Guardian angels and our responsibility to our children

A Reflection for the Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels

Find today’s readings here.

Growing up, I didn’t give a lot of thought to the idea of a guardian angel, at least one specifically assigned to me (and if there is one out there unlucky enough to have drawn my number, I have kept him busy).

I suppose the idea is intended to be comforting, but I can understand how some, myself among them, may feel a little put off about the overhanging presence of a heavenly spirit, privy to everything about us and every deed or thought we have ever had or experienced.

Guardian angels make a memorable cinematic appearance in Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire,” a beautiful film about longing and the risks and obligations of simply being human. It’s worth seeing if only for a short soliloquy about cigarettes and coffee and “so many good things” from the angelic Peter Falk. And everyone knows Clarence, the bumbling yet benevolent guardian angel who pulled George Bailey from an abyss of his own—and Uncle Billy’s—making. Is that what my guardian angel is like? And yours? Let’s hope so.

Today’s Scripture recounts one of the more memorable interactions between Jesus and the disciples. Among these jostling and envious men, each I imagine competing in their own way for a sign of the Lord’s favor above their peers, Jesus literally holds up a child. This child, kind and inquisitive, ready to trust and learn, is already closer to heaven than these young men, barnacled by adult experience, no doubt saddled with worldly cynicism and hardened by disappointment. Jesus urges them to restore the innocence and credulity of their childhoods so that they may remain open to the powerfully counter-cultural message of compassion and mercy he is trying to impart.

His gentle reproach is accompanied by a message of obligation and responsibility: “whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me…. See that you do not despise one of these little ones.”

Their guardians in heaven “always look upon the face of my heavenly Father,” keeping the eternal fate of their earthly charges before the attention of the Lord. And those little ones whose lives on this temporal plain are cut short by hunger, disease, neglect or conflict? The thousands of children we have all watched dying in Gaza and Sudan and hundreds of other killing fields of conflict around the world, the children whose lives are cut short by industry or resource extraction, surrendered to poverty: Were their guardian angels faulty somehow? Were they not up to the job?

No, the care and nurturing of children is a joint responsibility we adults of the world hold with their guardians in heaven and their Father above. We cannot despise one of these little ones either in the things we have done or in what we have failed to do to protect them, to see them well-fed and educated and delivered into their own adulthoods with every possible advantage we can render unto them.

A glance at any daily headline attests to how much and how often we have failed in fulfilling this divine obligation. We are called, however, to not give up and to carry on trying, lifting up all the little ones among us.

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