As the clergy at Southwell Minster stand facing the congregation, we see them framed by a multitude of angels in the glass of the great west window, installed in 1996. Seraphim and cherubim scintillate like stars, dance, fling incense, or spin mysterious glowing balls, while others holding images of the creation look out quizzically at us, as if they find humans strange but intriguing. At our Christmas children’s nativity services, we are again surrounded by the heavenly host in the form of crowds of little girls with sparkly wings and fluffy halos, who prefer to be angels rather than Mary these days.

This costume choice is not surprising, for ours is a culture in which angels have a powerful presence. In 2023 an AP-NORC poll found that 69 percent of Americans believe in angels, including 21 percent of nonbelievers in God, while in the less devout United Kingdom it was just 46 percent in 2009, down to one-third in 2016, but even among those who didn’t believe in God, 20 percent believed in angels. The Bible Society, polling in 2016, was also surprised to discover that in Britain 11 percent of women and 8 percent of men claimed to have seen an angel. London is the most angel-haunted part of Britain, appropriately; it was in Peckham Rye that the eight-year-old William Blake saw his first angels in a tree, their wings shining between the branches.

And yet angels are not equally welcome in some Christian circles. Among liberals, the demythologizing spirit of Rudolf Bultmann still holds sway, impossibly separating the kernel of the gospel from its “cosmological trappings.” Bultmann wrote: “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.” Even those who would not go quite so far are dismissive of the new angelic religion, believing it is an easy and comfortable New Age version of faith, making no demands on its adherents.

While it is undeniable that the secular concept of the guardian angel has something in it of the amulet or charm, we should not dismiss angels entirely. As poet Francis Thompson wrote,

The angels keep their ancient places—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Indeed angels have “ancient places” – they are scriptural: divine agents in the Old Testament and even more ubiquitous in the New. Angels announce Christ’s conception, birth, resurrection, and ascension. For Christ personally, such spirits are an intimate reality; they are his companions in the desert and sustain him in his agonized prayer at Gethsemane. He speaks of the angels of his “little ones” who see the face of God in Matthew 18:10, and he announces his coming with the angels in the synoptic Gospels. In John 1:51 he tells his disciples they will witness angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. To attribute all this to a sort of cosmic window-dressing risks losing the theological meaning of the life and ministry of Jesus.

Indeed, biblical angels are not even supernatural and “mythical” but natural creatures like ourselves. The angels in Christianity are regarded even by a Neoplatonic writer like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his fifth-century Celestial Hierarchy as created by God directly: they are not emanations. Rather, they are our friends and guides. Jesus’ remark about the angels of each “little one” led Gregory the Great to suggest we each have a guardian angel. Indeed, in the prayer I was taught to say as a child, I had four: “One to watch and one to pray, and two to bear my soul away.” It was a comforting thought amid the terrors of the night and confirmed my worth as a protected child of God. And it taught me that God also had quite different offspring.

Angels therefore make the universe a friendlier, more companionable place, and importantly reveal that we are not the only conscious parts of God’s creation. Indeed, their difference from us helps us to understand more clearly what it is to be human. Comparing ourselves only to beasts and plants can give us too grandiose an idea of ourselves, while the existence of pure intelligences puts us in our place and de-centers us.

And yet Christ also says these powerful spirits do not know when the end times are; Hebrews 1:6 and following suggests their wonder at the Incarnation. Humans may have some knowledge that angels lack. I am always moved by the angels in medieval crucifixion scenes, such as those by Giotto. They swoop around the cross in attitudes of frenzied agony and horror, unable to understand what is happening, how God can suffer. God has revealed secrets to us humans which the angels marvel at.

We are also blessed in our physicality, which the angels do not possess. The rabbis taught, indeed, that they were envious of human embodiment. Milton’s fallen archangel, Satan, is consumed with envy and hatred of Adam and Eve because they are beloved of God but also for their enjoyment of physical love: “sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two / Emparadised in one another’s arms.”

