Gems from the Letters

[Amarie of the Vanyar]

One of my favourite gem from the letters, is the one I quote here. It the best and the most poetical explanation I have ever heard of the guardian angels. Whenever I read it, I experience the same joy that Tolkien mentions

"Your reference to the care of your guardian angel [...] reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St. Gregory's before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant' Ore was being held there.
I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God's very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean 'personified', by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since - for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining posed mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) - it has occured to me that (...) this is a finite parallel to the Infite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine, i.e. angelic."

Letter 89 to Christopher Tolkien; 7 - 8 November, 1944