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You are here: Home / Gordon MacRae / Saint Michael the Archangel and the Art of War

Saint Michael the Archangel and the Art of War

Posted by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on September 27, 2017 13 Comments

A haunting dream on the Feast of Guardian Angels reveals the necessity of accepting allies before securing arms for the coming field of battle in spiritual warfare.

“Only one thoroughly acquainted with the
art of war can successfully wage one.”
(Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 500 BC)

Five hundred years before the Birth of the Messiah, the Chinese general, Sun Tzu wrote a treatise called The Art of War. The wagers of war have been trying to decipher its hidden meanings ever since. There is no point in reading it. Sun Tzu offers little to the Western mind beyond confusion, but his quote above rings as true today as it did in 500 BC.

A basic tenet of The Art of War is that victory depends not only on weapons, but on allies. Spiritual warfare is no exception. For those who disdain war, there are no conscientious objectors in spiritual warfare. It does not pursue those who have already handed themselves over to evil. They have reported to boot camp. Spiritual warfare seeks to subdue contributors to the good. It pursues those at peace. More on this later, but first my allies.

In two recent posts on These Stone Walls, I wrote about two figures who have asserted themselves into my life in this field of battle where I would rather not be. Their presence here is evident if you spend a little time with These Stone Walls, but two titles in recent weeks identify them clearly: “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance,” and “Padre Pio: Patron Saint for the Heavy Lifting in Heaven.”

In that latter post, I wrote that I would reveal a third this week, and he, too, is evident in my title Saint Michael the Archangel has a powerful presence here.

Before I tell you about it, I want to add a disclaimer. I have no delusions of grandeur. If I have any delusions at all they are the opposite of grandeur. I do not feel that I am special in any way. I was just an ordinary priest, with no special gifts, traveling through life on an ordinary path.

Then I was falsely accused, dragged through the justice system, and placed on trial – first in the news media and then in the circus of Caligula. I was sent unjustly to prison for sixty-seven years after three times refusing a “deal” that would have had me free in one but would have required handing a part of myself over to the Prince of Lies.

Remaining spiritually intact while facing such a plight requires special resilience and other gifts, but I have none. Nothing has ever come easy for me, and especially not the art of war. Like most of you would do in my place, I struggled to retain hope, sanity, and my soul as I walked in the Dark Valley of Psalm 23.

“YOUR OLD MEN SHALL DREAM DREAMS” (Joel 2:28)

The image above has great spiritual meaning for me. Though I cannot even begin to fully comprehend it, the image was revealed to me in a dream during a time when I felt stranded upon the latest of my life’s many fields of battle in spiritual warfare. I first described the dream and the above image in a 2016 Christmas post, “Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah.”

It was a time when the prison that holds us was in a great upheaval and our peace of mind along with it. At this time one year ago I was unable to write so Father George David Byers stepped in for me with a guest post on a subject I asked him to write about “Saint Michael Who Is Like God: Patron Saint of Justice.”

Four days later, early in the morning of October 2 – the day the Church honors the Guardian Angels – I had a strange and vivid dream. You may have read of this before, but a year later it seems worth repeating and reflecting on. It has lingered in my psyche and my soul, and when my days grew dark, it stayed with me and gave me hope. It’s a dream and an image that haunts me.

In the dream, I stood gazing out the window of my cell with a trusted companion standing next to me. Who he was remains mysterious, but I can surmise by the date of the dream that it was someone who knows me well – better even than I know myself. The companion took the form of an older man, someone wiser, someone known for all my life but on another plane of existence.

He pointed out the window as I stood next to him. I looked in the dark through the bars of the window up into the western sky to where he was pointing and he asked me, “What do you see?” I said, “I see only the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” he said. Then my eyes were strangely opened, and I could see far beyond the limits of where I stood.

I saw three stars in a perfect triangle. I knew they were very distant stars, but somehow my eyes became like telescopes. Then I saw within the triangle streams of light that seemed to flow from the three stars and interact with them. It was glowing, but it was also alive and vibrant. “It looks like neon,” I remember saying. Then my companion said, “Michael dwells within the light.” I felt as though I could have gazed forever.

The dream seemed to go on for a long time in silence and my struggles seemed to be absorbed by what I was seeing. This is all I could remember of the dream. Then I awoke in my bunk. It was just a few minutes after 3:00 AM. The dream seemed so vivid that I wondered whether it was a dream or actually happened.

