Archangels

Call to mind a time when you felt fiercely protective of someone. You felt as if you may be capable of absorbing that person into your chest and would take any abuse to shield them from harm.

Allow yourself to remember an instance when you felt so inspired by an idea that for a moment you thought you might be made of light. Your eyes opened wide and you smiled with joy from the inside out. You may have laughed out loud. In that moment everything made sense. You had the answer and it felt like it may have been the answer to everything.

Remember a feeling of such tenderness for another person that it seemed if you were to touch them your hand would pass through warm air. Your love for them was so pure and generous that whether they were near or far you could simultaneously drown in their essence and sense them immaterial as the atmosphere.

I think these are the kinds of inspirations humans have tried to explain through the device of “archangels”. These sensations, or rather states of being or inspiration, can never be adequately explained with words or drawn in a picture, yet when I asked you to recall them, you could can feel them and intuitively understand everything about the concept with perfect clarity.

Just as each of the feelings I suggested has its own energy and intensity behind it, so too archangels. In fact, I think the feelings you remembered are the energies represented by the archangels. Or archangels are the energies that inspire those feelings. Or maybe they are interchangeable. Or maybe they are all in play all of the time and it only takes an intention to lean into or open ones eyes to one of these inspirations in order to experience them.

People have given archangels names, perhaps to help make these philosophical ideas accessible to people who are less fluent in the interpretation of their feelings. Or maybe those who named them were still in the process of trying to understand them, but yet did not.

Ultimately, I think, to anthropomorphize archangels is to make them inaccessible. They are not like people, I think they are more like the inspiration for emotions, catalysts, instigation, very close to the source of creation in that they motivate intention. They are not the intention, they motivate the intention, they are where the intention starts.

If colors can be thought to have influence over feelings and intentions then one could say that archangels could take visual color and form. They are often depicted as such. I think I experience them through the visual impression of natural beauty, especially in images dominated by light.

If any of this resonates with you, I invite you to look at sunrises and sunsets in a new way. Open yourself to the energy the beauty motivates you to feel. Notice what it motivates you to say and do. If it is good, allow it to transform you.