ANGELS are in the air at the moment. I speak figuratively, but by no means deny that this might also be literally true. Angels are in the air in the figurative sense that, over the past week, by apparent chance, I have encountered discussion or writing about angels from three or four different sources.

One person sent me an academic book about angels: the excellent Angels and Monotheism, by Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge University Press); another sent me a poetic film imagining an angel in the Hebrides; and then I heard an episode of the podcast The Rest is History on the enigmatic John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court magician, and his supposed conversations with angels.

Angels don’t fit into the material, secular world, reduced to what Charles Taylor called “the immanent frame”; but still they persist in the popular mind and imagination, pushed perhaps to the edge of existence, but still as potent as ever. And, of course, for a Christian, they remain, if not central, certainly crucial: they manifest themselves to mark and proclaim the key moments of the salvation story: the annunciation, the birth of Jesus, and his resurrection.

Whatever part they have been made to play in flaky New Age Gnosticism, angels remain part of our joyful communion with all of God’s creation, as we join them in eucharist week by week in that glorious Sanctus that we sing “with angels and archangels and with all who stand before God in heaven and on earth”.

Whatever shifting view of angels I might take with my analytic and academic mind, it is when I write poetry that I discover what I really believe about them; and, to my surprise, they appear quite often in my poetry. I opened my sonnet on the annunciation with a reflection on the ubiquity of angels:

We see so little, stayed on surfaces,
We calculate the outsides of all things,
Preoccupied with our own purposes
We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings.
They coruscate around us in their joy,
A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled;
They guard the good we purpose to destroy,
A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.

The Archangel Michael has a sonnet to himself in Sounding the Seasons, and even receives a petition for help:

Archangel bring your balance, help me turn
Upon this turning world with you and dance
In the Great Dance. Draw near, help me discern,
And trace the hidden grace in change and chance.

And, in my sequence of sonnets on George Herbert’s poem “Prayer”, as I explored what he might have meant by calling prayer “angels’ age”, I expressed, at last and explicitly, something that is part of my experience of prayer, especially in and through holy communion:

They brush me with their feathers, with the rumour
Of their flight, and something in me sings
Into their passing light, till my prayer-murmur,
Circled in the slipstream of their wings,
Is lifted up in grace to join with theirs,
Who sing a Sanctus into all our prayers.