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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250619
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UID:13580-1750291200-1750377599@laycisterciansofgethsemani.org
SUMMARY:Vigils Reading
DESCRIPTION:THE ANGEL \nAND THE MACHINE \nFrom an article by Thomas Merton5 \n◊◊◊ \nThe angels are our brothers and fellow servants in a world of freedom and \nof grace. Like us\, they are saved by Christ the Lord and King of Angels. With \nChrist their King and sent by his command\, they come to us as invisible \nmessengers of his divine will\, as mysterious protectors and friends in the \nspiritual order. Their presence around us—unimaginable\, tender\, solicitous and \nmighty\, terrible as it is gentle—is more and more forgotten while the personal \nhorizon of our spiritual vision shrinks and closes in upon ourselves. [The \nangels] are sent to inform us that we are rooted in the very light by whom they \nwere sent! Yet if they were not sent our eyes would never open\, our hearts would \nnever leap out of their own little constraint into the large freedom of a perfect \nand total response… \nWe meet the angels\, the messengers of divine help\, on the frontiers of our \nown freedom and our own capacity. They touch us when we reach our natural \nlimits…We do not usually meet them except when we ourselves are at the end of \nour strength\, or of our endurance\, or of our understanding\, or of our capacity to \nhope and to believe. The angel appears when we ourselves are reduced to the \ncenter of our deepest need. \nIf the angel comes as the comforter who says “fear not” and “Thy prayer \nis heard“\, that is precisely why man prefers more and more not to be reduced to \nthe extremity where he needs the angelic answer. Rather than fearing and then \nbeing told to fear no more\, he would prefer to avoid fear. Our weak faith would \nrather get along without such powerful help\, coming as it does from the invisible \nworld that is entirely beyond observation and control: in other words\, we would \nprefer to get along with fewer demands upon our faith. We would prefer not to \nbe reminded of our poverty… \nTechnological civilization is\, as we have it now\, a civilization without \nangels. It is a civilization in which we have chosen the machine instead of the \nangel: that is to say that we have placed the machine where the angel used to be: \nat the limit of our own strength\, at the frontier of our natural capacity… \nThe machine is fully visible… Yet the machines are “our” angels. We made \nthem\, not they themselves. They are\, we think\, entirely in our own power. They \nbecome\, then\, extensions of our own intelligence\, our own strength. We do not \nhave to walk to the edge of an infinite void in order to feel the brush of their \nunpredictable wings upon us in the starlight. They form part of our own \nenclosed and comfortable world\, they stand between us and nature… There still \nremain limits where we face the void from which no mechanical rescue is \nimaginable. At these frontiers\, as always\, the angels await us. \nIf technological society may seem to exclude the angels\, it is because it \nseeks to make us forget these other frontiers (especially death!): and this again \nis no fault of the innocent machine. It is our own choice… It is our anxiety to \nmake our machine world completely self-sufficient and autonomous that we \nrender it spiritually unlivable for ourselves. More than ever we need the angels\, \nnot to replace our machines but to teach us to live with them. For the angels \ncome to us to teach us how to rest\, to forget useless care\, to relax\, in silence\, to \n“let go\,” to abandon ourselves not to self-conscious fun but in self-forgetful \nfaith. \n5 The Angel and the Machine”\, first published in Season\, vol. 5\, Summer 1967\, reprinted in The Merton Seasonal\, vol. 22 \nno. 1\, Spring 1997\, pp. 3-6.11
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-reading-324/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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