Entertaining angels: Seeing is believing

by Michael Shackleton · August 24, 2009

ANGELS IN MY HAIR, by Lorna Byrne. Random House, London. 2008. 325pp.

Reviewed by Michael Shackleton

Lorna Byrne sees herself as an Irish�mystic. She claims to�see angels all around her most of the time, and she tells the story of her life and how the angels guide and advise her at every step of the way. She does so�in a readable, interesting and sometimes�rather absurd manner.

As a child she was backward and considered different. But, she believes, this was because the angels wanted to absorb her attention and draw it to the reality of how they work in the world. Even her husband Joe felt she gave more time to entertaining angels than him, yet the pair managed to live with it. Angels told her that her Joe would die young, and he did. Her bereavement and that of her children,�was�lightened by the presence of angels giving her consolation.

I cannot but think here of another Irish person, George Berkeley, who was born in Kilkenny in the 17th century. He was a philosopher-bishop who, broadly speaking, controversially taught that there is nothing outside the mind.�The things we experience�through our senses are merely subjective impressions or�pure imagination.

Well, anyone who says they see visions of Christ, the Virgin, the saints or angels, and converse with them,�could be�in the same boat. Byrne experiences angels as walking, talking friends and counsellors, sometimes sporting feathery wings. They exist for her but not for us in the same way. The Church believes that angels really exist. Byrne plainly does so too. For her, however, believing is also seeing.

Michael Shackleton is a former editor of The Southern Cross.