JunoMagic ~ satismagic

Bouguereau, William: Cupid and Psyche as Children. 1889
Oil on canvas, 47 x 27 7/8 inches (119.5 x 71 cm), Private collection.

The Angel of Gratitude

by Anselm Grün

Gratitude has become scarce today. People make immense demands. They have the impression they are missing out on something. Therefore they need more and more. They have become insatiable and because of that cannot enjoy anything any more. Pascal Bruckner, a French philosopher, describes the human being of today as a big baby making immense demands of society. This “baby” can never get enough. And always the others are to blame if it is not well. Because they don’t give it what it absolutely needs for living.

The Angel of Gratitude wants to introduce a new flavour to your life. He wants to teach you to see everything with new eyes, with eyes of gratitude. Then you take a grateful look at the new morning, that you get up feeling healthy, that you can watch the sunrise. You are grateful for every breath flowing through you. You are grateful for the good gifts of nature you can enjoy for your breakfast. You live more consciously. Gratitude opens up your heart and makes you glad. You are no longer fixated on things that could annoy you. You don’t begin each morning being vexed about the horrible weather. You are not frustrated at once if the milk boils over. There are people who make their lives miserable because they only see the bad things. And the more bad things they see, the more this outlook is asserted by their experience. They attract small mishaps by their negative outlook. To thank is derived from to think. The Angel of Gratitude wants to teach you to think correctly and consciously. If you start thinking, then you will thankfully realize what has been given to you in your life. You will be grateful for your parents who have given you life. You will not only be grateful for the positive roots you have in your parents, but for the wounds and hurts they have dealt you. Because with that, too, they have shaped you as the person you are. Without those wounds you maybe might have become sated and insensitive. You would overlook the person next to you and their suffering. The Angel of Gratitude wants to open your eyes for seeing that throughout your life an angel of God has been with you, that a guardian angel has kept you from many a harm, that your guardian angel has turned even hurt and pain into a precious treasure for you.

The Angel of Gratitude presents you with new eyes to consciously take in the beauty of Creation and to enjoy it gratefully, the beauty of meadows and woods, the beauty of mountains and valleys, the beauty of of the sea, of rivers and lakes. You will admire the grace of a gazelle and the charm of a deer. You will no longer wander unknowingly through Creation, but thinking and thanking. You will perceive that in Creation you are touched by a loving God Who wants to show you how lavishly He cares for you.

Who looks at her life with gratitude will accept what happens to her. She will stop rebelling against herself and her fate. She will realize that every day an angel enters our lives to keep us from harm and to offer his loving and healing presence. Try to live through the next week with the Angel of Gratitude. You will see how everything looks differently, how your life takes on a new flavour.

You can also ask your Angel of Gratitude to teach you to be grateful for people you live with. Often we pray only for people who are important to us, if we want to change them or if we wish that God helps them, heals them and comforts them. Sometimes our prayer for the others is rather a prayer against them. We want them to become the way we would like them to be. If we are grateful for another person, we accept them unconditionally. They don’t have to change. They are precious just the way they are. Often people notice if we are grateful for them. Because being grateful has an effect of positive acceptance, of feeling accepted unconditionally. An American clergyman tells of a couple who had prayed for years for the father of the wife to get away from alcohol. And they asked many prayer groups for intercessions. But everything was useless. Only when they found the courage to thank the father for being the way he is they made it possible for him to change. Because he did no longer feel the unvoiced demand to change, he could change. Because he felt accepted unconditionally, he did not need the alcohol any more. Therefore ask your Angel of Gratitude for the miracle of people feeling loved unconditionally because of your gratitude, so that they may become whole in this love.

© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr, 1997;
translation by JunoMagic

Song for December 3:

(Click pic!)

“Die tanzenden Seraphim”
(“The Dancing Seraphim”)
by Hans-Jürgen Hufeisen,
album “Das Engelkonzert” (“Concert of Angels”)

TROGER, Paul: Christ Comforted by an Angel, c. 1730;
Oil on canvas; Museo Diocesano, Bressanone

The Angel of Self-Surrender

by Anselm Grün

To surrender yourself sounds very passive and resigned at first. Who is not able to actively shape their lives and cope, has to surrender to fate. They give up. But that is certainly not the attitude the Angel of Self-Surrender wants to lead us to. He intends something else. Self-surrender means getting into something first. Who “gets into” life accepts life and its motions. They aren’t keeping anything back. They don’t freeze up, but surrender themselves to the flow of life. That way something can flower in them and become alive.

Self-surrender is the opposite of clinging. Many people cling to their self-images, others cling to their habits or their possessions, their fame, their success. The Angel of Self-Surrender wants to introduce you to the art of letting go of yourself, of surrendering to life, and ultimately, to God. I can only surrender myself if I have faith that I will not be treated arbitrarily, but that there is an angel who means well. Who surrenders to their angel will be free of the unnecessary worries that many agonise about today. They will be free from obsessing about themselves and their health, about adequate appreciation of themselves and their success. The attitude of self-surrender encompasses not only faith, but it also holds great inner freedom. If I don’t have to do everything on my own, if I surrender myself to God, trusting that He will take care of me, then I will be free of being self-directed and self-centred.

