| IX. Choir | 3 January |
|---|---|
| Angel with the ploughshare | Genevieve |
God the Father’s goodness sets an angel before us every day, so that we may learn from him not to take our eyes off God, and through every day and every hour to get the strength and the help that we need for our earthly wanderings. This strength and this help is only given to us by God. We would finish all our tasks much more successfully if we followed the angel’s example.
We should also recognise the glory of God in the angel. The angel is, after all, merely a created image of God’s wisdom, goodness and infinite love. What wonderful angels there are! Through them we understand the meaning of the words: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.” What love is like this?
Every angel announces to us the love of God… even the one God sets before us today:
Saint Selamiel,
the angel with the ploughshare. He is associated with the angel of depth and inwardness and of longing for God, Saint Jophiel, known as The Ploughman. Saint Selamiel must also go over the field of our soul with the ploughshare.
As an angel of the ninth choir, he is the easiest for us to understand. The seraphim, the angels of the first choir, are not comprehensible to us. We naturally prefer the simple angels, those whose radiance fills us with joy and longing for God without knocking us down or burning us.
The number of the angels of the ninth choir cannot be estimated. They are angels of life, and all guardian angels belong to this choir, without exception. Each angel bears the symbolism of his task—recognisable to us through the mercy of God—and it is by this symbol that we can most easily understand each angel and his task.
Saint Selamiel is a great, silent angel; his robe carries the dark depths of inwardness and work in the field of God. This field of God is our soul. The angel has a ploughshare as a symbol of his task. With it he must go over the field of our soul and prepare us for the Lord’s call: “Come!” The ploughshare is shiny, but you can see that many a stone has hurt it. How often the field of our soul is stony!
With this we immediately see our duty, which can be taken from this symbol of the angel’s task: Let us be a prepared field for the Lord! Let us allow ourselves to be ploughed by the love of God and willingly accept the word of the Lord that shows us our way. Let us let the words of God bear fruit in us, so that the holy angels too can one day bind the sheaves and reap the harvest!
Prayer: Lord, let the ploughshare of Thy love pass over my heart, so that Thine angels may also reap it for Thee! Amen.