29 September 1989
Asuncion, Paraguay

My dear Sisters,

Today the Church is honoring three principal angelic messengers of God. These messengers find a place in the litany of God's Saints, even though they do not have bodies like ours nor have to live their lives on this planet. We may find it difficult to imagine other beings that have not bodies like ours. But we should not allow our difficulties, or imagining other creatures that are totally different from us, to put limits on what God is able to create. The trouble is that we humans are so much centered on ourselves and on our world that we find it difficult to think about others, and particularly to think that God could create creatures that have intellects more powerful than ours, but that do not have flesh and blood and bones like ours. There are people who deny the existence of angels, but who at the same time like to think that there may be life on other planets.

When we think about angels in our lives, we can think of them as special messengers of God to us. In the very early Church there was such a devotion to angels that St. Paul had to remind Christians that the principal messenger of God to mankind was Jesus Christ. That remains true now and will always be so. It is Jesus Christ by His words, His life, His sufferings and His death, Who has shown us how God wants us to live on this earth. When St. Vincent said that "nothing pleases me except in Jesus Christ," he was expressing a profound truth. It is good to ask ourselves often, "Could Jesus Christ share this thought, this remark, this experience with me?" He is the first and principal messenger of God to each of us.

The existence of angels can remind us that God sends His messages to us in all sorts of ways. We will never know in this life how many times and on how many occasions God sent His angels to us with messages. Besides angels, God uses many other ways of communicating with us. Perhaps that was a reason that made St. Vincent have such devotion to Divine Providence. St. Vincent was not a superstitious man, but he trained himself to be sensitive to the signs by which God transmitted His messages to him.

St. Vincent's insistence on the importance of being faithful to our Rule came from his devotion to the Providence of God, for he saw the Rule of the Community as a clear message from God. He saw the events of his life also as so many messages from God, which he accepted with the reverence one would show to an angel. In the cries of the poor he heard the voice of the suffering Christ, and he interpreted the message as an appeal for help. When he saw the Sisters going out to help the poor, he thought of the angels: "Ah! my God, how many angels are now busily occupied in counting your footsteps! Those you have taken in coming here have already been counted and so, too, will those you are about to take, because a Saint tells us that `All the steps taken by the servant of Jesus Christ for His love are reckoned unto them.'" (Conf. Eng. ed., 25 Dec. 1648, p. 413).

Yes, we are receiving messages from God at all times and in a diversity of ways. May we not be so busy and so distracted that we do not hear them. Above all, may we ourselves become in turn good messengers of God to our communities and to the poor. May we be messengers of faith and hope and love. May we be messengers of God, not only in words, but in deeds also. May we be messengers who bring light and encouragement into the lives of all whom we meet. In one word, may we be Christ to others, for He is "full of grace and of truth." (Jn 1:14).