Abstract
In The Love of Thousands: How Angels, Saints, and Ancestors Walk with Us Toward Holiness, popular spiritual writer Christine Valters Paintner offers an invaluable and highly practical resource for integrating the presence of angels, saints, and ancestors into our spiritual lives. While describing the historical role of angels, saints, and ancestors, Valters Paintner also beautifully integrates her own personal story. In particular, Valters Paintner describes the ways in which these spiritual practices have provided comfort and growth for her as she has confronted loss and grief in her own life, particularly after the death of her mother.
In describing the role of angels in our lives, Valters Paintner focuses on the Exodus account of Jacob wrestling with an angel. At the dawn, after a night of wrestling, Jacob demands a blessing from the angel. For Valters Paintner, angels can challenge us and force us to do things that we might not do otherwise, and they can bless us. In fact, we can demand their blessings. At the end of her narrative about angels, Valters Paintner offers several practical sections, including a spiritual practice, a meditation process, a creative exploration, and finally, a blessing. She follows this same format in every chapter so that readers can apply the material to their lives. In fact, at the outset, Valters Paintner recommends that reader take their time with this book and perhaps read just one chapter a day or a week.
In describing the role of saints, Valters Paintner reviews the way in which saints were originally chosen. In the early centuries of Christianity, saints were not chosen by the church, but by their local community. These early saints were people who were recognized for having lived their lives in a “particularly intimate way with God, serving the community out of that love” (p. 41). As a result, Valter Paintner argues that sainthood has always been available to all people and that sainthood has always represented the fulfillment of God’s goal for humanity. Thomas Merton wrote, “For me to be a saint is to be myself”’ (p. 46). Valters Paintner would agree. As in the section on angels, Valters Paintner ends each chapter with a spiritual practice, a meditation process, a creative exploration, and finally, a blessing.
The largest section of the book covers the role of ancestors. Valters Paintner maintains that the Christian traditions recognizes that there is some kind of consciousness or awareness that continues beyond death in this world; we can be in relationship with our ancestors; not all dead are fully well; and the dead can change and be affected by our actions, and the reverse is true as well (pp. 79–80).
She also encourages people to strive to communicate with ancestors, in the same way that people communicate with angels and saints, “through dreams, visions, synchronicity, nature, ritual and imagination” (p. 87). By communicating with ancestors, Valters Paintner argues that people can start to heal intergenerational trauma, to grieve their losses, and to welcome the blessings of their ancestors. Particularly, in the section on ancestors, Valters Paintner beautifully models these practices by describing her own ancestral work, particularly with her deceased parents. Finally, she argues for the importance of doing ancestral work with the planet, which has deep connection to every living thing. As in the previous sections, Valters Paintner ends each chapter with a spiritual practice, a meditation process, a creative exploration, and finally, a blessing.
Ultimately, Valters Painter points to the angels, saints, and ancestors as “the love of thousands” that bless every person. Yet, most people are unaware of the abundance of love surrounding them. To increase awareness, she recommends allowing for time to grieve daily; to move slowly through the world; to reject compulsive “busyness”; to pause regularly and breathe deeply; to roll along the grass; and to give thanks daily for the “gift of being alive” (p. 184). To Valters Paintner, all these actions are the process of completely surrendering to love. In times of anxiety and fear, Valters Paintner provides a resource for stepping back from the distractions of our time and recognized the deep and abundance ways in which we are all blessed. Angels, saints, and ancestors are there for us, if we but look for them.