To Consume with Fire
Nearly every day, I regret that I’m not an angel. Not the ones from paintings, with human frames and white wings and soft curls encircled in halos, or the rosy-cheeked, swaddled babies shooting arrows, or even our deceased loved ones floating on clouds and watching us from above. I’m talking about biblical angels, spiritual beings that are invisible unless they choose to take on a human figure and appear among us. This happens in the Judeo-Christian tradition hundreds of times; angels are present at nearly every vital moment in the text. They fill the Gospels with their presence: announcing, warning, protecting. They are at the empty tomb and they are atop the mountains.
And I wish I could have been one, wish down to my core I could have been given only a will and no body, could have been only soul, consciousness, pure thought unbounded by corporeality.
It’s a strange sort of longing, both because of the impossibility and the vagueness. What would it mean, really, to be without a body, to be only a will, floating? It probably looks a lot like empty air, like an echo, like a soundless cave. Maybe like looking down into a deep, dark hole. I try to picture it and can’t, not fully; my ability to imagine a realm outside the one I inhabit is so limited. I remember as a very young child feeling more in tune with that world beyond this one, with the invisible.
I had a small golden cross I wore around my neck, the pendant no bigger than the tip of my pinky finger, and I’d hold it between my lips when I prayed, with the chain pulled taut across my chin. My mother would scold me for putting it in my mouth, but I loved the way the cool metal felt pressed against my skin, loved how it calmed me. I would whisper questions to it, then slide the cross up the chain and hold it to my ear like some sort of cosmic telephone. No rumbling voices ever resounded, but I never felt silly doing it, and took that peace as an answer.
Do you remember the fragility of childhood, when everything felt massive in comparison to you? When you had to climb constantly, when you were always reaching? Maybe I’m projecting; I was so often scared of the world around me. Everything felt threatening, and my body never performed in the way I wanted it to; I couldn’t inhabit mine in the way I watched the other kids exist in their own. My body was needy, and easily offended. A crumb of the wrong food could close my throat; the sun burnt me fast and hard; my lungs never took in enough air and left me gasping on the schoolyard. I didn’t think I was made to have a body then, or at least, it seemed to me that my body didn’t quite want to be here, and if it did, it wasn’t doing a grand job of showing it.
Physically, I took up little space, but my existence felt looming, larger than I could manage. Like my being had expanded outside the outlines of my body, bumping into everyone and everything around it.
Not everyone experienced youth in this way, I realize, but the concept feels so foreign to me, that opposite reality where children view themselves and their world as indestructible, their bodies invincible. I remember feeling strong, certainly, climbing trees and nestling my body into the arms of their branches, but there was always a moment when I looked down to the grass below and felt my breath catch in my throat, thinking that if I moved the tiniest bit I would fall and it would hurt and that always, one needed to be careful. I watch my niece, a sharp girl of three, scale the living room sofa and jungle gym ropes and see her move without doubt in her small limbs, no hesitation, just motion and lightness. She has no fear of falling; I wonder what it is like to experience the world with that sort of freedom, with such ease.
And so my fascination isn’t new. It feels natural to me to question my body and the solidness of it, how it takes up space and exists in space, and how the two experiences don’t always align. It feels natural to seek protection, for a body that has always needed protecting. In the first grade, I carried a small plastic container of baby wipes with me, dense at the bottom of my checkered backpack, to wipe down my desk and doorknobs and anything I touched, to make sure it was safe, to make sure no lingering oils from a classmate’s sticky PB & J-stained hands made their way onto my own and into my bloodstream. It’s a strange thing, anaphylaxis, that sudden closing of the throat, the instant swelling. Once my eyes bloomed so large I couldn’t blink.
What an awkward thing to carry with you as a child: the responsibility for your own life. It seems like something meant for adults, and I’m sure it was, in some ways. But it was mine, too. There was a sense in which staying alive was my only job, the clearest purpose I could discern. I once taught a room full of my teachers how to administer an EpiPen. I stood in front of them in a crowded conference room, their bodies towering over me, and swung the trainer—exactly the same as the real device but without the epinephrine, without the needle—swung it hard and fast onto my thigh. It left a bruise, I remember, a purple circle on my outer thigh. I told them in a voice and tone I’d learned from my mother, if I am unconscious, you have to do this for me, and someone needs to call 911. I was eight. Perhaps it was just the added layer of awareness that made me feel nervous to live, fully, in an untethered way. To climb without a fear of falling.
