Someone to watch over you .....

Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God's love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side,
to light and guard, to rule and guide.
Amen.

As children of the 50s and 60s, the first prayer we ever learned was to our Guardian Angel! It was reassuring to know that someone had your back.

When I made my First Holy Communion, no different than kids today, I received gifts of money from neighbours and friends, not I might add, anything like the tokens of the 21st century - a half-crown was a good sum back then, but one elderly lady gave me a book about Guardian Angels, and as fate would have it, the monies I received are all gone, but I still have that treasured little book. It describes the various angels, and the jobs they had. They were of wonderful colours, and all with feathered wings.

Angels are a strange phenomenon; they are heavenly spirits whom we believe guard and protect us. Often mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, we call to them in prayer in our hour of need. They are different to saints in that saints were real humans with a past history that we can relate to. One remark I've heard of angels is that they are like ideas; we can't see them, but they are there all the same!

Over time, and my little book became invisible among lots of other things horded, it moved house and somehow hid itself for many more years ......

In that time, I wouldn't have been thinking much about Guardian Angels, but my late mother had very poor eyesight, and just when she died at 85 years of age, I thought her Guardian Angel must have been looking out for her all those years crossing through busy traffic in Lucan, and indeed in Dublin City. Her Guardian Angel certainly had a busy time keeping an eye on her.

Friday, 2nd October is the Feast Day of Guardian Angels, and we pray that they'll watch over and guide us in these perilous times. It's comforting to remember they'll have our backs once again.

Mary Mulhall