Guided By Angels: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World. Paddy McMahon

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СКАЧАТЬ which included the right of Catholics and Presbyterians and members of all Christian faiths (other than the established Church of England, which already had the exclusive right) to sit in Parliament. The enabling law was passed in 1829.

      While I was researching O’Connell’s life I was guided to a rare biography of him, written by M.F. Cusack. In much the same way as I had been guided to Ruth Montgomery’s book in the library in Dun Laoghaire, I found myself holding the biography in my hands without consciously having sought it. I later discovered that the author was a woman usually known as Margaret Anna Cusack.

      Something very odd happened when I held that book in my hands for the first time. I heard, or at least sensed, a new voice. Like the other guides who had entered my life, Margaret Anna introduced herself by way of a sort of telepathic communication. I looked down and saw her name, and there she was communicating with me. I was astonished to discover that this new voice belonged to someone who had been ‘real’. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that the guardian angels or spirit guides had been people who lived on earth. Up to that point I thought of them as ethereal beings. Why was this woman contacting me? Where did she come from? I had to find out.

      Margaret Anna was a nineteenth-century celebrity; through her writing and her campaign for social reform she had become internationally famous as the ‘Nun of Kenmare’. Born in Dublin in 1829, she was brought up as a member of the Anglican Church. In her teens her parents separated and she moved to England with her mother. In due course she became engaged to a young man called Charles Holmes; however, during a visit to Ireland to see her father, who was very ill, she got news that Charles had died suddenly. She was devastated. She wrote: ‘I lay in a darkened room for months for it seemed to me as if the sunlight was too glad.’

      After a period of mourning, Margaret Anna turned to intensive religious searching that led to her becoming an Anglican nun. About five years later, in 1859, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and a year after that she entered a Poor Clare convent in Newry, County Down, in Ireland. There she took the name Sister M. Francis Clare.

      In 1861 Margaret Anna moved to Kenmare in County Kerry to help found a branch of her order there. She wrote prolifically and her books had wide international circulation, with the proceeds going to support the Poor Clares and their work with the poor. In total she published more than fifty books, including A Student’s History of Ireland, Woman’s Work in Modern Society, biographies of St Patrick, St Columba and St Bridget, and two autobiographies, The Nun of Kenmare and The Story of My Life. Her novels include Ned Rusheen, or Who Fired the First Shot?, and Tim O’Halloran’s Choice. She also wrote songs, music and verse, and founded Kenmare Publications, through which 200,000 volumes of her works were issued in under ten years. She kept two full-time secretaries occupied, publicly railed against landlords, and wrote letters on Irish causes to the Irish, American and Canadian press.

      Quite simply, Margaret Anna was a feisty, driven and strong-minded character, with a raft of interests and a dogged determination to make a difference. She railed against social injustice, and actively sought political and social reform. She drew attention to the needs of the underprivileged, and fought for equal rights for women. She was passionate about education, and is reputed to have been instrumental in saving thousands of people from dying of starvation when she founded a Famine Relief Fund in 1879. Most astonishingly, she attained this high public profile from within a cloistered institution.

      With her passionate enthusiasm and impatience for creating a just social order she came to be seen as a thorn in the sides of her ecclesiastical superiors. Having incurred the disapproval of the Bishop of Kerry she left Kenmare in 1881. It would be naïve to expect that a nun with such an internationally public profile as a social agitator would earn the approval of the hierarchy. They expected nuns to get on with their lives and work quietly and obediently, without seeking to upset the established order of things, as Margaret Anna was doing. In the nineteenth century women were still generally treated as second-class citizens – mere chattels in the eyes of the law.

      Despite her brave attempts to elicit change, Margaret Anna was poorly treated by the Irish church hierarchy. On one occasion she paid a visit to the Convent of the Poor Clares, in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, en route to Newry. Here she was warmly welcomed by the nuns and arranged to return to the convent soon after. However, before her scheduled return the Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal McCabe, visited the convent and ordered the nuns not to allow her to stay there that night. She was left to find alternative accommodation – quite shocking treatment considering the fact that she had been experiencing heart problems.

      Margaret Anna was not inclined to give up easily, however, and over the following two years she sought to implement her plans to help the underprivileged in Ireland. It was a tiring and thankless task. Exhausted by the continuing struggle, she moved to Nottingham in England in 1883. With the approval and support of Bishop Bagshawe of Nottingham and authorisation from Pope Leo XXIII, she founded the Order of Sisters of St Joseph of Peace early in 1884. The goals of the Order were to choose works for peace that would especially benefit the poor.

      Due to lack of funds, the fledgling Order was curtailed in the progress of its mission. Conscious that Margaret Anna was well known in America (as the ‘Nun of Kenmare’), Bishop Bagshawe asked her to go there to seek help. In spite of medical advice that she was unfit for such a long journey because of her heart condition, she set sail for America late in 1884.

      To her utter surprise and disappointment, she was met with a blank wall of non-cooperation by the hierarchy in New York. Her reputation as the Nun of Kenmare, an internationally renowned author and social reformer, had preceded her. Put simply, she was regarded as a troublemaker to be ignored.

      One man, however, was willing to stand up for her. Bishop Wigger of Newark realised the value of her work and invited her to his diocese. In March 1886 she established a branch of her Order in New Jersey. But the hierarchical grapevine conspired against her in her efforts to expand the work of the Order throughout America. It didn’t help that so many of the American hierarchy were of Irish extraction and aware of the Irish church authorities’ opinions about her. Deeply anguished, in 1888 she decided that the work of the Order would not prosper while she was connected with it, and she resigned.

      Having formally left her position as Mother General of the Order, her personal integrity wouldn’t allow her to remain as a member of a Church with such inflexible patriarchal structures, and to a large extent she reverted to the Anglican beliefs of her early life. She was in much demand as a lecturer and travelled widely throughout America speaking to large audiences.

      At the end of 1891 Margaret Anna returned to England, where, despite increasingly failing health, she continued to write. She died in Leamington, England, on 5 June 1899. Her name was excised as the founder of her Order because she was branded as an apostate by the Catholic Church. It was not restored until 1970.

      Margaret Anna was a remarkable, pioneering woman, and in her evolved spirit state she continues to be a source of inspiration and help to all those in need. I know her intimately now, and she comes across as a warm, humorous and completely non-pious woman – always direct, and endearingly honest. Above all, she emphatically conveys what an exhilarating experience life – continuing life – can be. I knew that before she died she was in a debilitated physical condition. Yet here she was – very much alive in another form, and showing in a most vivid and exciting way that life is a continuing adventure.

      In my experience, one of the peculiarities of being human is that we like freedom, but (somewhat contradictorily) we also like being told what to do. We want guidance to follow our own path. Some people might consider guardian angels – spirit guides – as benign dictators who plot the course of our lives and tell us how to live them. This couldn’t be more wrong, as I soon discovered.

      In the spirit world free will is sacrosanct, and at an evolved level of awareness there can never be interference with it. So when I refer to being in constant СКАЧАТЬ