This could be why I find the idea of a guardian angel so comforting, why I tell myself there is something or someone next to me, always. I remember scooting aside a few inches in my seat in grade school, making room for her to sit next to me as I took spelling tests and filled out times tables. I prayed to her the prayer we learned in school, recited it on knobby knees before bed, angel of god, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this night be at my side: to light, to guard, to rule and guide, the rhyme lulling me to sleep.
In almost all cases, angels are depicted as men, and sometimes I imagine my own angel that way, but as a child it was a woman, always. I’d try to picture her but could never come up with a face, just a presence, just heat that I knew felt maternal.
I thought of them constantly, the beings surrounding me, protecting me. It felt mythical and magical and safe, at an age where everything else felt dangerous. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, an eleventh-century theologian known for his contributions to angelology, everyone, alive and dead, had one assigned to them at birth. An infinite partnership of unique beings.
As an adult, I’ve become enthralled once again, though I’m not convinced my interest ever really faded. There is something about their bodilessness that I found captivating, at a time when my own body was feeling more and more foreign to me. And so I learned more about them, about the philosophy that explains their existence and being and motion, about the biblical accounts of their duties and roles, about the ways they are said to aid in prayer and how they are viewed in other cultures, by other faith traditions. I wanted to know everything there was to know about them, and I can’t explain why. Maybe I don’t need to, maybe the longing is enough.
My favorites are the seraphim, the highest order, the ones closest to God, who make up his court and heavenly choir. Their song shakes the foundation of heaven; they exist to sing his praises. When their form is described (though even this is a projection, form here is something like a costume they slip on) they’re said to have six wings—two to keep them suspended, two that cover their faces, two that cover their feet—and to be encircled in concentric rings of flame. Their entire figure covered in rounded, slow-blinking eyes.
They should be alarming at least, terrifying, really. But I’m so drawn to them, to the bliss they must feel by not having a corporeal body, or the bliss of having and knowing and serving a purpose. Even their name, from the Greek saraph, meaning “to consume with fire,” is alluring. Haven’t you ever wished to burn, to be ignited for something, for someone?
The seraphim are mentioned throughout Scripture, but there is one scene in the Book of Isaiah that strikes me, for its haunting description and imagery. In a prophetic vision, one touched a live ember to Isaiah’s lips, purifying them, sealing his mouth for holy words. After this, Isaiah is given a mission: to tell the people of Israel that their hearts will be hardened, that they will hear but not understand the things Isaiah has to tell them of their God. Our hearts have hardened, haven’t they, locked securely in our private obsessions. I long to feel the hot ember on my own lips, the scorch and then relief. Or better yet, to be the seraph who plucked the live coal with tongs and held it out for him, at a distance.
Angels don’t occupy a human frame, they don’t share our vulnerable skin or brittle hair or dry mouths. They have a form but take up no space, not physically. Aquinas considered their form and determined that they aren’t made of matter, itself a concept that feels slippery, like trying to capture clouds in your fists. Their existence, he says, is in their esse, their being. Their potentiality explains their actuality; they are that which is. His example is one of motion: an act of running is that by which a runner runs. Potentiality explains actuality.
The physics of this are admittedly complicated, but what I do understand more fully is what reading about them does to me. What it feels like to get so lost in a sentence that I forget my own presence, forget to breathe, forget that I have a body and that it is fallible; who cares when there are beings to learn about that are unlimited and boundless and utterly transparent? Of what concern are my own opacity, my own denseness, my own edges, in the shimmering light of their vastness?
There are others in the hierarchy, which stems between earthly creatures and the highest reaches of heaven. They form a ladder of sorts, the seraphim on the top rung, clinging closest to their maker. Below them are the cherubim, the thrones and dominions, the virtues, powers, archangels, principalities and the plain angels, at the lowest rung, nearest to us. The hierarchy is divided into three choirs, each choir into three orders. All of these distinctions were made based on Christian scripture in the fifth century by a philosopher named Pseudo-Dionysius. I don’t know for sure that he got it right, that one man’s interpretation is in fact the reality, but I love order, I love lists and organized information. I love rules and responsibilities, and what his ranking provides me with is a breakdown of the spiritual realm that I can hold onto, grasp tangibly in my hands. Order in something that can so easily slip into chaos, the way we choke on infinitude.
Think of all creatures—spiritual and material—as two inverted triangles, their points overlapping in the middle. In the upper triangle are the ranks of angels, and in the lower triangle are humans and all organic creation, in a descending order from us at the point down to the smallest, most insignificant or microscopic organisms at the base. At the point of the upper triangle we find our guardians, the ones who protect and shield us. As the triangle widens, the ranks rise in both celestial importance and nearness to God, closeness to him in the courts and importance in duties. The point of intersection is humanity—both body and soul, material and immaterial, a collision of both realms that exist simultaneously in us.
