The angels we need

Is it possible that angels are real and come to us every time we need them?

Christian Science teaches that they are and do. Angels, as explained in Christian Science, are spiritual intuitions coming from our divine source, God, right to each one of us.

They lift us out of status-quo thinking – where we’re subject to sin, sickness, and other forms of inharmony – and into a growing recognition of the present reality and permanence of God-bestowed freedom, health, and holiness. And they’re coming to us continuously.

For Christ Jesus, angels were constant companions. In his darkest hour, refusing to flee from or humanly fight his enemies, he turned fully to God and His angels for direction and strength, assuring his disciples, “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). A verse in the “Christian Science Hymnal,” speaking of God, promises that He knows the angels we need, “And sends them to your side, / To comfort, guard and guide” (Violet Hay, Hymn 9).

So how can we feel this presence? We may not recognize the angels we need precisely because often they’re not the angels we think we want.

Divine inspiration comes unbidden and from a source beyond the human mind. It insists that we change the way we think. It demands that we stop focusing on self and lifts our eyes to spiritual realities. At times, this may cause us to wrestle. But we can find encouragement for this wrestling from the biblical character Jacob (see Genesis 32:24-30).

Returning home after a long absence, Jacob feared that his brother, Esau, intended to kill him because Jacob had cheated Esau. As Jacob prayed for guidance, he had a visitor. Turns out, the visitor was an angel, though Jacob doesn’t seem to have realized that at first.

That’s not surprising – the angel didn’t act very “angelically”: According to the Bible, it kept him up all night wrestling, dislocating his hip in the process.

Jacob wasn’t actually physically assaulted by an angel. The account is a metaphor for Jacob’s mental struggle. Jacob had cheated Esau because he had believed that cheating was the way to get what he thought he needed. Since then, he had been growing away from sin and materialism. The angel knocked the remains of that false foundation out from under him and he found his true, sinless identity as God’s loved child.

As the Christian Science textbook puts it, “Jacob was alone, wrestling with error, – struggling with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence as existent in matter with its false pleasures and pains, – when an angel, a message from Truth and Love, appeared to him and smote the sinew, or strength, of his error, till he saw its unreality; and Truth, being thereby understood, gave him spiritual strength in this Peniel of divine Science” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 308).

We may sometimes find ourselves wrestling in similar fashion – arguing for anger and resentment while an angel thought is demanding that we love. Or indulging sin when an angel message is insisting that we be pure. Or maybe expecting evil to overcome good when Love’s angels are commanding us to be unafraid of evil because of the infinitude of good.

The angel is always on the side of our true being, the pure and good selfhood created by divine Love, God. And it always has the power needed to counteract any evil, sensuality, or mortality that would hide our true nature and our present health and harmony.

Once, I was hiking alone, fuming over a conflict with a friend. I stumbled over a rock, twisting my ankle badly. I would have liked an angel to not only get me home but change my friend’s mind as well! But instead, as I prayed about my ankle, a thought from divine Love healed my anger.

I saw that it was impossible for my friend and me to ever be in conflict, because both of us are forever maintained as innocent, loving expressions of Love. Rejoicing in the mental release, I stood up without thinking of my ankle and found that the injury had vanished.

The angels we need comfort us by assuring us of our true identity. They guard us by revealing what in our consciousness needs to be corrected and showing us that we have the God-given strength, understanding, and wisdom to do it. And they guide us by shining the bright light of Love on the path of true freedom and joy. If we’re willing to entertain them, we might just find that they’re also the very angels we really wanted.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Jan. 15, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.