Fra Angelico: A Series About Angels, Miracles, and a Time-Travelling Monk
So this past week I’ve been bitten by a new idea, and so captured my mind I had to jump on it.
It’s a series of short stories, centered on the character of a medieval illuminator and painter, Blessed Fra Angelico, and his team of friendly angels. Together, they travel throughout history helping to save people, right wrongs and bring about miraculous events.
Until the amazing day when I can pay an artist to actually illustrate a cover, I’ve used generative AI to capture the feeling of magic and youthful excitement.
The more I researched Fra Angelico, the more I found that this combo was utterly perfect. Not only did he pioneer an original style of painting angels, he also painted a Dominican friar, or even St Dominic himself in many of his paintings. This was to help the meditating friars enter into the scene themselves.
Well, what if… Fra Angelico wasn’t painting random friars, but himself?
And he left these scenes all over the walls and manuscripts he touched, recording the most incredible moments of his adventures?
From Biography.com: Fra Angelico was born in 1400 in Florence, Italy. Between 1420 and 1422 he entered a monastery the San Domenico at Fiesole. He painted altarpieces and manuscripts. Linaiuoli Altarpiece, a triptych enclosed in a marble shrine, was an early masterpiece, but he went on to paint famous frescoes at the monastery of San Marco in Florence and a chapel in the Vatican. He died in 1455.
(‘Fra‘: a prefixed title given to an Italian monk or friar.)
Some of the adventures I’ve thought of so far center on the miraculous moments in the lives of the saints and Sacred Scripture.
For example, what if he’s sent back to Palestine during the Roman invasion, and similar to Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has to place a few drops of a special vial in the mouth of a dying servant, the servant to a centurion who’s left for the day.
Or Fra Angelico is sent to medieval Spain, where he has to gather roses and rush to find a queen who’s serving bread to the poor in the streets, and swap out her bread for roses right before her husband the king demands to see what she’s holding.
Or how about visiting the forge in Angelium (Caelos? I haven’t decided yet), one of the angelic cities, where the first Rosary is being crafted, and he has to take it to a hovel in England in time for Our Lady to present it to a meditating monk?
As you can see, it’s a new take on the idea of Santa Claus, and a new way to learn about the saints through miraculous moments in their lives.
Why Stories Like this Are Important
Apart from being a ridiculously fun idea, why did I think something like this is important? I think a lot of childrens’ stories today are too materialist.
When kids are young, they need plenty of stories about the magic of ordinary life - the kind of thing older kids would see as boring. But to a child who’s never experienced anything? It’s all magic, all day, every day. Pots and pans and cooking and cleaning.
But a time comes when we need to put away the things of the child, and induct them into the myth and mystery of adulthood - rife with sacramental magic and meta dragons and flying saints, and all sorts of mind-bending things.
I hope this series helps families enjoy fun adventures with a friendly friar. But these are not theologically accurate. They’re not meant to be. They’re meant to feel like Narnia, like Tolkein, or like a fantasy romp through the angelic realms.
I’m taking loose inspiration from the visions and paintings of Fra Angelico, St Hildegard of Bingen, and of Fr Sergei Bulgakov, who were passionate about the ancient view of the world. An view where the cosmos is saturated in the activity and energy of angels in all their choirs, responsibilities. Angels who work and intervene all the time - sometimes miraculously - and sometimes as matter of course in our human history.
Sacred Scripture and the experiences of the saints and mystics portray angels as great, powerful, gloriously dangerous, and delightfully benevolent.
Perhaps you’ll enjoy this theological fiction. Imagine an innocent, helpful Fra Angelico romping through time and space with an eclectic team of angels, inducting the reader into Narnian other-worlds just beyond our line of sight, filled with incredible cities and places where the angels work to keep our world ticking along, bristling with myriad hierarchies and characters.
I don’t know much more at this point, but if you stay with me, I’ll release the stories as they’re written. And I’d love to know what you think.