The archangels and principalities make up the rest of the lowest choir, and their duties are largely centered around communication: delivering messages, announcing news. Gabriel, who appeared to Mary at the Annunciation, and to Joseph in a dream, is likely the most common or well-known archangel, or perhaps Michael, who cast Lucifer (also an angel, a seraph, actually) down from Heaven. The principalities have command over the lowest choir, like middle management of the spiritual realm. They are also responsible for watching over large groups—nations, countries, whole communities of people on earth.
In the next choir we find the powers, the warrior angels, who defend the cosmos and humanity from evil spirits. Even writing that sounds a little silly, or exaggerated, but belief in good and holy spiritual beings makes it easier to believe in their opponents. And it gets more mythical as we continue: the virtues are known for their control of the elements, of weather and nature. They’re also said to assist in miracles, altering our experience of reality in ways we wouldn’t expect or be able to explain through science.
I’ve seen them, miracles, as many people have. There was a girl I knew once who suffered from a degenerative nervous system disease, who hadn’t walked in years. I was with her when she prayed to stand and I was with her, watching, as her legs straightened and she stood, almost floating. There was a glow around her, a kind of luminosity that seemed to be rising off her skin. It sounds fantastical, I know that, and you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. But I saw it, hugged her while she stood, saw her jump and stay suspended in the air longer than she should have. The virtues, then, are said to be present in those moments.
Above them are the dominions, who keep the world in order: delivering justice swiftly to the poor and unconditional love to the marginalized, keeping the lower ranks of angels in order, showing mercy towards humanity. In the final choir, those at the top of the triangle and the highest reaches of heaven, are the thrones and cherubim, and of course at the highest, the seraphim, my favorite, which we’ve already discussed. Thrones are angels of humility and peace, who coordinate communication between the lower ranks and God, like couriers in a court. The cherubim, second-highest, are described as looking man-like (though their form, their essence, is purely spiritual, and the visual appearance they take on when they appear is just that, something they take on, like a layer of clothing), and their role in scripture is in Revelation, where they are said to be attendants to the End.
Up and down the ladder the celestial ranks move: completing tasks, serving, worshipping, protecting, healing, and inspiring. Motion for spiritual beings such as these has been a topic of debate for centuries, because of the way they take up space, or more accurately, consume it. When an angel is somewhere, that space becomes a part of the angel itself, subsumed within it. They don’t occupy space, they become it. Absorb it into their being. Instead of having a body that is in the way, bumping into others and making a scene, they simply become the space itself.
So much of my fascination here is centered around the body; both my own fraught relationship with mine and the mind-boggling notion that there are, or might be, beings that exist without them. My envy is for that kind of freedom, that lightness. But what’s ironic really, is that in Catholic Christology, embodiment—of both Christ himself and ourselves—is the highest gift. In fact, it’s the pinnacle of the faith. Jesus, fully man and fully God. Immaterial made material, infinite being contained, limitless power and divinity, crucified. Redemption, the Eucharist. His body taken into our own, not as a memorial or a reenactment but the real thing.
Transubstantiation, a shifting of form and accidents, bread and wine into body and blood, though no visible physical changes occur. True presence of the divine in the most everyday, commonplace elements. The Catholic faith presents us with a beautiful paradox.
St. Faustina, a twentieth century mystic who is most known for her visions of Jesus delivering divine mercy; in the famous painting, red and blue light stream like water from his chest, his arms extended and open. She wrote in her diary that “If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering.” Oh Faustina, the grass is always greener. But I think about her words, about the pitfalls of our human frames, tethered as we are to the ground and the dirt by our gangly limbs. How hard it is to imagine that envy, while acknowledging that there is goodness in the forms we inhabit. That their fallibility might be their strongest suit, or that the argument for it could be made.
The body presents itself for complication; I both loathe it and obsess over it. Whether or not it is good, looks good, feels good, does good. Whether it is healthy or strong or active. I think about the ill body, the troubled body, the fragile or wounded body, and wonder if it wouldn’t be better if we were freed from them entirely. It’s inescapable: even after death, we will return to them, and inhabit a beatified version of the forms we currently take, only without the eating and the drinking, without the shame. Perhaps I would have thrived in the Garden, before the Fall, before Eve, before the fig leaves and toiling labor and the dirt.
I’m no mystic, I’m just anxious, and something about these hovering creatures who hide their faces and bodies out of reverence seems so safe. I envy them, floating around the altar, praising in perpetuity the one who made them. How magnificent it must be to have a purpose so clearly defined.