There are many things that our catechism teaches us about God and life. The book of Genesis makes no qualms about creation and its origins, and that it was God who made them and gives them life to thrive and reproduce. Of course, the apex of his creation happened when out of soil he made Adam, and from his side, Eve.
The compendium called Catechism of the Catholic Church specifically mentions angels in the life of the Church, stating that the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels. We are also taught that the angels, and that we celebrate the memory of certain angels more particularly, especially St Michael, St Gabriel, St Raphael, and the guardian angels.
It also teaches us that beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life. So, this means that from the moment of our birth or baptism, God dispatches a particular angel to guard us on our journey as we live our lives to glorify God.
Our belief in angels guarding us in life can be understood by some as God’s real presence in our life. Do I have personal experiences of angels who have helped me in my dark and dreary moments? I am blessed to be able to say that I do, and am proud of those moments as they have strengthened my spiritual life in ways beyond my reckoning.
I was enlisted to serve my National Service after my ‘A’ levels, and started out like all recruits, with Basic Military Training, otherwise known as BMT. One goes through all kinds of physical exercises in the first three months of NS, and one of them is the SOC or Standard Obstacles Course. One of the exercises in this SOC is where we have to climb up a balance beam and at the end of it, jump off the beam and land on our feet, squatting. It was at this landing part where I found that I couldn’t stand up, and had to sent by speed boat to the main land so that I could go to the hospital to get treated by a doctor. There were all sorts of tests I had to go through, and after several months, it was ascertained that I suffered from Spondylolisthesis, which is a condition involving spine instability, where the vertebrae move more than they should. Finally, because of this incident, my fitness grading was immediately moved from A down to E permanently, and I had to undergo physiotherapy and be supported by wearing a brace, much like a corset beneath my army fatigue.
Then, as most of my readers would know, in 2013, I was diagnosed with a very severe cancer of the blood, called leukemia. It was life-threatening, and the only way I could find some hope was to be able to get a donor of stem cells from someone who matched my human leukocyte antigen, otherwise known as HLA. The search had to go out to the world, as no matching donor was found locally. The journey was arduous, and after about 7 tries, one was finally found, and Peter Mui, a truly kind and generous donor, turned out to be from of all places, half the world away in Chicago, Illinois. Without a matching donor’s providence of his precious stem cells, I would not have had the chance of remission. Needless to say, the donation worked wonders, and I am now in remission from a very rare strain of leukemia, and I am daily so grateful to Peter for his selfless act of reaching out to save a total stranger in Singapore. And the most interesting thing about him is that the day that he signed up to be a bone marrow donor was the day right after I was ordained a priest here in Singapore. To show my gratitude to Peter, I gave him a watch that my grandfather gave me, and asked an engraver to etch some words at the back of the watch face. It reads “Time given for the gift of time.” Peter wears this watch daily now.
Lastly, most of you will know that in May 2021, I was exercising outside of the parish in the early hours of the morning when I was hit by a van, and it sent me careening onto the road, and my head was injured, leaving a cracked skull, needing a prosthesis to cover my brain. The recovery from that accident was arduous, and I am still suffering some degree of weakness as I cannot now go for long runs.
In all of these three moments of being close to death, I was never fearful, but full of hope. I was glad to be suffering from leukemia, so that I can now tell cancer patients receiving chemotherapy that I know what they are going through because I have had a similar experience myself. In those moments of afflictions, I was always cognizant of God’s presence in my life, and that I was guarded by his Divine presence.
Angels do not leave us in our lives. We may not be able to detect their presence, but that doesn’t mean that they are absent from us. Angels help us to live our lives in ways that glorify our Beloved Creator, God. We should show our gratitude to these angels by constantly thanking God for them in our lives, that we have them as our guiding lights to show us to path that leads us to our heavenly home after our time on this earth ends.
As Ronald Rolheiser once said, God is closer to us that we are to ourselves, and God’s solicitous love, guidance and protection are with us always. God is indeed omnipresent. Praise be to God.
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