So I arose and walked the few steps to the cell window with the strangest sense of a sort of echo of the “Someone” who had been standing there. I stared intensely but saw only prison lights. Then my friend, Pornchai Moontri awoke in his upper bunk as I stood in the night staring at the stretch of sky beyond prison.

“What’s wrong?” asked Pornchai. I told him that I had a dream about seeing some stars. “Oh, here we go again,” he muttered as he rolled over to resume his sleep. (Months earlier, Pornchai was awakened in the night when I jumped from my bunk in alarm after another strange dream that I wrote about in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”)

Later that day after my dream about the stars, it kept replaying in my mind. I felt compelled to do as I was instructed, to “look beyond the prison lights.” I was especially struck by my mystery companion’s statement about the light from within the triangle of stars. “Michael dwells within the light.”

So at work in the library that day, I sat down with an atlas of the stars. It took an hour of searching and studying, but I found a tiny constellation called “Triangulum”.” Its stars are far too distant to see with the naked eye, but with a telescope, Triangulum can be seen above the horizon at various times of the year in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere.

Later that day, I called a friend and asked her to search Google for the Constellation Triangulum. She sent me a few photographs. One was the photo above taken  in a “Deep Field” survey. It was the image of my dream.

The search also yielded something else interesting. In the late 1990s, something was discovered inside Triangulum. It was a galaxy 12.2 billion light years away called Galaxy RD-1, the most distant object ever seen by human eyes or instruments. Galaxy RD-1 (above) is seen as a bright light within Triangulum, formed near the dawn of creation after The Big Bang.

 

To look at that image is to look upon the birth pangs of the Cosmos. In the Fourth Century A.D., Saint Augustine devoted a part of his famous City of God to an examination of the majority population of that city: the angels. Augustine noted that in the Creation account of Genesis, light was created before its visible sources in the material world: the sun and the stars.

In early 20th Century astronomy, physicist-mathematician, Father Georges Lemaître discovered the origin of the created Universe. Eighteen centuries earlier, Saint Augustine proposed a sort of Big Bang for the spiritual Universe. When God said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), it was for Augustine the moment the angels came into being. “God saw that the light was good. Then God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1:4)

For Saint Augustine, this separation of light from darkness recounts the fall of Satan and the rebellious angels. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Milhama from Qumran Cave 1) identifies Michael as the “Prince of Light” who leads the angelic army against the spirits of darkness.

In Genesis, this angelic rebellion preceded the material world and the sin of Adam and Eve who later in the narrative were lured into sin by demonic temptation (Genesis 3:1-6). I once heard a priest and seminary professor suggest that this is all just a metaphor for the darker side of human nature. He said that angels and demons are mythological concepts constructed to personify conflict within the human psyche.

What nonsense! Padre Pio was assaulted by demons in the night because they could not bear the works of his sanctity. Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s life and freedom were taken because he never retreated from spiritual warfare in Auschwitz, the darkest manifestation of evil the modern world has seen.

https://www.amazon.com/Angels-Saints-Biblical-Guide-Friendship/dp/0307590798

I am grateful for a reflection on this by Dr. Scott Hahn in his book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones (Image Books 2014):

“Since the time of the primordial fall, humanity has been beset by evil spiritual forces and defended by good spiritual forces. We call this struggle “spiritual warfare… Our troubles and our struggles in this world are not simply anxieties over material discomforts. They are also – and primarily – spiritual struggles, Spiritual combat. Spiritual warfare.” (pp. 76, 85)

Those who know the misfortune of evil at a very personal level know that spiritual warfare is real. Sun Tzu was right:

“Only one thoroughly acquainted with the
Art Of war can successfully wage one.”

Everyone else, whether they know it or not, is utterly defenseless and in desperate need of allies.

SAINT MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL, DEFEND US IN BATTLE

The famous Russian author and former Soviet prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wrote that “the line that divides Good and Evil runs not between nations or parties or physical armies, but right down the middle of every human soul.” The battleground of spiritual warfare is the human soul. “Our natural battles are surrounded by a supernatural battle,” wrote theologian Peter Kreeft in Angels and Demons (Ignatius Press 1995, P. 124).

If you scroll far enough down the Home Page of These Stone Walls, you will come to a feature called “Most Popular Posts.” This short list is generated by an algorithm that measures the number of visitors to particular posts – and not just the number, but also how long they stay to read and ponder.

