I have no fully developed angelology beyond what is revealed in Scripture and handed down in the great Tradition. But, since Scripture nods (at least) to guardian angels and the Tradition explicitly includes them, I see no good reason to doubt their existence, presence, and agency on our behalf. I suspect my guardian angels works overtime, if time has any meaning to such a being.

As I continued to read “Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography” today, this passage about guardian angels impressed me:

…Tolkien had a vision, or “apperception” of spiritual reality, that brought him profound joy:

“I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it … And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.”

He realized, as part of this flash of vision, that “the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love).” Tentatively, he suggested a possible way of understanding what an angel is. Just as in the Christian understanding of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as being the love between them, “so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e., angelic” (Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith”. A Spiritual Biography, Word on Fire Press (2023)).

There are, I think, problems with Tolkien’s proposal, not least that angels are created beings and not coeternal with God. And yet, the notion that guardian angels are God’s attention to the individual believer personalized, that is, God’s focus of love on the individual so intense that it springs to life to minister to the individual, is a gracious thing in the true sense of grace. If not true theology, Tolkien’s vision is nonetheless theological poetry.