Article December 9, 1996 Issue

Christmas angels

Barbara-Jean Stinson

"All night, all day, Angels watching over me, my Lord." I still remember how reassured I always felt, as a youngster, by the idea in this old spiritual that angels were watching over me. At that time, little did I really appreciate the significance of those watchful angels.

Years later my husband and I were in New York City near Christmas, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art we saw the Angel Tree. At the wooden base of this magnificent tree is placed a colorful collection of eighteenth-century Neapolitan creche figures displaying a panoramic view of the nativity scene. The tree itself is covered with miniature angels tenderly looking down at the manger scene. The realization dawned on me that the invisible angels of God's love are always with us, "hovering" over us all.

How uplifted I felt as we moved through that huge city filled with humanity's longings and desires that angels were watching over us. Yet these angels are not winged figures. They are "God's thoughts passing to man...," as Science and Health them. The description of angels continues, "...spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality" (p. 581). Angels are with us because they are spiritual intuitions forever in our God-bestowed consciousness. They are our very thoughts, God alone gives us all true thought. We read in the Bible, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end" (Jer. 29:11).

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