VARIETY IS DEAR TO US, as it should be for it is dear to God. We appreciate changing seasons, the differences of trees, flowers, animals; and we are particularly grateful that all men and women do not look exactly alike. We like change and differences, not because we are fickle, or just for the sake of change, but because no one moment, no one climate, no one expression of beauty or goodness exhausts the possibilities of reflection of the Divine perfection. There are so many pleasing combinations of human creatures, so many pleasing patterns of human virtue, so many pleasing colors, sights, sounds; such inexhaustible aspects of truth, so many alluring insights into goodness. The variety of the world is at one and the same time a declaration of the imperfection of created things, each one giving us only so much, and of the extravagant generosity of God.

AS IN NUMBERS, so in variety, the Angelic world is a splendor that dims the variety of the physical world into a plainness approaching homely monotony. There are no Angelic families or races; each individual Angel stands apart from all others more distinctly different than an elephant from a fly. The pleasant individual differences we notice from man to man and woman to woman are as far from the differences between the Angels as a ripple on a pond is from the towering power and smashing violence of a stormy sea. At each encounter in the Heavenly courts, the Angels see differences greater than those which distinguish a rose from a woman. Multiply this by the countless numbers of the Angels; the Heavenly choirs are a luminous image of Divinity's perfections, stupendous in its beauty, staggering in its wide variety. Yet all this is no more than a foggy outline of the beauty of God.

ONCE CREATED, the Angels live forever, depending, as we do, on the steady support of the hand of God but on nothing else. All the things that pertain to us because we have bodies have no place in the Angelic world: growth, nourishment, sickness, pain, the decline of old age, and ultimately death. They are so much more like God than we are that their whole being reflects something of the Divine eternity, immortality, independence. Angels are neither old nor young, sick or healthy, men or women, infants or ancients, tall or short, fat or thin; they are the bright flames of life, unflickering, unfading, indestructible, flames that are fed by nothing but God.

THE PRINCELY DIGNITY of Gabriel standing before our Lady, the easy competence of Raphael protecting the young Tobias, the majesty of Michael with his flaming sword guarding the gates of a lost paradise gives us some little vision of the nobility of the Angels. We are in danger of blinding ourselves to that vision if we forget that these were Angels stooping to our limitations, bowing to our penchant for thinking in pictures; thoughtful Angels who delight us as a mother delights her infant by imitating its gurgling and chuckling. This is not a mother's normal speech; nor is this the the Angel's normal appearance.

ANGELS WERE NOT MADE TO GIVE LIFE to bodies as were our human souls. The bodies in which they have appeared from time to time among us were the appearances of bodies taken on for our comfort; not real, but apparent that we might the more easily accept the Angel, his message, his companionship. None of the things that are proper to living bodies could be accomplished by these apparent bodies the Angels: they could not digest a meal, beget children, become tired, or wake refreshed from sleep. For us to lose our body is the tragic thing called death; the body belongs to our integrity, without it we are not men and women but disembodied souls we are only half ourselves. It is hard for us not to feel a little sorry for the Angels' lack of bodies, forgetting that if the impossible thing happened and an Angel had a real body, it would not be benefited but be debased by that fact. Its completely spiritual nature in its independence and power has no need of a body. It can get far more done than any strong man, indeed than any material force. It is free from the barriers that the physical inevitably imposes on our knowledge and our love: free from the sluggishness, fatigue and distraction that makes our lifetime harvest of truth so skimpy; free from the frustration inherent in all our loving gestures of union, of all the feeble faith that supports our love, of all the helplessness that is our love's bitterest fruit.

NOT EVEN A CHILD is puzzled about how an Angel gets its clothes on over such huge wings; for it is clear to everyone that the wings we give to Angels are a symbol and nothing more. The swift flight of a bird contrasted with the trudging step of a man is a fitting symbol of smooth, untrammeled, rapid movement, and so a centuries-old expression of the celerity of Angelic passage. In our own times, we might appeal to the soundless swoop of a diving jet plane to help our stumbling minds to follow the flight of an Angel; we would come closer to reality by following with a flick of the eye the almost instantaneous thrust of lightning. We have the most accurate measurement of that Angelic progress in the time it takes our own minds to jump from city to city, across oceans, over five, ten, or fifty years; for it is thus that an Angel moves.

IN OUR THINKING about the Angels, we must draw much more on our knowledge of God than on our knowledge of men, for the Angels are finite pure spirits modeled on the infinite Pure Spirit. We do not locate God by surrounding Him, He is not contained within the easily discerned outlines of a body, a town, a country; He is where He works, and so is everywhere, for nothing can continue to be unless it is supported by His omnipotence. Nor can we locate an Angel by surrounding it; it, too, is a pure spirit. To ask where an Angel is means to ask where it is working; only thus is an Angel in place. Obviously no place can be too small for an Angel, no place too big, no place too distant; for with the Angels, it is not a question of squeezing a body into uncomfortable quarters, of spreading its arms wide to cover more territory, or of easing it out of a town quietly. No Angel is everywhere, for no Angel is God, no Angel is omnipotent; but neither is an Angel human, to be circumscribed by the length of its arms or the horizons of eyes. It is pure spirit, to be limited in place only by the degree of the power and perfection proper to the nature given lit by God.

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