Someone to Walk With Us

Guardian angels, the care of God, and the people we cannot always be beside

When I was a teenager, I sometimes babysat my little cousins. As part of their bedtime ritual, they had an angel doll, a sort of Cabbage Patch adjacent heavenly being. We’d press its hands together, and it would pray:

“As I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
Guide and guard me through the night,
And wake me with the morning’s light.
Amen.”

It’s funny how some things stay with you. I can’t remember what I had for lunch, but all these years later, I can still remember the words coming out of that little doll, including its gentler revision of the familiar bedtime prayer.

At the time, I was just a teenager putting my cousins to bed. I doubt I was giving much thought to the theology of angelic guardianship. At those same babysitting sessions, the kids also liked to play a game they imagined up called “Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the Giant Mushroom”… we had fun, but Aquinas we were not.

Anywho.

Looking back, there is something rather beautiful about that small bedtime ritual. Before falling asleep, they heard a prayer asking God to keep them safe through the hours when they could do nothing to look after themselves. I like to think my guardian angel was looking in on them too, while I watched their dad’s Star Trek tapes in the other room.

On occasion, I still say that little prayer before I go to sleep.

As we grow older and life makes us a little more cautious, we learn to lock the doors, check the stove, and make sure our phone is charging. We also learn how much lies beyond our control.

Back then, I could check on my little cousins simply by walking into the next room. I just had to dodge their cat, Muffin, who hated me with the fire of a thousand suns. But as we grow older, we discover how often the people we love are beyond that easy reach. The children grow up. Their lives take them elsewhere. We still want to keep them safe, even when we can no longer look in on them before turning out the light.

“Guide and guard me through the night.”

There is room for a whole adult life in those words.

Today, the Church celebrates the Holy Guardian Angels. After yesterday’s journey through Scripture and the strange, beautiful world of angels, I’d like to spend a little more time with this particular expression of God’s care: the belief that we have heavenly companions who help us along the road toward Him.

And perhaps that little doll offers us a place to begin.

“Their angels…”

When Jesus speaks about the angels who watch over His “little ones,” He does so in the middle of a conversation about how we treat people.

That is worth lingering over.

Matthew 18 begins with the disciples asking who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus calls a child into their midst. As the teaching unfolds, He speaks about humility, welcoming children, and the terrible seriousness of leading the little ones who believe in Him into sin.

Then Jesus warns against despising these little ones, adding this extraordinary explanation:

“…for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 18:10, RSV2CE (excerpt)

The people His disciples might be tempted to overlook have heavenly representatives in the presence of God. Imagine remembering that before deciding someone is beneath your attention.

We often encounter this passage through pictures of an angel guiding two small children across a precarious bridge. There is something lovely in that image. But Jesus’ words also ask something of the adults looking at it. How do we regard the vulnerable? Whose needs do we dismiss? What care do we owe someone whose importance heaven already recognizes?

Guardian angels belong within that larger understanding of human dignity.

The Psalms give us another familiar foundation. Psalm 91 describes God commanding His angels to guard the person who seeks refuge in Him. It is a beautiful expression of trust, filled with images of shelter, protection, and deliverance.

And there is a fascinating detail we should remember when reading it: the devil quotes its promise of angelic protection to Jesus.

During the temptation in the wilderness, he urges Jesus to throw Himself from the Temple. Surely the angels will catch Him. Surely God will prove His care.

Jesus refuses. He answers that we must not put God to the test.

So Scripture itself teaches us how carefully we should receive this promise. We can entrust ourselves to God without demanding that He arrange a spectacular rescue to demonstrate His love. We can pray for protection while exercising the judgment and responsibility He has given us.

Locking the front door remains an entirely respectable spiritual practice.

The Letter to the Hebrews adds another dimension. In Hebrews 1:14, angels are described as spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation. Their ministry belongs to God’s work of bringing us into life with Him. That gives the word guardian a depth we might miss if we think only about narrowly avoided accidents.

There is a whole person to care for. A life to accompany. A soul learning, sometimes with considerable difficulty, how to love.

These passages give the Church the foundations for its teaching about guardian angels. They leave many of our curious questions unanswered. The fuller understanding of a guardian assigned to each person develops through centuries of Christian reflection on Scripture and God’s providence.

And that brings us back to Aquinas, who, unlike my cousins and me, did give the matter rather serious thought.

What is a guardian angel guarding us toward?

In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas devotes an entire question to the guardianship of angels. He asks whether each person has a guardian, when that guardianship begins, and whether an angel ever abandons the person entrusted to its care.

These are recognizable questions. Beneath the medieval language, we can hear something very personal: Is someone looking after me? Does that care continue when I make a mess of things?

