St Michael and All Angels - 29th September 2025
Michaelmas is a strange feast – all the other saints whom we celebrate were flesh and blood people but St Michael and the angels belong to the unseen realm of spiritual beings. The stories about them have arisen in response to intuitions that there are beings who exist in a realm other than our physical realm and whose actions affect our lives on earth. They remind us that we are caught up in a cosmic struggle between good and evil, and St Michael symbolises in the heavenly realm the victory that Jesus Christ won over evil through his death on the cross here on earth.
We have only to look out on the destructive forces at work in so many places to know that there are powers at work that are beyond the individuals involved. Malign influences can take people over and hook into their deep fears and insecurities. If they end up in some form of leadership then the consequences can be dire, especially when it is leadership of a whole nation. Our monastic lives work this through on the small stage of our own communities but the work we do to counter these malign forces in our hearts flows out into the wider energy field of humanity and I believe changes things for the better. It is the power of prayer, of clearing the channels in our own hearts to allow the loving energies of God to flow into the world.
It is interesting that this celebration is at a time of year when the days are shortening most rapidly as we pass the equinox. Darkness is becoming more apparent and in the days before electric light it would be a time when imaginations would turn towards what was lurking in the dark. Now we can simply turn on the lights and dismiss the darkness. But we choose to pray Compline in subdued light, acknowledging the importance of encountering the darkness in the way that our ancestors did. The literal darkness not only opens us to perceive unseen forces ‘out there’ but also the unsavoury parts of ourselves. We must resist the temptation to fill the darkness and emptiness with distractions, but instead stay open and receptive to God’s work in our hearts.
Although we may struggle with the idea of a literal St Michael with his angels flying around somewhere in the ether it is important that we not lose sight of the spiritual realm as a kind of fourth dimension to our lives. There is more to this world that just the things we can see and touch. We modern people have been educated to demythologise things and find it hard to incorporate the spiritual world into our thinking. But mystics through the ages have intuited that there is more to this world than what we can see, hear and touch with our physical senses. It is interesting that in recent years physics and astronomy have been revealing a world much more akin to that of the mystics than of Newtonian physics. Everything is energy they say, and matter is constantly flipping in and out of being in a vast sea of energy. Is this energy field actually the word of God, holding all things in being? Our own bodies can resonate with this energy field and sense the interconnectedness of all things, which is surely the unity of all things in Christ?
Places have particular energies, an atmosphere that we can sense. We are privileged to live in a place with a very powerful atmosphere, a peace that so many people can sense the moment they walk through the gate. We’ve had a lot of people through the gates recently with the Heritage Open Day and the Music@Malling concerts. How often people will comment on the peace that they feel here, and of the sense of God’s presence, or simply that transcendent spiritual realities can be felt here even if they are not able to name God.
I wonder whether the abbey was built here because this was already a ‘thin place’ where the veil between the material and spiritual was particularly thin? Or has this become a thin place because of the dedication of generations of nuns to a life of prayer? Whichever it is, we have an important work to do in sustaining this atmosphere. It is interesting how various people involved in this week’s concerts asked me about how we lived and were surprised that we still sing a seven-fold office. I imagine they have been reading up on Hildegard1 and the lives of medieval nuns and now here they were confronted with modern women doing the same thing!
Our regular singing of God’s praises and the chanting of psalms keeps the channels of our hearts open to God’s presence and enables the divine energies to flow out into the world. It is the particular role we are called to play on earth in the cosmic warfare symbolised by St Michael and his angels. Our commitment to praying the monastic Offices is our gift to the wider church and to the world. Along with other monastics and all who follow a serious path of prayer we hold the hope that in the end evil will not triumph and Christ will be all in all.
Mother Anne - 29th September 2025
1The concerts had Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval Benedictine abbess, as their theme and featured her own compositions and music specially composed for these concerts that took inspiration from her.