by Mairi Colme ISBN: 978 1 84747 023 2
Published: 2006
Pages: 382
Description
About the Author Book Extract
This story about my struggle with the Psychiatric System is shot through by my own spirituality. For spirituality is our "saying Yes to God whenever we experience Him"; and I experienced God in my madness. When I was young, "joyous and eager, capable of ecstasy," I had a revelation about the love of God, which I subsequently called the"Book of the Beloved." And I have come to understand the meaning of this book, contemplating on it every day during my years of intense mental suffering, when the emotions of rage and pain dragged through me like a sea. Now, years later, I can say I wouldn't want to be without that suffering as it gave me a unique insight into that love. And I offer the book in the hope that others can espy the Love too, without having to go through the madness as I did.
It is the Love that moves the stars (which I called "the Star-Love," though you can call Him God or whatever you choose) ; the Light-Energy which was in the beginning, "in every blade of grass, flowing in every stream, and moving the stars, ubiquitous," "the cornucopia of creativity from whom the worlds tumbled forth."
And this universal Love, according to my Book, becomes the Lover of the human soul, ie. the Beloved, when she says Yes to him. She is a "maiden" like Our Lady, but precisely because of her innocence and purity she believes what is "beyond the credibility of men's bound minds," and has an inkling of what God can do. So in the crucial Time-span which was come upon her she did not doubt, but rose beyond herself and transcended herself. She gathered her soul in cupped hands as she vowed; "May everything happen to me as Love wants." According to my book this is the mighty "Fiat" which brings about the birth of the divine into the human soul, and in Christian terms, the redeeming birth of the Christ-child into the world of time. "Her words became a pulsation, passing through all the worlds; radiant light-energy pulsed and streamed through her, gathered, centered, streaming in the one direction, with will."
However, as the first page of the Book of the Beloved makes clear, the implications of this, for the Beloved, is that she must share, partake in God's own suffering; just as Our Lady had to share Christ's suffering under His cross. Hence Page One opens with the words; "the Beloved has received the Star-Love; she has known the Star-Love's Agony." It is like the imprinting of nails!
The Book keeps returning to the theme of being lost in a cold dark Void, which I identify personally with the Void of madness; (Madness is the void which is left when you annihilate the self). She keeps clamouring into the Void; "Isn't there somewhere a great enough Love to overcome this cold dark Void of Agony? I cannot reconcile the Star-Love with this Agony; Love is Absent." It is an absence of Love; she feels her soul is not loved and God is nowhere!