The Chaplet of Saint Michael and Our Spiritual Journey

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The Chaplet of Saint Michael the Archangel and Our Spiritual Journey: Meditation Class, A Mystic’s Journal, Entry July 29, 2006

Saturday, July 29

The first thing we discussed in class last Wednesday night, was the introduction to the prayer to each choir of angels: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of .... In other words, each prayer is asking St. Michael the Archangel and that particular choir of angels to intercede for us. This tells us that St. Michael and the choirs of angels 1.) are willing to intercede for us and 2.) we need their intercession, their help. For those of you who missed last week’s entry of A Mystic’s Journal, this prayer was given to humanity by Saint Michael the Archangel himself. The prayer in its entirety is given in that first entry, July 25 - 27, 2006. Aside from the vast rewards for saying this beautiful prayer, I remembered that Saint Bonaventure had written, in A Mind’s Journey to God, that our human journey towards mystical union followed the ascending hierarchies of the angelic choirs. I was therefore doubly interested in Saint Michael’s chaplet.

We decided that the best approach might be to briefly examine all the choirs, from the highest to the lowest. We began with the highest choir, the Seraphim: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Seraphim may the Lord make us worthy to burn with the fire of perfect charity. Amen. We discussed the term “charity”, and agreed that charity here referred to the Higher love, Divine love: the love that can only flow through us from the Divine Itself, i.e. God’s own Love and Compassion. This Divine love is not a personal emotion. Our small hearts cannot produce this Love and Compassion - it is first a Gift to us, from God. God’s own Love first fills and surrounds us. When our Hearts are infused with it, this Love and Compassion then builds within us, and naturally and effortlessly radiates outward to all other beings in the universe.

If we are fortunate enough to experience Mystical Union, then our own spiritual Heart begins to burn with this Higher love.

Saint Teresa of Avila says that this Gift of Love is God seeking Himself in the soul. Nate questioned St. Teresa’s statement: he said that it seemed strange that God would seek anything, which I considered an astute comment. I said that in my mind, St. Teresa here was more speaking from the personal position of an incarnated being: that God first felt above or surrounding us, and from that “distance” or “separation” was then seeking itself in the Trinity embedded in the soul - rather than God just giving the soul a Gift. It would be more like water naturally seeking itself, streams flowing into the ocean, or the ocean itself overflowing back into the streams that fed it ...

Make us worthy ... This told us that the Seraphim, the highest choir of angels, burned with this Divine Love. And that we cannot, through our own efforts, be made worthy of this state of being, this Gift.

It then occurred to us that if St. Michael and the seraphim made our Hearts worthy to burn with this Higher Love and Compassion - all the rest would fall into place. This burning Flame, in the Spiritual Heart, is the true goal of all our spiritual efforts. If that were achieved, with the help of St. Michael and this highest choir of angels - we would naturally turn away from sin, we would not be able to harm other beings or ourselves. Filled with that Divine Love, we would have no other needs, our deepest needs would already be met. When the Divine Flame burns within us, in the depths of the soul, God no longer feels outside of us. And when the Divine Flame burns continuously in the spiritual Heart, nothing in the physical universe can compare. There would be no cause to break the Commandments: we would naturally put God first in our lives and in our thoughts and in our heart, and our love for our neighbor would be automatic. And Christ Himself tells us that all the other Commandments flow from those first two ...

Nate said this idea that the Higher Charity would bring a natural love for ones neighbor was a comforting thought. That so many people were trying to love their neighbor, but as soon as that person did or said something to annoy us, the love flew out the window. It was almost as though the more you tried, the harder it was to love others unconditionally. That brought us back to the idea that we must be standing in the Higher Love, or Charity, in order to unconditionally love others - it is only then that we are able to love others, no matter what they said or do, no matter what their behavior or personality is. Until we can stand in the Higher Love, and the perspective that can bring - personal love can easily flip to its opposite: anger or even hatred. When standing in this Higher Love, we see that all beings are struggling, that all beings are trying to find happiness. And this is when we reach the Higher Compassion for all beings, purely because they are incarnate and have forgotten their true Selves, i.e. the soul.

We then discussed the Cherubim: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Cherubim may the Lord grant us the grace to leave the ways of sin and run in the paths of Christian perfection. Amen.

Perfection, in St. Teresa’s schema, is the highest possible human state: the third and highest portion of the third stage of the interior life. Perfection is the attainment of the saints. Here, St. Michael is telling us that the perfection of the saints can only be achieved by grace. And that this perfection means leaving the ways of sin behind us.

We then examined the 3rd choir of angels, the Thrones: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Thrones may the Lord infuse into our hearts a true and sincere spirit of humility. Amen. Both obedience and humility are essential to the spiritual path, and the vow of obedience is central to the various monastic orders. Obedience and humility are also related in meaning, obedience being a form of humility. We discussed this at some length, deciding that only by true humility could we successfully avoid the traps of the ego encountered on the spiritual path, in our lives. A new meditation student, who had joined us for the first time, was not clear on what we meant by ‘ego’. Nate explained that the ego here meant all our thoughts and perceptions and emotions, including the thought that we are the physical body. I added that if we identified with our thoughts and perceptions and emotions, if we thought ourselves the physical body and the personality - we would entrap ourselves, imprison ourselves. We would forget that we were the soul, and the ego would separate us from God.

Here, Saint Michael, for the first time, uses the term infused. The first prayer had said: make us worthy, and the second: grant us the grace. We decided to study all the choirs before trying to understand these phrases, to see if we could discover a pattern of deeper meaning in their placement in the overall spiritual journey from lowest to highest attainment.

We noticed that the 4th, 5th and 6th choirs all seemed to concern themselves with falling into temptation, evil, the senses and our unruly passions. The 4th choir: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Dominions may the Lord give us grace to govern our senses and overcome any unruly passions. The 5th choir: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Powers may the Lord protect our souls against the snares and temptations of the devil. The 6th choir: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Virtues may the Lord preserve us from evil and falling into temptation.

We decided that if these choirs and stages reflected the steps of the spiritual journey, it would be worthwhile to better understand the differences between them. To try to comprehend, we started with the lowest choir first, the 6th choir. It seemed that in the two lower, or earlier steps of our journey, God protected us. In the highest, the 4th choir, we ourselves could come to govern our senses and overcome any unruly passions, through the intercession of St. Michael the Archangel, the choir of Dominions and the grace of God.

The next choir of angels, the 3rd choir, again mentioned the infusion of a virtue: By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Principalities may God fill our souls with a true spirit of obedience.

I began to see a pattern and said that by next week I would draw up a diagram and give it out in class. But first we would study the remaining choirs, the Archangels and angels. It had also occurred to me that within this schema of the angelic choirs, obedience and humility were somehow connected to the two Dark Nights: the Dark Night of the Soul and the Dark Night of the Spirit.