It’s true. I had a "vision" at church this morning.

No, it wasn’t a mystical experience. I didn’t see or hear anything. I didn't experience an apparition. It was, rather, something much more mundane yet still profound: a thought that came out of nowhere and illuminated a spiritual reality that I had been ignoring.

Tired of receiving the Eucharist reflexively as I so often do, in recent weeks I have been asking our Lord to pull aside the veil a bit so that I can more fully see and appreciate the spiritual reality behind the bread and wine I was about to consume. This morning I repeated that prayer, and a truth was “revealed” to me that I had not been expecting.

Unbidden and unexplained, as I waited in the long line leading up to the sanctuary, I suddenly imagined a scene of angels all around, standing their ground and guarding the church from every conceivable approach. They were facing and holding at bay a legion of demons who were constrained from entering this holy place. The evil ones were hissing and moaning and hurling every kind of epithet at us, aiming to distract and demoralize us from the joy we were meant to experience in that holy moment.

The devils were in absolute agony at the thought that we were receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. They began hurling accusations toward us, reminding us of our unworthiness and of all of the bad things we had done during the week to make us undeserving of this gift of great Love. They knew our weaknesses intimately, and they knew which guilt “buttons” to press in order feed our feelings of unworthiness.  If they couldn't stop us from receiving Him, they would do all that they could to deflect the graces we were meant to receive. In my mind, I saw their desperation to prevent us from experiencing the joy and consolation of receiving our Lord.

The angels, in deadly earnest and with grim faces, were protecting us, preventing these evil ones from swarming down to devour us. Our adversaries cringed as each person received the precious Lord, because they, like the angels, know profoundly the great, great good to which we were honored to be called in that moment, and which they were powerless to stop. But they wanted to stop it. Lord, did they want to.

By the time I got to the priest and held out my hand to receive Christ, I was renewed in the knowledge of the momentousness of what I was doing.  I realized the importance of this Sacrament of Love, a sacrament so precious that one could imagine the Lord mobilizing legions of angels to protect us spiritually as we worship Him at Mass and walk up to receive Him in Holy Communion. I also recalled the truth of an ages-old bit of spiritual wisdom: The closer we get to Christ, the more Satan and his minions work to harass and bedevil us so that we will be discouraged in our efforts to achieve closer union with him. If, as my imagination “revealed,” they were so energized to throw any impediment our way in the reception of the Eucharist, I had to acknowledge that what I was doing at that moment was of supreme importance.

I know, I know. Many of you don't believe in the devil. Many of you think my brain has gone crackers. What else would explain my belief in such "fairy tales."

All I can do is try to convince you of the reality of this spiritual warfare in which we are engaged every day, but of which we are so often blissfully unaware. I am convinced that it explains the frustrations, conflicts, and obstacles that seem to grow when we are about to achieve a closer union with Christ.

Yes, these very obstacles can come from deep within ourselves. We don't necessarily need to take refuge in the reality of demons to explain the spiritual self-sabotage we commit out of fear of losing ourselves in the intimacy that comes with being one in Christ. But spiritual obstacles also come from without. They often come from our deadly spiritual enemies, who would like nothing better than to derail our spiritual progress so as to claim another lost soul.

The closer you get to Christ, the more prayers you should pray for protection from the Enemy. He doesn't want you to have peace and salvation in Christ. He loathes your closeness to the one he has rejected. But do not be discomfited. Simply know that you have the protection of angels available to you in the midst of your spiritual challenges. You just need to ask for it.

For my part, it is far less likely that I will ever receive Christ with the same sense of "been there, done that" indifference that I have been guilty of in the past.