Ever since it was written in September 2010, one post has never left our “Most Popular Posts” list. That post – which we will link to with a few others at the end of this one – examines the significance of Saint Michael’s scales, of his place in Sacred Scripture, and of what it means to be a Patron Saint of Justice. That post is “Angelic Justice: St Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”

Saint Michael first showed upon my field of battle in 2002. It was the year the clergy abuse scandal exploded for the second time in America and dragged all accused priests – me included – through the media mud. It was the year the U.S. Bishops opted for “amputation’ as the sole response to the due process rights of accused priests. It was the year Saint Padre Pio was canonized by Saint John Paul II.

You have been reading about all those events and their impact in recent posts on These Stone Walls. In the middle of that year, my friend, Alberto Ramos showed up at my cell door. You read about Alberto and saw his photo just weeks ago in “Labor Day Weekend Behind These Stone Walls.”

Alberto went to prison at age 14. In 2002, at age 22, he walked into my cell with an icon of Saint Michael the Archangel. He silently climbed up on a sink in a corner of the cell, reached up, and taped the icon above my door. “You need this,” he said. “And you should never take it down!”

In the following months, as the spiritual battles of 2002 raged on, one image after another of Saint Michael arrived in my mail and appeared in my cell. One was even affixed to my coffee cup and is still there.

Along with Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio, Saint Michael has taken up permanent residence in my soul. These are our allies. Upon this field of battle in spiritual warfare, they have never left us.

The Prayer to Saint Michael is a part of a longer prayer composed by Pope Leo XIII in 1888 after a terrifying vision of spiritual warfare:

“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our, protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen”

Editor’s Note: Honor Saint Michael and the Angels this week with these other posts from These Stone Walls:

  • Angelic Justice: St Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
  • Pope Francis Consecrates Vatican City to St Michael the Archangel
  • To Guard You in All Your Ways: The Archangels on These Stone Walls
  • St Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

A Postscript from Father Gordon MacRae:

And by the way, for those who like to calculate the astronomical odds of such things, Father Georges Lemaître, Father of the Big Bang and modern cosmology, was the Godfather of Pierre Matthews who is the Godfather of my roommate, Pornchai Moontri.

31

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About Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

The late Cardinal Avery Dulles and The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus encouraged Father MacRae to write. Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2005: “Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound will be a monument to your trials.” READ MORE

Comments

  1. Michael says

    September 30, 2017 at 9:04 AM

    St. Maximilian and St. Pio are two saints for our time just as they were two saints of our time.

    Two fathers in a time of fatherlessness. Two sufferers for charity in a time of hedonism. Two devoted sons of the Immaculate Conception in a time that gives birth to filthiness. Two priests willing to bear every indignity, hardship, and sacrifice in a time that now mocks the priesthood. And with St. Michael, three beacons of light, indeed of the presence of God in a time marked by darkness, i.e. the absence of God.

    Reply
    • Helen says

      October 2, 2017 at 4:38 AM

      Well said, Michael. Fr. Gordon is IN great company and thru him, so are we.

      God bless you.

      Reply
  2. Carol Hall says

    September 29, 2017 at 5:38 PM

    My reply to David Norman – I also watched and recorded the beatification of martyr priest Blessed Stanley Rother. Ordinary priests I think, have the most impact on our lives because their life is so normal to ours!!

    Father Gordon – I always read, enjoy and have a file for all your TSW reports. I like to go back and read them over again. You are so interesting to follow and relate too! This report of our guardian angels, St. Michael etc. are very enlightening to me. My prayers daily consist of St. Michael and Angel of God along with the usual Our Father. Hail Mary. You are always in my prayers daily. I keep praying for a miracle to happen for you to get you out of prison.

    Reply
  3. Peter Haas says

    September 28, 2017 at 2:17 PM

    Dear Fr. MacRae – I pray daily the St. Michael prayer. I will now add your intentions when I again pray to St. Michael. I’m already praying to St. Maximilian and St. Pio for you.
    Pete H.

