Their angels in heaven always look on the face of my heavenly Father (Mt 18:10)
The angels are our shepherds, because they carry not only our messages to God but also those of God to our souls, feeding them with sweet inspirations and divine communications. As good shepherds they protect us and defend us from wolves, which are the evil spirits. Through the secret inspirations which the angels convey to the soul, they effect a deeper knowledge of God and make it love him the more, till they leave it wounded with love...The light of God, which illumines angels, enlightening and setting them on fire with love as pure spirits disposed for that inflowing, ordinarily illumines people in darkness, pain and distress because of their impurity and weakness...
When a person has become spiritualized and refined in the fire of divine, purifying love, he is then within the union and inflowing of that loving illumination with the same sweetness as angels receive them...Consider what utter vanity it is to rejoice in anything but in the service of God, how dangerous and how fatal. How ruinous it proved to those angels who rejoiced and were complacent in their own beauty and natural endowments; for this they fell, deformed, into the abyss. (St John of the Cross, Spiritual Maxims)
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