers,

Shells after ebbing wave

Gathered on lonely shores

With secret toil of love,

Deathless in memory save

The treasures of my grave.

Your angel is the spirit of renewal and transfiguration. Celtic mythology had a wonderful sense of novelty. There was no such thing as a prison in the Celtic mind. You could see that so powerfully in the way that things continued to change shape and take on other different forms. There was no fixed boundary between the visible and the invisible. Without warning or preparation, things could appear suddenly out of the invisible air. This happens often in the Irish epic The Táin. A presence coagulates itself, comes out, and is standing there giving advice or warning or prophesy. The Celts inhabited a rich imaginative landscape. At the heart of Celtic spirituality is the fire, force, and tenderness of the Celtic imagination. All spirituality derives from the quality and power of the imagination. The beauty of Celtic spirituality is the imagination behind it, which had no boundaries. The essence of a thing or person was never confined in any prison of definition or image. Celtic spirituality is an invitation to a wonderful freedom. The recovery and awakening of the invisible world is as wild and free as the immeasurable riches of the earth.

W. H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” has the following beautiful verse:

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountains start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

In prayer, your angel can help you to praise and sing the song of freedom from your heart. Your angelic presence can convert a dead world into a new world of mystery, potential, and promise. The British poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called “First Sight,” about lambs born in the snow. On a farm it is exciting to see new lambs finding the world during their first few hours here. Larkin’s poem describes the snow-covered landscapes into which these new lambs arrive. They see and know nothing except snow. They have landed in a white world; before them every hill and bush is white. Larkin then suggests the absolute novelty that is still concealed. Waiting for them is

Earth’s immeasurable surprise,

They could not grasp it if they knew,

What so soon will wake and grow

Utterly unlike the snow.

This poem marks and articulates an unnoticed and surprising threshold of recognition. Similarly, outside the walls of the inner prison in which you are now locked, there is the gift of the earth’s immeasurable surprise awaiting to bless and enlarge your Spirit. You were born for life, you were born for eternal life. No fear or false conviction should confine you in any crippled emotional or thought-space that is unworthy of the springtime that sleeps so lightly in the clay of your heart. Winter always precedes spring and is often a time of suffering. In the prisons we build for ourselves, our belonging becomes crippled and our longing haunted. When we suffer, our sense of belonging is broken.