| IX. Choir | 9 July |
|---|---|
| Angel of gratitude | Queen of Peace |
We must be filled with deep gratitude in the knowledge that God, in His truly divine goodness and care, has placed many, many angels upon our path. They are our brothers and helpers, even harbingers of joy.
We should understand that the way to God is the Way of the Cross, of course, but we must also know that God created joy and that there are joyful angels… angels who rejoice and sing for sheer joy.
Amongst his brothers, the angels of the ninth choir, the sunny, simple angel who stands before God’s Throne as our intercessor today is known as the Little Songbird.
He is
Saint Gelomiah,
the Angel of Gratitude. People like to say that gratitude is dying out in the world. That is not true, however, for as long as there is an angel of gratitude, there will always be people who are grateful to him.
And don’t we have reason enough to thank God until the end of our lives? To give thanks that we have Him, this marvellous, wonderful God, as our best Father… To give thanks that He, this best of all fathers, gave us His Son, who will remain in our midst until the Last Day as our Way, our Truth and our Life… To give thanks that we have Mary, this dearest and best of all mothers… To give thanks that God has given us such a wide, expansive world with flowers and birds and so much more…
Gratitude always opens the heart of the giver. Let us remember that! So, if we are grateful to God… really, really grateful… we open the Heart of the Heavenly Father – this Great, Wide, Kind Heart – to new gifts, new goodness and help.
There is even more to the gratitude that this angel bears, however. It is not merely the habitual saying of thank you, no, it is a genuine gratitude of the heart: it remembers the giver with a joyful heart. It is thereby a discipline of the heart; there is no falsehood in it, no ambivalence in saying “Thank you!” with the mouth whilst thinking contemptuously with the heart. It is a discipline of the will to be humble even in thought and to hold everything in low esteem; then what we should be grateful for will also be honestly appreciated by us. Gratitude requires humility. Humble gratitude is therefore joyful because it is happy to have cause for gratitude.
And if Saint Gelomiah has prayed for us in childlike gratitude, then he will descend to earth again and put on a large apron and sing in the kitchen or the hen house or in the field with the little birds in the trees: “Dearest Lord Jesus…!”
Prayer: O you dear, radiant Angel of Gratitude, Saint Gelomiah, make my heart wide and grateful so that I can rejoice and sing like you! Amen.