The Angel of Self-Surrender also wants to introduce you to having the faith to surrender yourself to another person. Many friendships and marriages shatter today, because everyone is only concerned with themselves, because everyone is afraid of surrendering themselves to someone else. It is the fear of losing their freedom, that the other person could do with us what they would, that we would be at the mercy of their arbitrariness and malice. But without self-surrender no relationship can work. Because then everyone will only look fearfully to keeping their emotions in check, as well as their words and their actions, and in any case not to give themselves to the other person. But that way no trust can grow, that way the other person cannot show that they would treat us well, that they would not abuse our trust. Self-surrender does not mean to give myself up. I can only surrender myself if I am in touch with myself, if I know who I am. But at the same time self-surrender always implies risk. I leave the safety granted by always clinging to myself when I surrender myself to someone else. This can only work if I know that the other person is not a devil, but an angel who will pick me up and carry me, who means well.

I know many people who think they have to do everything themselves. That they have to work hard on their personalities to get on and to fulfil their dreams. They try to do what’s good. But one day they reach a point where they realize that they cannot get everything they want. They can have any number of good intentions. They will never be able to live up to them. Again and again they are confronted with their own inadequate reality. I have to open my arms and surrender to the angel sent to me by God so that my life may succeed. That is not an attitude of resignation, but of freedom. I feel that I don’t have to achieve everything what I want, because this is in the end only an expression of my personal ambition, but not the will of God. When I sit down in meditation before God and I turn to Him with my empty hands, then I feel this freedom of self-surrender. I know that He holds me, that I may be in His good hands just the way I am. This is what lies at the core of the Christian faith: the experience of freedom, the freedom Christ has prepared for us.

(Gal 5, 1: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”)

© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr, 1997;
translation by JunoMagic

Song for December 2:

(Click pic!)

“Windgesang aus dem Westen”
(“Windsong out of the West”)
by Hans-Jürgen Hufeisen,
album “Pegasus – Melodien der Vier Winde” (“Pegasus –  Melodies of the Four Winds”)

LOTTO, Lorenzo: Angel Annunciating, 1527;
Oil on wood, 75 x 55 cm; Church of Sts Vincent and Alexander, Ponteranica

The Angel of Leaving

by Anselm Grün

There is a deeply rooted longing in men to make themselves comfortably at home and stay forever where they have once felt safe and snug. Where a person is happy, there she wants to settle down and remain forever. But at the same time she knows that she cannot settle down in this world forever. She has to leave again and again. She has to make a new start again and again. She has to break camp, a camp she built and made cosy, and continue on her way. Leaving demands severance. Old ties have to be severed. Things cannot continue the way they are. I cannot stay forever where I am at the moment.

While we are on our way, we need to break camp again and again to depart for new destinations. Every departure is frightening at first. Because what has grown old in our lives, what is familiar, has to be left behind. And when all this is left behind, I don’t know what to expect yet. The unknown provokes a sense of fear. But at the same time departure holds a promise, the promise of something new that has never been there before, that has never been seen before. If you don’t move on, your life will grow stale. What cannot change, grows old and stuffy. New ways of life want to open up inside us. But they can do that only, if we relinquish old patterns.

We want to settle down where something reaches out to us and touches our hearts. The disciples would have liked best to build three huts on mount Tabor and remain there forever in the joyful experience of transfiguration. But Jesus is not responsive to that desire. For already in the next moment the light of Tabor is extinguished by a dark cloud. They cannot hold on to that experience, they have to move on, they have to take the path down into the valley. There they will miss the clarity found on the mountain. Every deep religious experience wants to seduce us into settling down with it, into clinging to something we cannot hold on to. God cannot be kept like that. Most of all, He is the God of Exodus, of departure, the God Who always exhorts us to move on. To Moses He says: “Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.” (Ex 14, 15). The Israelites are afraid of moving on. They feel oppressed and unfree in Egypt. But they have come to terms with foreign rule. At least their stew pots are full. They want to move on, but at the same time they are afraid of departure. This is the ambivalence we experience ourselves again and again. We are not content with the lives we lead. But at the same time we are afraid of moving on, of leaving the familiar behind and of daring to make a change, inside and outside. But we will experience life only if we are ready to move on, again and again. For this, we need – like the Israelites – an Angel who gives us courage for our leaving, who extends his staff to ward off the Red Sea of our fears, so we can walk full of confidence through the tides of life.

Especially today the Angel of Leaving faces many difficulties. The prevailing mood of our time is not marked by courage for new beginnings like the 1960ies, when first the Council in the Catholic church, and then the student movements for all of society, brought about a mood of change and movement. Today the prevailing mood is one of resignation, of self-pity, of depression. One tends to feel sorry for oneself, because everything is so difficult nowadays and there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.

Therefore we need the Angel of Leaving very much today, to give us hope for our time, to allow us to move on to new shores, to help us take the chance of a new beginning so that new possibilities of cooperation, a new way of treating Creation and a new way of thinking in politics and economy may blossom.

And this also means that you have to depart from fixed perceptions and rigid ideas. To burst open inner blockades, to open up closeness, to depart from old habits and entrenched structures: all of this enables us to move on to new ways of life and new periods of life.

You will hesitate often, because you don’t know where your way may lead you. Then the Angel of Leaving may be at your side and may provide you with guidance for your journey:

“For Angels rent the House next ours,
       Wherever we remove–"

(Emily Dickinson)

© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr, 1997;
translation by JunoMagic
 

Song for December 1:

(Click pic!)

"Mein Geschenk für Dich"
("My Gift for You")
by Hans-Jürgen Hufeisen,
album "Gold, Weihrauch und Flöte" ("Gold, Incense and Flute")