    Reply
  4. David Norman says

    September 28, 2017 at 10:26 AM

    ”I was just an ordinary priest with no special gifts, traveling through life on an ordinary path”
    Dear Fr. Gordon,
    Terry and I were blessed to witness the beatification of martyr priest Blessed Stanley Rother this past weekend in Oklahoma City. We visited the town in which he grew up, and the parish in which he served as a young priest. We saw where he had been buried and spoke to a woman at whose marriage Fr. Rother had presided. Without exception, everyone, from those who knew him personally to the Cardinal who brought the letter of beatification from Pope Francis, spoke about him as an “ordinary priest” and I thought of all the “ordinary priests” I have met in my life and how they have molded and shaped my understanding of Jesus in their often silent but profound imitation of His life. I have to say that I have never considered the word “ordinary” to have such depth of meaning until I read your post this morning. Answering the invitation of Jesus to work beside him in his vineyard is the “every day, ordinary, normal, common place and usual ” invitation he offers to all of us. He asks us to lose our lives in service to others, some by the gun or the sword or the cross, the rest of us by mirroring as best we can the absolute and unending love and compassion he has for each of us, regardless of our personal circumstances. Thank you for doing just that.
    May Michael continue to stand by you and give you peace, and may your life be truly “ordinary”.
    Yours in Christ,
    Deacon Dave

    Reply
  5. Joan Ripley says

    September 28, 2017 at 12:49 AM

    Thank you so much for this beautiful post, Father Gordon. You are always a tremendous comfort and inspiration to me and you and your incomprehensible legal situation are in my prayers. My birthday is on September 29th so your insightful thoughts are a great gift and are much appreciated.

    Reply
  6. Sue Zappa says

    September 27, 2017 at 1:25 PM

    Thank you so very much for your insights, Father! I’ve been fighting some very intense spiritual battles the past two days, & like you, my battles are fought alone. The only allies are those who reside in heaven, & they don’t always make their presence known. Like you, my spiritual war has been raging for years, dating back to 1995 for me. I don’t know about you, but developments in my own spiritual life are leading me to believe that some very decisive battles will be fought in the near future. So much prayer & penance needed! You are an inspiration to me! Thank you again! God & your heavenly compatriots be with you & Max!

    Reply
  7. Matamoros says

    September 27, 2017 at 12:11 PM

    “Auschwitz, the darkest manifestation of evil the modern world has seen.” Oh come now. The Gulags were explicitly anti-Christian and terminated over 100 million people according to modern estimates. That is truly the “darkest manifestation of evil the modern world has seen.”

    Reply
    • Helen says

      September 27, 2017 at 4:41 PM

      Matamoros, God bless you. The darkest manifestation of evil is personal. What one may experience, someone else, with maybe less grace, at the time, to contend with it; it would be THE darkest. When we’re blinded by the darkness, (not a creation but an absence from God Himself) then we are most blind. When you can’t see, you can’t see!! Blind is blind, Dark is dark. Praise God for His Light: Jesus.

      Thank you.

      Helen

      Reply
      • Father George David Byers says

        September 28, 2017 at 7:06 AM

        Helen, that’s the best comment you’ve ever put up, written like Saint Teresa of Avila. Thanks for that. — Father George

        Reply
  8. Helen says

    September 27, 2017 at 5:01 AM

    Hello Fr. Gordon.

    Thank you for this profound and provoking post, this week. It surely speaks to the depth of the soul. You write as if you are scribing into our hearts. Your words are ‘felt’. Does that make sense?

    I am edified, knowing that we share the same favored saints. For years, every morning, I implore St. Michael to protect and care for my family and loved ones. Padre’ Pio, whom I’ve asked to spiritually adopt me, and St Maximilian Kolbe’, who was introduced to me thru a book of his life, have been my helpers and prayer partners, for years. I never leave home without them!

    Father Gordon, this is a beautiful post. I loved reading it and was kind of sorry it ended. I am blessed that I was lead to your post thru the Virtual Rosary Prayercast. I noticed a prayer, lifting you to the Lord, and I became focused on that prayer and wanted to know who you were. Praise God. I found you.

    Thank you, God bless you and Max, until we meet again.

    Your fan,
    Helen

    Reply
    • Father Gordon J MacRae says

      September 27, 2017 at 6:39 AM

      It was Helen who found and sent me the photograph of the constellation Triangulum that appears in this post. God bless you Helen! — Father Gordon MacRae

      Reply
      • Helen says

        September 27, 2017 at 8:23 AM

        Father Gordon, I am ALWAYS blessed by you. Thank you for your blessings and for you.

        WOW! Your memory is a miracle. I can hardly remember if I’ve put my socks on or not. No matter…you ALWAYS knock them off, any way.

        Have a glorious, Spirit-filled day….blessing you and Max.

        Always your fan,
        Helen

        Reply

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