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Good morning. Try as we might to find good news this Monday, I can count half a dozen crises that might make my life and yours more dangerous today than yesterday. Even if the pictures of dust and rubble were not taken in British communities, and the recorded voices of trauma-scarred families not all recorded in British towns and villages. The world does not feel a safe place right now.

Fear itself is corrosive: it puts me in a perpetual fight or flight mode, and I either get paralysed by complexity and do nothing in the face of evil, or I make bad decisions and end up causing more harm.

Enter the feast of Michael and All Angels, which was celebrated in western churches yesterday. The story comes from the Revelation, that dream-soaked book of apocalyptic visions at the end of the Christian scriptures. War broke out in heaven, we are told. The Archangel Michael grappled with the devil, defeated him, and threw him to earth where he goes about his business with great wrath because he knows his time is short. Folk tradition goes further, saying that when he fell, the devil fell into a blackberry bush. Torn by the thorns, he cursed the bush, as you would. That is why, we are told, blackberries picked after the 30th of September have been sour to taste ever since.

Today I call on Michael for help in those moments when the hair on the back of my neck rises walking into a dark alley, or I need to open a letter from my doctor, or turn on the news. Michael is still fighting evil, we are taught, still protecting the vulnerable and working for the restoration of peace.

Methodists like me do not do as much as some Christian traditions with angels, and when we do, some of us lean heavily on metaphor. But along with 40% of us in Britain, I find I do believe in angels. Incidentally that figure is apparently higher than when the question was first asked in 1939.

Nevertheless, no angel stepped in to stop the bombs, the drone attacks, the rockets that have already fallen today. No angel held back the hurricane wind or the flood last week. I often pray that God will prevent us from doing greater harm: the role of angels is also to restrain and inspire us to be better ourselves, and in how we respond to days like today. A belief in angels cuts across our fears: we are told that in making space for the stranger at our table, ‘we may yet welcome angels unawares,’ and find ourselves part of the solution, not the problem, every day.

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