In our turn we learn from the angels, whom Richard Hooker described as a “pattern and a spur” for humankind. They teach us how to worship, from the seraphim exchanging cries of “holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts” across the temple in Isaiah to the angelic choirs of Revelation. It is no accident that we pray “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”; scripture shows them as intercessors. In Daniel 10 an angel comes to answer his requests and in Revelation 5 the prayers of the faithful are held in a bowl by an angel, who adds incense to hasten their ascent.

This needs a little explaining. We seek in prayer to align our will and desires with God’s good and perfect will. The angels aid us in these divine purposes: Thomas Aquinas divides them into three triads. First, angels and archangels guide and protect us and the church, with principalities guiding the nations; secondly, dominions govern and order the angelic world; angelic virtues enable miracles, and powers engage in spiritual struggle. At the pinnacle of the third triad, the seraphim burn with God’s love, the cherubim reflect his wisdom, and the thrones mediate his authority down to the second group. In prayer therefore, as we become more just, more loving, we ally ourselves with the angelic virtues, and by intuition they come close and lift us further toward God’s love and wisdom. Augustine reminds us that their nature is to cling to God in love and worship. To assist us, therefore, is an act of self-giving love on their part.

The Christian cosmos, then, is a vast interchange of mutual love and prayer, between angels and humans, and including also the lower creatures, who worship God by their life and action. Remember that in Mark 1:12 Jesus is accompanied by wild beasts as well as angels as he prays in the wilderness. Henry Vaughan said:

The rising winds
And falling springs,
Birds, beasts, all things
Adore him in their kinds.

And as humankind, according to George Herbert, is “the world’s high priest” offering nature’s unconscious prayer and adoration, so the angels enable our human offering. We all minister to each other, which is God’s gift in the economy of grace. This is expressed movingly by the humans and angels embracing at the foot of Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (1501), in an image of joyful reciprocity.

Some readers may still be uneasy at the idea that angels do any intercession. Can God not just communicate directly? Yet if you look at any biblical encounter between an angel and a human, you realize that no angel comes alone, as a divine substitute. He brings what he represents. In every case the divine is revealed through the angelic visitant; when the mysterious visitors ate with Abraham, or the angel wrestled with Jacob, God was present. God sends the archangel Gabriel to Mary to announce the coming of the Holy Spirit and inaugurate the Incarnation. Indeed, God’s taking on of humanity in the Incarnation is the justification for anything or anyone to speak of God and mediate his presence – God gave himself to the world in Christ, and he shines out in every part of it. We are all – humans, angels, plants, and beasts – mirrors of God to each other.

The Annunciation marks the coming together of human and angelic orders in a new relationship, as each is newly revealed to the other. The poet Edwin Muir describes the moment vividly:

Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there.

There is no scene before this in scripture that enacts so intimate an angelic encounter, so extended a conversation, in a true exchange of mutual discovery:

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

When I look into the grave faces of the angels in the west window at Southwell, who surround the central figure of Mary, its patron saint, I feel something of the same fascination for a mode of life so “other” and yet one to which I am called – as Christ promised, our life in heaven will be more like that of the angels. And they are an integral part of our life here and now. The designer of the Southwell window, Patrick Reyntiens, was drawn to paint these spirits because he had been saved from death by an invisible, angelic hand, which stopped him from being run over. Angels are agents of God’s providence and if we expect them, they will come and be our companions, as Raphael was to the boy Tobias.

So let us not mock the angels of popular culture, which are a sign of a desire for transcendence, for a reality beyond the limits of the material world, and for our heavenly destination, but instead introduce people to the true angels of Christian revelation, who are powerful and other, who bring God close and can aid and protect us. With an understanding of the ministry of biblical angels, people will be made ready to encounter the one who is their King, who was made lower than the angels in his self-giving to our world, to be crowned with the glory and honor of the one who defeated death and all evil. When he comes again, it will be with his angelic hosts, who will bring us to join them as fellow citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, where our praise will be perfected and our mutual conversation unending.