We exist in full view of, and even in interaction with, heaven’s watchful and intercessory hosts. Orchestrating angels as they watch all of creation, plus interacting with the residents of heaven (an inestimable number of saints) as they pray for our divine intercession, takes incredible organization and readiness. Only God can do that.
Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Ephesians 5:21-33
Psalm 128:1-2, 3, 4-5
Luke 13:18-21
Do prayers from frightened children, prayers formed under the threat of death, and prayers that put God on the spot all strike at God’s heart in the same way? Is anyone other than God listening to these prayers?
We Christian Catholic folk presume, or more properly imagine, that we know God is not the only one to hear our prayers. The angels and the Communion of Saints are also privy to all our communications. They don’t take prayers in bulk, as does God. The bulk of them, however, hear every muttered plea. As the wind and the waves and the footsteps of creation move about on earth, I believe the angels watch. As we pray, I also believe the saints pray with us. At times they intercede.
They appear to us like a canopy of graceful aids —tree trunks, branches, leaves, and hallowed seeds —intervening only as God allows, and then with unified purpose: the salvation of our souls.
I offer three tales of prayers from fellow members of creation — a child, a man in crisis, and a woman pleading for God to answer. A trio of people passing from this life into holiness in the same hour. These were innocent folk. We might disregard our eventual destination, focused instead on death’s cruelty, mourning the gift of life taken away. However, death’s final and brutal act isn’t final at all.
We exist in full view of, and even in interaction with, heaven’s watchful and intercessory hosts. Orchestrating angels watch all of creation. Their interaction with the residents of heaven (an inestimable number of saints), as they pray for our divine intercession, takes incredible organization and readiness. Only God can do that.
Angels don’t write our prayers down; they collect them, I presume, measuring each against an innate ethical compass. They watch how God responds, designed to be curious and expectant about us. “For he commands his angels with regard to you, to guard you wherever you go. With their hands they shall support you, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” (Psalm 91:11-12)
We have to be careful, as Colossians 2:18 says, not to worship angels. I probably don’t have to say this, but being reminded to be careful is good, like those bumpy and noisy edges when we drift off the center lanes of a highway.
The Communion of Saints is more ponderous than curious. They pray for those who struggle through life, especially with an urgency over those in creation who ask them personally to intercede. Some find this a ridiculous idea, and perhaps even a heresy. Ours is a separate existence from heaven. Yet, Catholics allow for channels of prayerful communication. For all saints hold dear every breath — those who have lived just a short moment or two, and those who lasted a century or more. They pray for those born and about to die.
I get this notion (actually, it’s doctrine) from Hebrews 12. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us* and persevere in running the race that lies before us.”
We were pleased to be housed inside our mother’s protection, but a path of transition awaited us. We are about to burst into the next reality, one we can barely imagine.
The distance between creation and heaven is thinner than an atom's width. That’s not pure conjecture — just thin evidence. Still, it’s an impermeable veil except for when God allows creation to see through it. Several times in scripture, that veil has been opened. A cosmic burst ripped it in two, then Jesus removed the veil upon his Ascension.
Creation, most likely, sits in the midst of heaven. Heaven wouldn’t have any edges, would it? Creation and heaven are certainly not the same size, like two opposing planets. Creation can only be a small spot compared to heaven's divine breadth and depth, accessible enough that anyone in divine communion with God can see into it, probably from anywhere in heaven. It’s fine to guess at such things, because our concentration on death’s result needs to be heaven’s existence. I do this rather than fret over the dentist’s chair appointment-like trauma of death.
Lou, a wise man, explained that both divinity’s architecture and physics surpass our understanding. Well, I said that. But then he said. “Yes, for how would you explain to a child in his mother’s womb about a tree?” That’s pretty wise.
I have never been out of this current womb, yet Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension offer a darn good story involving angels and saints. Jesus is ensconced in our minds.
To our stories, then.
The saints watched as three people prayed from earth. This is a common occurrence. More than 600 people die every second (or is it way more, or about half that — oh well, it’s a lot). The saints are urged to pay special attention to people in their last grip on life. It’s an unimaginable coordination, only sensible if you live in the heavenly realm. In every case, angels attended to these three folks who called out to God.
We begin with a boy in Kansas, segue to a man on his tractor, and end with a devout woman.
A whirling East wind whacked a tree branch against Trevor Holmes’ house, periodically scratching a window in its wild wrangling slaps. Nine-year-old Trevor listened, clutching his dog, Moan — named for the sounds he made as a pup whenever he and Trevor got separated. Moan growled lowly at every screech of the branch on the glass. The boy and his dog were the same age. They’d slept together most nights.
Trevor prayed that everyone he knew was safe at home with their families, not out alone and afraid in the wind. The angels noted this. The saints nodded and prayed with Trevor. Moan turned his head to the boy. Trevor touched the cross on the necklace he’d worn every day since his First Communion. “Pray that the wind calms down, Moan,” Trevor said. Moan stared at him, sensing the boy’s fear. He pushed his head into Trevor’s neck.
Our records on Trevor’s death do not match heaven’s. A congenital heart anomaly took his life. Heaven lists his death as a holy martyrdom. The further transitory particulars of his death include an incredible matrix of sorrows and corresponding graces upon his family, blessings to his friends, while simultaneously projecting to all a number of hallowed procedures introduced by Trevor’s entry into heaven’s realm.
Moan did meet up with Trevor later. The tears and misery rampant in Trevor’s death subsided as each affected person later experienced their own hallowed procedures. The storm, by the way, calmed down, and no one was injured or left outside alone in the wind. The angels praised God.
