639 chapter 20: the tutelar patrons of the mystical temple of our hearts, and with our desires: because such is the will of Him who wished us to have all through Mary.”166 Our second guardian is the Angel, to whose guardianship we were entrusted soon after we began to exist. O how much service, how much care we receive from him! David, greatly refined by Divine Wisdom, addresses man as follows: “No evil shall befall you, no affliction come near your tent. For God commands the angels to guard you in all your ways” (Ps 91:11) [LV]. As if He had said in brief: hedged about by the guardianship of your tutelar Spirit no one should fear danger, no one should tremble before evil. Saint Augustine recognized how much the Angel’s protection confers on man, as he himself declares before God in the following words: Our guardian angels “support us with great care and watchful eagerness at all times and in all places, coming to aid us and providing for our necessities, and passing with great solicitude between us and You, O Lord, bringing our groans and sighs to You, that they may obtain for us an easy mercy from Your benevolence, and may bring down from You the desired blessing of Your grace.” (Soliloquies, Ch. 27[3]). Yet what impels them to such great care for us? Their love for us; “they love,” (says the same author,) “their fellow citizens, by whose society they expect that the ruin of the schism [caused by the rebellious Angels] may be repaired” (ibid.).167 Hence they are near us with such great perseverance that they do not neglect even the greatest sinner, yet to his last breath continually watching for his conversion. O how great are the good deeds each man could do, how great are the merits he could win for himself, how great are the evils he could avoid, if he paid attention to and obeyed this Holy Spirit, given him by God the father of the heavenly luminaries [cf. Jas 1:17], as his guide and leader? Finally the third guardian is that saint whose name we took for ourselves either in Holy Baptism or in Holy Confirmation. 166 Bernard, In the Nativity of the B.V. Mary — On an Aqueduct, § 7, in: “St. Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux — Sermons on the Saints, Sermon 68: PL 183, 441 167 Augustine, A Book of Soliloquies of the Soul to God by St. Aurelius Augustine Bishop of Hippo, Ch. 27, n. 3, in: AMS, p. 181.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mw==