Overview

First published in 1981 and long out of print, The Holy Angels has yet to be surpassed as a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the nature of the angels and their role in our salvation. In layperson's terms, Mother Alexandra presents the essence of everything the Church has to teach us about the angels, beginning with the Old Testament, continuing through the New Testament, and concluding with the Tradition of the Church as expressed in her theology, hymnography, and iconography. For those who long to become better acquainted with these holy servants of God and to understand their role in our lives, this book is a great place to start.

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9781944967772

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Reviews

I find The Holy Angels, as a teaching manual, to be comprehensively enlightening as I slowly read along noting what I think I already knew and what I never knew. Readers will soon realize in a way they had not before that we are consistently befriended by watchful HOLY ANGELS who exist beyond the pages of childhood catechism books. MAY MOTHER ALEXANDRA'S MEMORY BE ETERNAL! -Mackie J., Covington, LA I was delighted to recently discover that The Holy Angels by Mother Alexandra has been republished by Ancient Faith and offered as an audiobook! The author rightly notes that in our modern context, we give insufficient consideration to the angels (that is, to all the bodiless creatures) even though we are often reminded of their presence in creation in the prayers of the Church and in the Holy Scripture. We ask the Lord in every liturgy for an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies, and in our daily prayers, we ask to be guided and guarded by and surrounded with an array of Holy angels. Tuesdays are for the angels in our weekly cycle of commemoration. And still, we know nothing, or almost nothing, about them! Mother Alexandra's book seeks to resolve that. She approaches the subject from a foundation of direct encounter with the angels in her own life, an incident not many of us can claim for our own. Having witnessed the angels directly, Mother Alexandra assiduously takes the reader through the witness of the Church, beginning with the scriptures and ending in the context of Orthodox theology, liturgics, and sacred art. The holy abbess does this with a fluency in the subject at hand that entirely removes any pretension from her approach. There's nothing academic about this work, though it is well researched and well sourced. St Isaac the Syrian says that words coming from righteous activity is a treasury of hope, and Mother Alexandra's active life of service, prayer, and study informs this text so that it is precisely such a treasury. It is accessible to those who are just beginning to deepen their understanding of the teaching and practices of the Church no less than it is accessible to those who are steeped in the writings of the saints. The citations of liturgical and patristic texts offers the reader the opportunity to further explore any particular understanding of the angels and their role in the Church offered herein. Mother Alexandra reminds us repeatedly that the angels surround us and protect us. Ignoring their role in the story of salvation, from the beginning until this present day (and indeed until the end of the ages!), we not only lose a rich aspect of our theology (in the sense of understanding doctrine), we lose our ability to connect to a vital aspect of creation, depriving ourselves of contact with the noetic world-that is, we lose a piece of our true theology of prayer. After getting through this book, I became acutely aware of the pervasiveness of the angelic hosts in our scripture, worship, and spiritual writings. While there is no dramatic change in the order my daily life as a result of this, a great deal of consolation has entered my interior life; I pray, fellow reader, that the same will hold true for you after you complete this book. -Pedro S., Green Bay, WI

"I find The Holy Angels, as a teaching manual, to be comprehensively enlightening as I slowly read along noting what I think I already knew and what I never knew. Readers will soon realize in a way they had not before that we are consistently befriended by watchful HOLY ANGELS who exist beyond the pages of childhood catechism books. MAY MOTHER ALEXANDRA'S MEMORY BE ETERNAL! -Mackie J., Covington, LA I was delighted to recently discover that The Holy Angels by Mother Alexandra has been republished by Ancient Faith and offered as an audiobook! The author rightly notes that in our modern context, we give insufficient consideration to the angels (that is, to all the bodiless creatures) even though we are often reminded of their presence in creation in the prayers of the Church and in the Holy Scripture. We ask the Lord in every liturgy ""for an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies,"" and in our daily prayers, we ask to be ""guided and guarded by"" and surrounded with an array of Holy angels. Tuesdays are for the angels in our weekly cycle of commemoration. And still, we know nothing, or almost nothing, about them! Mother Alexandra's book seeks to resolve that. She approaches the subject from a foundation of direct encounter with the angels in her own life, an incident not many of us can claim for our own. Having witnessed the angels directly, Mother Alexandra assiduously takes the reader through the witness of the Church, beginning with the scriptures and ending in the context of Orthodox theology, liturgics, and sacred art. The holy abbess does this with a fluency in the subject at hand that entirely removes any pretension from her approach. There's nothing ""academic"" about this work, though it is well researched and well sourced. St Isaac the Syrian says that ""words coming from righteous activity is a treasury of hope,"" and Mother Alexandra's active life of service, prayer, and study informs this text so that it is precisely such a treasury. It is accessible to those who are just beginning to deepen their understanding of the teaching and practices of the Church no less than it is accessible to those who are steeped in the writings of the saints. The citations of liturgical and patristic texts offers the reader the opportunity to further explore any particular understanding of the angels and their role in the Church offered herein. Mother Alexandra reminds us repeatedly that the angels surround us and protect us. Ignoring their role in the story of salvation, from the beginning until this present day (and indeed until the end of the ages!), we not only lose a rich aspect of our ""theology"" (in the sense of understanding doctrine), we lose our ability to connect to a vital aspect of creation, depriving ourselves of contact with the noetic world-that is, we lose a piece of our ""true theology"" of prayer. After getting through this book, I became acutely aware of the pervasiveness of the angelic hosts in our scripture, worship, and spiritual writings. While there is no dramatic change in the order my daily life as a result of this, a great deal of consolation has entered my interior life; I pray, fellow reader, that the same will hold true for you after you complete this book. -Pedro S., Green Bay, WI"

Author Information

"Mother Alexandra was born in 1909 in Bucharest, Romania, the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, and was christened Ileana. She lived through the harrowing events of World War I and, being a perceptive child, fully comprehended the suffering which surrounded her. She early learned to follow her mother in works of charity. At 22 she married Archduke Anton of Austria and lived in Sonnberg, Austria, giving birth to six children, two born during the Second World War. In March 1944, wishing to get away from the Nazi oppression, she moved the children to Romania. Here, at the foot of her castle of Bran, she built a hospital in memory of her mother, Queen Marie. She devoted herself to the care of the war-wounded and lovingly served the surrounding population. Subsisting and still working at the hospital, it was here she witnessed the end of the war and the communist takeover in August 1944. Then began the sad exile's life, the ""D.P."" [Displaced Person-ed.] no one wanted. She and her family went first to Switzerland, then Argentina, and finally, obtaining scholarships for most of the children, they settled in Newton, Massachusetts. Their needs were met by the sale of jewelry and by Mother Alexandra's extensive lecture tours. When all the children were either married or had found sufficient employment, she fulfilled her great desire to devote her life entirely to God and became a nun. She founded the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, and reposed there in 1991."

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