For Aquinas, angelic guardianship belongs within God’s providence, His loving care for creation and its journey toward the good. And that care reaches each of us personally. Thomas argues that each human being has an angel appointed to guard them.

I find something deeply moving about the particularity of that claim. So often we talk about God loving humanity in such broad terms that the individual person almost disappears into the crowd. Aquinas asks us to consider divine care attending to a particular life, including its uncertainty, weakness, and capacity for holiness.

Your life, for instance.

He also gives us a richer understanding of what that care involves. Angels help illuminate our understanding and encourage us toward good choices. Their guardianship concerns the people we are becoming, as well as the dangers we hope to escape.

And here Thomas makes an important distinction: an angel can help us recognize a good and encourage us to pursue it, but cannot force our will to choose it.

Which may explain why having a guardian angel has never relieved any of us of the responsibility to think before opening our mouths.

We remain free. We can receive help, resist it, or carry on insisting that our spectacularly questionable idea is going to work out beautifully. Angelic companionship leaves us with the work of learning to love, apologize, exercise judgment, and begin again.

Thomas even observes that someone helped by an angel need not recognize where that help came from. We don’t have to identify the heavenly origin of every good thought. We can attend to the good itself and respond.

But what about the times when something terrible happens?

Aquinas explicitly allows that a guardian angel’s continuing care does not prevent every trouble. His account leaves room for suffering within a life that remains accompanied. We should be humble about applying that teaching to someone else’s pain. It gives us no basis for explaining why a particular person was injured, became ill, or died, and certainly no reason to suggest they failed to pray properly.

What it does offer is a way to understand guardianship that reaches through the whole of life, including the parts we would never have chosen.

The destination of that care is life with God. Our guardian angel’s work belongs to His desire that we grow in goodness and come to share His joy.

That gives us a rather beautiful question to carry into prayer: How might I become more willing to receive the help God gives?

Learning to love what the angels love

Writing centuries before Aquinas, Saint Augustine offers another way to understand our companionship with the angels.

In The City of God, he describes the holy angels as loving us and desiring that we share their happiness in God. They want us to worship the One they worship, to find our joy in the One who gives them theirs.

I find that a lovely way to think about a guardian angel: a companion who already knows the joy toward which we are traveling, and wants to help us arrive.

Augustine also explains that our earthly, bodily lives do not prevent us from having fellowship with these heavenly beings. We draw closer to them through a shared love of God and a growing agreement in what we desire.

That gives angelic devotion a very practical direction.

We can ask for help becoming more patient with someone who tries us. We can ask for clearer judgment when resentment makes a bad decision look exceptionally satisfying. We can ask for courage to tell the truth, humility to accept correction, or the generosity to notice someone whose loneliness has become easy to overlook.

Those are things we can bring into our relationship with our guardian angel. They belong to the work of becoming more like Jesus.

And they give us a way to reflect on how that devotion is shaping us. Are we becoming more attentive to God? More willing to forgive? More capable of receiving love and offering it?

There is room here for affection, gratitude, and a simple daily greeting to the companion entrusted with our care. Augustine helps us understand where that friendship leads: toward the God whose love we share.

Centuries later, Padre Pio would live that friendship with a familiarity that still makes people smile, and sometimes raises an eyebrow.

“Send me your guardian angel.”

Padre Pio’s relationship with his guardian angel had the familiarity of a friendship that had lasted a lifetime. In the accounts preserved by those around him, angels arrive carrying the concerns of people far away, and Pio responds with prayer.

His invitation was wonderfully direct: “Send me your guardian angel.”

Fr. Alessio Parente, who helped care for Pio in his later years, collected accounts of this devotion in a book bearing those very words as its title. One concerns an English spiritual son of Pio’s, Cecil Humphrey-Smith, who was seriously injured in a car accident in Italy.

According to the account, a friend went to send Padre Pio a telegram asking for prayers. At the post office, he was handed a telegram from Pio already assuring Cecil of his prayers for recovery.

Months later, when Cecil was well enough to visit, he and his friend asked how Pio had learned about the accident so quickly.

“Do you think the Angels go as slowly as the planes?” he replied.

Padre Pio was not known to mince words.

And we have his own correspondence as well. Writing to his spiritual daughter Raffaelina Cerase, Pio explained that her guardian angel sometimes brought him her needs, and that he responded by commending her to Jesus.

That is the part I want us to linger over. Someone was suffering at a distance. Pio understood angelic companionship as a way that her need reached him and called him into prayer.

There is something deeply tender in that understanding, especially for those of us who carry people in our hearts whom we cannot regularly hold in our arms.

