The feast of St Michael the Archangel either presents an invitation to engage with the world of the spirit and the supernatural, or becomes essentially an embarrassing festival of nostalgia about an outworn cosmology which, in the mind of the modernist, threatens to delegitimise faith rather than infuse it with new vigour.
People without etymology or Hebrew may have become so used to the name Michael that its embodiment as a theological question passes them by. But it shouldn’t, because as a theological question it goes to the root of the struggle to establish an identity in the world that is both fully human and fully ensouled.
