John, a friend of mine, swears that his guardian angel saved his life when he was a kid.
It happened when he was four years old. His family lived in a second-story apartment, and in the living room there was a large bay window that looked out over the street below. A small sofa sat right up against the sill of the window. One day, John was playing on the sofa—climbing all over its arms and back—and behind him, the great bay window was open. As he was trying to tightrope-walk his way across the back of the couch, he lost his footing and felt himself tumbling towards the window and the pavement that lay waiting two-stories below. But all of a sudden, his fall was stopped. The way he describes it, it was as if someone was holding onto his ankle, keeping him from careening off the couch. What was it that saved him? John himself has no doubt about the matter: it must have been his guardian angel.
In Catholic circles, guardian angel stories like this abound. Our angelic guardians are frequently made the fall-men whenever we are inexplicably whisked out of harm’s way. And these stories aren’t ludicrous: there’s no doubt that our guardian angels protect us from physical dangers.
But, is that all they do?
Think about the guardian angel prayer:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day be at my side,
To light, to guard, to rule, to guide. Amen
The last line is a list of petitions. There, the first thing that we ask the angels to do for us is, not to guard us (though we definitely want them to do that too), but to give us light.
Consider what St. Thomas writes:
“An angel can strengthen the light of the mind in order to make man see more perfectly.”
— De veritate, q. 11, a. 3
The role of the guardian angel is first and foremost to fill our hearts with light: to help us make sense out of confusing situations; to help us know what we ought to do when life gets complicated; to help us understand the other side of the story when people do things that frustrate us.
But most of all, the guardian angels strengthen our minds so that we can better know God.
The Gospel passage that most explicitly speaks of guardian angels is Matthew 18:10:
See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.
These angels have minds that are filled with the light that radiates from the face of God. They see clearly how much God loves his “little ones.”
We can be so forgetful and ignorant of God’s love. How often do we find ourselves stumbling about in darkness: confused and unsure about where God is in our lives? At times like these, our guardian angels are beside us to give us light: to keep us from falling into error—to strengthen our minds so that we might gaze with them upon the face of our Father in heaven and know that he is love.
✠