We may never experience anything resembling Padre Pio’s extraordinary encounters. We can still make room for the confidence that animated his devotion: God’s care reaches beyond the limits of our sight, and we can ask for help on behalf of those we love.

If you missed my recent essay, Padre Pio, The Saint Who Had a Fight with His Guardian Angel!, it is waiting for you in our Supporting Member archive. Becoming a Supporting Member gives you access to that piece and helps make these daily reflections possible. And yes, the title gives you some indication of just how familiar that heavenly friendship could become.

For now, let’s bring this closer to home. How might we make such a request ourselves?

When you cannot be there yourself

Perhaps someone has already come to mind as you’ve been reading.

A child who lives far away. A friend waiting for test results. A loved one awash in addiction or homelessness. Someone who is grieving and has stopped answering the phone. You want to be beside them, and circumstances simply won’t allow it.

You can bring that person into your prayer with your guardian angel.

“Sending” our angel is a way of asking for help, trusting that whatever assistance is given will be according to God’s loving will. We can make that request with the same affection and confidence with which we ask a faithful friend to look in on someone we love.

You might pray:

Holy guardian angel, please go to someone I love whom I cannot be beside today. Watch over them as God allows. Pray for them, comfort them, and help them draw closer to Jesus. Help me, too, to understand what care I can offer. Amen.

You can say their name. You can explain what is worrying you. There is no need to make the words more impressive than the concern itself.

“Please look after my daughter. She’s having a difficult time, and I don’t know how to help.”

That is a perfectly good place to begin.

And then, when you can, make the call. Send the message. Offer the ride. Prayer can help us become more attentive to the opportunities we do have, even while we entrust to God everything beyond our reach.

There is room to welcome your guardian angel into the less dramatic parts of life, too.

Before a difficult conversation, ask for help listening carefully and speaking truthfully. Before beginning the day’s work, ask for the attention to do it well and the patience to treat people kindly while doing it. When you know you owe someone an apology, ask for a little assistance getting past the twelve excellent reasons you have assembled for why they should apologize first.

I suspect some of our guardian angels have heard those reasons before.

A simple morning prayer could be enough:

Guardian angel, pray for me today. Help me recognize the good before me and respond generously. Keep me attentive to Jesus and to the people He places in my care.

You don’t have to feel a presence or receive a sign. You can offer the prayer, make yourself willing to receive help, and get on with the day.

Then, at night, take a moment to remember where you received kindness, where you needed patience, and where you might need to begin again tomorrow. Thank God for the care you recognized and for whatever care escaped your notice.

Bring Him the people who are still on your mind.

There may be very little you can do for them at that hour. You may already have done everything available to you. You can ask that His holy angels accompany them, and let yourself rest.

The people we love remain in God’s care when we fall asleep.

And wake me with the morning’s light

My cousins and I still reminisce about the evenings I spent babysitting them. Whether or not they remember that little angel and its prayer, I’ll have to ask. But all these years later, those words still give me somewhere to put the love and worry that sometimes follow me to bed.

Perhaps you have words like that, too. A prayer someone taught you. A blessing spoken over you. Something you thought you had forgotten until the moment you needed it.

Tonight, you might give those words another hearing.

Think of the people you love, wherever they are. Ask God to keep them close, and ask your guardian angel to visit where you cannot. Remember that you, too, are someone worth looking after. You can ask for companionship on your own road as well.

Then, when you are ready, turn out the light.

“As I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
Guide and guard me through the night,
And wake me with the morning’s light.
Amen.”

Sleep well, my friends. May God bless you and those you love, and may His holy angels accompany you.

And now it’s your turn…

Is there a prayer or blessing from childhood that you still return to? Who taught it to you, and has its meaning changed as you’ve grown older?

Or perhaps today’s reflection has given you a new way to pray for someone you cannot be beside. I’d love to hear what you’re taking with you. Share only what you’re comfortable making public, and keep another person’s private struggles their own.

Leave a comment

If someone came to mind while you were reading, consider sending this reflection their way. It might give the two of you a prayer to share.

Share

A prayer for those we cannot be beside

Let us pray.

Loving God,
You know the people I carry in my heart,
and You love them more fully than I can.

Send Your holy angels to accompany them.
Give them courage when they are afraid,
companionship when they are lonely,
and help they can receive when the road is difficult.

Teach me to offer the care that is mine to give,
to listen before assuming I know what is needed,
and to entrust to You what lies beyond my reach.

Help me welcome Your care for my own life, too.
Through the prayers and service of Your angels,
draw us closer to Jesus
and make us more generous toward one another.

Be with us through this day and through the night.
Grant us rest, and grace for the next faithful step.

Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.