Honouring St. Michael the Archangel

I had never heard of anyone commemorating the Feast Days of Saints outside of Mass until I became a Novice with the Faithful Companions of Jesus. Sure, I’d been aware of St. Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day each year, and there was a special place in my heart for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God on January 1st, but this was different.  We, as Sisters and Novices, would claim the Feast Day of the Saint that shared our name and celebrate that day very much like our birthdays:  a nice dinner, a glass of wine and a special prayer for the person who shared the name of the Saint.  It was a tradition in my Novitiate community that I appreciated very much.  Some of the Sisters had a very loyal devotion to their Saint; we used to say that Saint Rita had to work very hard to keep up with the constant stream of requests she received from one of our Sisters.

My name being “Michelle”, the Feast Day that I honour in a special way is that of St. Michael the Archangel.  He shares the day with St. Raphael and St. Gabriel, but St. Michael’s the one I especially remember on September 29th.  Now, I do appreciate St. Michael, but I will admit that it has taken me some time to really wrap my brain around what it is that I’m praying for when I ask for his intercession.  I know that angels are said to be messengers of God in the Bible, but St. Michael has a much more active role in the Book of Revelations and in our Catholic Tradition, wrestling and killing demons, as well as leading other angels into battle.  The prayer to St. Michael that I recite with the other parishioners at my church every weekend speaks of St. Michael dealing with “evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.”  But what is a demon?  And what role does St. Michael have in banishing them? 

Eckhart Tolle, in his book The Power of Now, writes of his battle with depression and thoughts of suicide.  He shares that many of his early years were anxiety ridden until one unforgettable night when he awoke with the thought:  “I cannot live with myself any longer.”  In the transformational moments that followed, he had the striking realization that the “I” and the “myself” in his statement were not the same entity and that only one of them could be real.  In our Catholic tradition, we might say that he recognized the “I” speaking to him from the deepest parts of himself as the person he was in God.  The “myself”, however, was the part of himself that he’d been identifying with all of his life.  It was the source of the many thoughts and voices that had been leading him into depression.  From that night on, his life was forever changed, and he was able to banish the ‘demons’ of suicidal thoughts.

We, too, are inundated with ‘voices’ every day.  They can come from social media and the people that we meet, but mostly, the whispers come from inside ourselves.  We fret, we worry, we criticize.  We tell ourselves that we need to be better, that we should be more than we are, and that we’re not enough.  We fear all of the things that will happen and all of the things that won’t happen because of our human frailty.  Our thoughts can consume us.  We can struggle to recognize that our thoughts are not our truest identity; the murmurs that we often hear are not who we are and they are definitely not of God, either.

Perhaps, then, it is St. Michael that we are invited to seek help from in quieting those clanging voices and banishing the demons of stress and anxiety and depression.  Maybe it is he that supports our efforts to create a path through the noise and clutter of our minds and thoughts, allowing the calming, peaceful voice of God to break through with peace and joy and hope.  Could it be his vigilance that enables us to recognize our deepest, innermost identity as children of God through the mania of our lives?  As the Feast Day of the Archangels approaches, let us pray to St. Michael, asking for his intercession in helping us to cope with the flood of thoughts and voices that rob us of our sense of connection to God.

Michelle Langlois, fcJ