Mystic Lorna Byrne - the woman who says she can see ANGELS Geoffrey Wansell (Daily Mail) Lorna Byrne doesn’t look like a mystic. She doesn’t wear flowing robes or a turban, and she does not have a crystal ball. She is a 5ft, 54-year-old Irishwoman with porcelain skin, green eyes and shoulder-length red hair, dressed in a plain blouse and cardigan. But appearances can be deceptive. In the past year, Byrne - who says she’s seen angels from the moment she opened her eyes as a baby - has been acknowledged as one of the most remarkable mystics of modern times, with a best-selling book to prove it.
Mystic Lorna Byrne claims to have been seeing angels all her life and has turned her story into a Christmas bestseller Indeed, so great has Byrne’s reputation become that her book has sold 70,000 hardback copies in Britain and Ireland alone - and next month her fame will extend still further when the company that produced the international bestseller The Da Vinci Code publishes her book in the U.S. They paid a six-figure sum for the privilege. Cynics may dismiss her as a charlatan, the latest in a long line of soothsayers who prey on people’s desire to know their future, but Booth - who is more used to working with mega novelists such as John Grisham - is not one of them.
Though he started as a sceptic, he is now convinced that everything Byrne says and does is touched by ‘palpable sincerity and authenticity’. ‘Everything she says checks out in the Judeo-Christian tradition,’ he says. ‘I suspect there’s no one else like her in the world - no one who has the same constant access to the spiritual world.’ Booth also has a personal reason to believe in her powers. At their second meeting, the Irishwoman told him he needed an operation on his lower abdomen and he should see a doctor straight away. ‘She must have seen the panic in my eyes because she told me it wasn’t cancer or anything like that,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I went to the doctor and it turned out I had a hernia. An operation was duly done and I’m fine.’ But the episode helped to convince him that Byrne was someone very special. ‘I’m only an ordinary person’ So special, indeed, that many are predicting this softly spoken Catholic mother-of-four - whose youngest child is a teenager and whose husband, Joe, died more than a decade ago in his 40s - will become an international phenomenon, offering spiritual hope in these gloomy economic times. Not that she has made a career out of being a mystic.
Byrne kept her visions of angels to herself for many years - she saw herself as an outsider because of them - and she certainly did not share them with her parents or even her husband for many years. When she did finally tell Joe, he replied firmly: ‘This is ridiculous. Ordinary people like you and I don’t see angels.’ Indeed, she insists that she wrote her book only because Michael, an angel she’d seen since her childhood, told her to. ‘But I admitted to him that I was scared of doing so because I was afraid of being ridiculed.’ Many will dismiss her as a fantasist, but it is hard to criticise her honesty.
Byrne makes no claims for herself, beyond what she sees in her visions. In fact, when you speak to her, the first thing that strikes you is how down to earth she is. ‘I’m only an ordinary person,’ she insists, even though she says that as a baby she saw her mother surrounded ‘by wonderful bright shiny beings in all the colours of the rainbow. They were much bigger than I was, about the size of a three-year-old child. It was only much later that I learned from them they were called angels’. Throughout her childhood, Byrne was regarded as ‘retarded’ because she struggled to read. She was later diagnosed with dyslexia. But that did nothing to curtail her psychic powers. Byrne went on to have visions of the Virgin Mary and St Michael, the most senior Archangel, as well as an angel she called Elijah - even though she had no idea there was an Old Testament prophet with that name. ‘I see angels all the time I’m awake,’ she says. ‘I see people’s guardian angels - we each have one - and other types of angels, too, including archangels and cherubim. ‘They talk to me every day, help me to understand what’s going on in the world and I help them do their work among the people I meet.’ Special powers?
Lorna Byrne It sounds fanciful, I admit, but there is a streak of modest honesty in Byrne which is difficult to dismiss. This is not a woman who wants to sell you a potion or spell, rather someone who is almost embarrassed to be saying what she does. Perhaps the most extraordinary vision Byrne has experienced was a tableau of the Nativity. Her version of the birth of Jesus and the herald angels may come as a shock to some, as there is no mention of a stable, shining star, wise men or shepherds, but it is nevertheless a startling vision of the Nativity - and a novel interpretation of what it means. So, in this Christmas season, I asked her to reveal this vision, something she has never done before. It came to her more than ten years ago when her husband Joe was ill in hospital. ‘I went into the front room of my cottage to pray for him,’ she says. ‘I wanted him home for Christmas. ‘I’d often seen angels flying over houses and dropping balls of light on to them at Christmas, and I used to wonder what it meant. What are they doing?
As I started to pray that day, I could feel the angels gathering around me, wrapping themselves around me like a cloth, first softly, then tighter and tighter. ‘My eyes were open wide, but I was drifting away from this world. Then just for a split, but very frightening, second it was as if my breath had been taken away.’ Byrne then says she found herself in a different dimension, being led towards a vast stone wall by two shadowy angels. The wall was so high that it seemed to reach up into the sky and the grey stone was ’sparking with tiny dots of light of many different colours’, she says. In the middle of the wall was a great gateway, and standing guard on either side were two gigantic, golden angels, which were ‘bigger than the trees in the gardens near where I live’. As she approached, the angels began to push the doors apart. ‘Suddenly, once the gap between them was about a yard wide, there was an explosion of light and countless angels began streaming out. ‘They were everywhere, dazzling me at first, millions of them, some with wings, some without. ‘And then I saw that each one was lovingly holding a ball of light, like the ones I’d seen being dropped down into houses at Christmas. ‘Some glanced and smiled at me, but most just rushed past as if I was not there - as if they were in a hurry.’ Then Byrne found herself in the dark again with only the night sky above her. ‘But I could feel that the ground beneath my feet was soft and I began to make out a small, rounded hillside a small distance away, and set into it was a cave.’ Ushered towards it by her two shadowy angels, she realised that the cave was bigger than it had seemed at first - ‘Perhaps 20ft wide and 30ft deep,’ she says. ‘I sensed life in there, in the darkness at the back, and a small number of animals - I could smell animal life.’ ‘I felt such love and happiness’ But that wasn’t what captured her attention.
‘I saw the young woman first. Mary was standing in the middle of the cave, her head bent slightly, her long, dark hair tied with a white scarf, tending to the baby.’ What struck Byrne most was how young the woman was. ‘She was a teenager with a round, pretty, girlish face and she was concerned to make her baby more comfortable.’ The baby Jesus was lying on something that looked like a stone feeding trough with material thrown over it to make it softer, and the teenager was ‘kneeling down to put some more cloth under the baby’. It was then Byrne saw the father. ‘He was taller and much older, maybe in his late 20s. Joseph had a worn face and a dark beard, not black but dark brown, cut short and a little untidily,’ she says. ‘After a few moments, the baby reached up to catch his mother’s finger, with a little turn of the head and a smile. ‘He was a gorgeous, fine, healthy baby, but not a baby with a huge head of hair. What he had was soft and light brown.’ She says: ‘One of the first things I noticed was how long and lovely his eyelashes were - it’s the sort of thing a woman will always notice. ‘His eyes were startling, very white, the pupils dark. Everything about him was like any other baby you might see - except that he seemed to emit a gentle golden glow.’ Gradually, Byrne realised that Jesus was watching about 20 angels circling above him and his parents. ‘They were tall and beautiful, with translucent yellowy gold wings that moved gently and changed colour all the time. Their gowns seemed to flow down them all the time, like waterfalls.
Source Daily Mail - Geoffrey Wansell (Daily Mail) Laura Bryne
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