Vigils Reading

THE GLORY OF GOD

From a commentary by Eric Peterson

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Angels are more than poetic extras from the repertoire of folk-lore. They

have to do with Christ and with the Holy Spirit; but they have to do with us well.

They represent for us a possibility in our own nature, an enhancement and

intensification of our being – but never the possibility of a new and different

faith. They teach us about dark depths in our being wherein is movement and

impulse, independent, it may be, of ourselves, and which we may not even

recognize for what they really are, nor attribute yet awhile to angelic influence.

An impulse might simply be felt as an urge towards purity of heart; or one might

become conscious of an overwhelming desire for mental clarity and a true

existence.

We hurry towards the angels along many paths, not as though we

expected to become an angel, but because our own being is only a preliminary

existence and it does not yet appear what we shall be. And if we do not hurry

towards those angels who stand in God’s presence, then we shall most certainly

hasten towards those who have turned away from God; we shall rush towards

the demons. For we always live so that we transcend ourselves and thus move

toward either the angels or the demons. And we who transcend ourselves – for

to do this is our being – are able to ascend higher and higher, not in the moral

but in the metaphysical sense, until we become an associate of the angels and

arrive at the frontier of that realm where stand the cherubim and seraphim.

This boundary line, marked out neither by ourselves nor by any

archangel, arrests our progress: here we begin to join in the music of the

spheres and in the singing of the angels. Our song is no mere imitation of the

angelic song, no modest joining in the cry of Holy, holy, holy which resounds

from their lips majestically and without ceasing; but it is also something which

erupts from our innermost being when we reach the bounds of all things – the

bounds of ourselves as creatures.

What do we learn on reaching the angelic world but the creation praises

God, praises him from the last star down to the least blade of grass? What

applies to the highest grade of creation applies equally to the lowest, to plant-

life, animals and things which stand much lower than we in the scale of being.

When in the psalms let us say, animals and mountains break froth in praise of

God, this is no mere hyperbole or excess of poetic fancy, an unwarrantable

human personifying of inanimate nature. It is something based ultimately in

the nature of the created thing, and which runs fight through the whole scale of

creation from the cherubim and seraphim down to the least thing in the world.

As the Gospel has told us, the whole creation is full of the glory of God.