Hugo Steener steered his tractor uphill, a sideways, traversing climb, singing to calm his nerves. Behind him, he dragged a sled of chain link along the silty beach mound he had built at the northern end of Sweden’s shores. At 74, Hugo knew the sea’s periodic seizures; water attempting to hide from the storm, smacking the beach in waves, then pulling back into foamy chaos. It never learns. Instead of getting away from the storm, the sea ran farther and farther onto the beach, only to be yanked back into the storm’s rage, melting his mound.
"When gazing upon the beauty of creation, our souls cannot help but burst into praise: O Mighty God!" he sang.
Hugo coaxed a berm of sand to rise higher and higher to protect his crops from the waves slashing needlessly into his property. He watched the salt water splash and spray closer to his farm’s edge and prayed as he pulled at the sand. “Let this storm pass quickly, dear Lord. I’ll do what I do. You do what you do. Tell the waves not to get frightened and flee from where they belong.”
Hugo’s farm did survive the storm. There is that. Hugo did not. His tractor was never found. Hugo’s body lay wrapped around the trunk of a tree which he’d planted as a child, just a few yards from his house. He spent quite a while being greeted and cared for by relatives both recent and ancient in the wonderfully bright, rageless spaces of heaven. His perspective on ocean storms and the fretfulness of waves became an opera in heaven. Hugo burst into song. The chorus of angels joined him.
High on a forest hill far from the city of Seoul, South Korea, Eun Jung walked through the woods reciting the rosary as she did every day heading home from work. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” Eun chanted, rolling her rosary in her fingers. Her mother taught Eun to pray the ancient litany of pleas on this very path. Eun’s “Eomma” passed away walking home one day with a rosary in her hands. Eun, holding the same rosary, was now a few years older than her mother when she had died two decades ago. She stopped at the spot where Eomma Jung had collapsed and asked, as Eun did almost every day, “Jesus, do you walk with Mother for me? I have asked you many times. She would enjoy that. I’m sure Mother Mary has told you that I asked. It would mean a great deal to me to know. OK. I’m going home now.”
Prescient of Eun to use that phrase. She did not die on that spot, but later when she was home, in her sleep. Her mother met her in heaven and took her right away on a walk with Jesus. They had a great time. She told Jesus, “Thank you.” He replied, “Mullon,” which means “Of course.” She recognized his voice at once and nodded, remembering how steadily Jesus had communicated with her throughout her life.
Angels and saints do not know the prayers in the hearts of God’s creation. We are told that’s not possible, because they only hear them from our lips. God alone knows our heart. Neither angels nor devils can go there.
Prayers aren’t unofficial just because we don’t say them out loud. It’s just that the angels and the saints don’t get to hear them unless we do. God does let heaven in on every prayer (a wild-eyed supposition), but with so many prayers going on, you can imagine the delightful imagery of verbal prayers going straight to the ears of the angels and saints.
God’s answers in every case are remarkable, for he makes sure the angels know what he does as he does it. The saints, however, are charged with interpretation, putting causes and effects together, because they are constantly being formed, brought closer to divinity, absorbing love, and knowing God's mind. The particular differences between angels and saints aren’t clear to us. That’s the best I can explain it. Well, maybe when they come to harvest the good from the bad we’ll have more info.
God's answers to our prayers don't seem to come the moment we cry out. In the whirls of the wind, the waves on the beach, and the footsteps on the paths, however, people often release prayers loudly from their lips. The angels and saints will certainly hear.
Trevor, Hugo, and Eun all arrived in heaven that day. They were shaken and stunned at the immediate transformation from their places on the beach, on the path, or cuddled with their dog. The saints met them after the angels escorted them to Jesus, just after Jesus brought them to heaven and filled them with the Holy Spirit, and probably after the Father had already embraced them.
The stories may sound very real to some, but I imagined them, meager tracings of various news stories. Not surface scratchings from graveyard stones, but visions of people who resemble our dear friends and family.
Unlike our three new fabricated Saints, not everyone prays with heaven in mind. It’s more than we calculate. So much must be purged from our lives if we have not encased our beings in prayer and noted the subsequent graces we grasp. So the time to cross the thin veil into heaven might be much longer for some of us. I think I am among the longer ones.
In our deaths, we may be preserved under a similar veil, protected from evil’s snare. God judges beyond our grasp.
Some do not want to see heaven at all. I cannot recall engaging any such person. If so, they're likely forgotten by us as much as by Heaven. Each one who balks is an incredible loss to God, especially those who refuse to pray. We’re not sure about the math on this, but I believe quite a few of the 600 or more folks dying per second were offered heaven, but simply were unaware of the offer. The saints may have coupons for the unsure, an enticement, a coaxing from pure hearts. The lost may not be remembered, a sadness no one wants to visit.
We are not privy to the numbers of those who never properly cross over, or those who never will. Prayer, however, synced between heaven and creation, attempts to breach the chasm of the thin atomic veil, and we are better awakened when we allow for the angels and saints to be engaged in our life and our prayers.
You might think my faux saints — Trevor, Hugo and Eun — are mythical, fictional characters. They most certainly are. Every being of creation, however, is not. The rest of the trillions of Saints, and all of the faithful angels, are certainly not mythical or fictional.
At all times, and certainly for all time, the prayer catcher releases no plea back into the wild, but serves it as a welcome feast for the hosts and residents of Heaven.