Michaelmas — the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels — falls on Tuesday, September 29, 2026. Anglicans and Episcopalians keep it under that name; Roman Catholics now keep it as the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels; many Lutherans observe it too. Most Eastern Orthodox churches do not: they honour the archangels on November 8 instead.

It is a strange feast to modern ears, because it asks us to think seriously about creatures we mostly meet on Christmas cards. Scripture is less sentimental, and considerably stranger.

The archangels who are actually named

The Bible names remarkably few angels. Michael appears in Daniel as "one of the chief princes" and again in Jude and Revelation, always in the posture of a defender. Gabriel appears in Daniel and then twice in Luke, carrying announcements — to Zacharias, and to Mary. Raphael appears in the Book of Tobit, which is in Catholic and Orthodox canons and in the Apocrypha of many Protestant Bibles, though not in the Protestant canon proper. That is the whole named roster. Everything else — the hierarchies, the ranks, the choirs — is later tradition doing what tradition does, and it is worth knowing which is which.

The seraphim, who are not what we picture

The seraphim appear once, in Isaiah's vision in the temple:

"In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly." (Isaiah 6:1–2)

Six wings, and four of them are for covering. Only one pair is for flying. Whatever these creatures are, most of their equipment is devoted to reverence rather than motion.

The name itself is the surprising part. The Hebrew root behind *seraph* means to burn — the seraphim are, quite literally, the burning ones. And what the burning ones do, in the only scene we have of them, is not fight or fly or fetch. They sing:

"And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory." (Isaiah 6:3)

Then one of them takes a live coal from the altar and touches it to the prophet's mouth — a burning creature carrying fire to a man who has just called himself unclean, and the fire turns out to be mercy rather than punishment.

Why a prayer app is named for them

Seraph takes its name from that chapter, and the reason is the same reason Michaelmas is worth keeping.

A flame is the app's central image: one prayer a day keeps it lit, and it grows quietly over months. The temptation with any streak is to make it a scoreboard — to let a number become the point, and its loss a small shame. Isaiah 6 pushes the other way. The burning ones burn without being consumed, and their burning is not achievement. It is attention, sustained. Six wings, four of them for covering.

That is also why the flame in Seraph forgives a missed day rather than resetting to zero. A practice that punishes an ordinary human month is training you to fear the tool.

Keeping Michaelmas, simply

You do not need a liturgy to mark it. Read Isaiah 6:1–8 slowly on the twenty-ninth. Sit with the fact that the vision begins with a dead king and ends with a man volunteering. If you keep a daily practice, let that be the day's reading; if you do not, it is a good day to start one, and September has fewer excuses in it than December.

Seraph is free to begin: the daily verse, every reading plan, two of twelve guided sessions, and the complete King James Bible — all 1,189 chapters, bundled offline in the iPhone app — with no account of any kind and no prayer analytics. Seraph+ ($59.99 a year or $6.99 a month, auto-renewing, cancel anytime) opens the remaining ten sessions and the Sacred Seasons, and nothing else. Isaiah 6 is free, as it should be.