The mother who's made a fortune by claiming she sees angels including Martin Luther King and the Virgin Mary
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Angels' delight: Lorna Byrne says she has seen the future and there isn't enough love or trees in it
Lorna Byrne is small, neat and fragrant. Her hair has been carefully straightened, her make-up is immaculate and her voice is so quiet that I almost have to sit on top of her to hear what she’s saying.
But it’s worth it, because her chat is really rather startling.
After all, there can’t be many people who have met the late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King (during a vision in which he was in a previous incarnation — ‘he was bigger and stronger and taller, and he wasn’t black’).
Also, she has seen the Virgin Mary (‘absolutely beautiful, with a crown of jewels’).
What’s more, Lorna has already been to heaven — albeit briefly — when a hospital operation went a bit wrong (‘it’s so beautiful, like a big library and so full of love you don’t want to come back’).
But right now, she’s telling me about ‘Angel Michael’ — one of her team of regular guiding angels — who, eight years ago, persuaded her to start writing the series of books about angels and love that have now been published in more than 50 countries and 20 languages.
Lorna claims that she was in her kitchen when ‘Michael’ appeared. ‘He said: “I have a message for you. You have to write a book about angels and God and love. It will go all over the world and be a bestseller”.’
It was quite a surprise because Lorna was not the bookish sort.
She says her reaction was simply to laugh. ‘I just replied: “How on earth can God imagine me doing this? I can’t even read or write. I’m dyslexic and I have no education. I have a speech impediment. My parents considered me retarded. Why me?”.’
Unfazed, Michael the angel continued: ‘Why not you?’ And she says he told her that ‘help would be sent’.
Using a voice-activated computer, Lorna duly set to work. ‘I had no idea what to write, but I was guided by the angels.
They’d say a couple of words to prompt me and then it’d just flow. And then they’d tell me when I’d done enough. It seemed to work.’
Indeed. The first book, Angels In My Hair (about growing up with angels), took four years from conception to publication. Two more followed in quick succession.
Her fourth book, Love From Heaven (topping the best-seller lists now), is all about love which, according to Lorna, is not so much an emotion as a physical force rather resembling something out of an air-freshener commercial.
‘Love comes from the soul, it’s so beautiful, it’s like a mist, crystal clear, colourless, but so incredible.
‘It sparkles like a piece of ice with the sun shining on it, but for most of us, it is locked away by what looks like a transparent iron band across our chests.’
Lorna’s books are fantastically simplistic, but they have developed a massive cult following. She is mobbed at signings.
She was inspired to write about her experiences after Martin Luther King (right) appeared and told her to
‘We have to ask the bookshops not to advertise them or hundreds and hundreds of people turn up and I never get to bed,’ she says.
Her inspirational talks are sold out, the internet is awash with tales of how her words have transformed people’s lives, and her life is a whirl of planes, trains and hotels.
It seems everyone wants to hear about angels during these straitened times. According to recent polls, more than a third of us believe in them.
Celebrities such as actors Gemma Arterton and Denzel Washington, TV presenter Myleene Klass and the Beckhams (who wear matching guardian angel necklaces) are constantly banging on about them.
And it turns out that this 61-year-old lady from County Kildare is the only person in the world who has ever actually seen one.
‘Lots of people can visualise them, but I am the only person who can actually see them — as clearly as you’re sitting there.’
And feel them. ‘Angel Michael often takes my hand. It doesn’t feel like a human hand. My hand feels lost within it. You can feel so much love through the touch.
‘The angels are my friends and companions. They are my teachers. They are always with me.’
Which means that, today, at our tiny table at Café Rouge in Heathrow’s Terminal One (Lorna is en route from Dublin to give a talk in Glasgow) it’s a bit of a bun fight.
There’s me, Lorna, Lorna’s agent, the photographer and Angels Michael, Elijah and Jimazen.
‘Angel Hosus was downstairs when we arrived, but he’s not here now.’
Maybe he’s popped out for a newspaper? Lorna smiles at me patiently and presses on quietly.
'I have been to heaven. I have been shown the future and love is lacking'
‘And, of course, every single human being has a guardian angel behind them which takes care of your soul and never leaves you for one second. I see them as a beam of light behind the person. And on occasions the light will open up — usually for a reason — and bring attention to a particular person and ask me to pray for them.
‘They are very powerful, very strong. I’m still asking yours to open up its light, but it hasn’t yet. You can’t force them.’
Lorna Byrne was always a bit different. She was the third of eight children (her eldest brother died when he was a baby) in a poor Catholic family in Dublin.
For as long as she can remember, she has seen angels. As a baby in her cot, she could see them flying around her mother. As a toddler, she used to play with them, trying to catch them.
‘They taught me everything,’ she says. ‘God only ever allowed me to have friends at certain times, but they were never allowed to stay.’
Why? ‘So I wouldn’t get contaminated or influenced by the world — I hope that doesn’t sound offensive,’ she adds worriedly.
‘But the angels kept me separate. The only thing I was allowed to go to was the prayer group.’
Not even Brownies?
‘No. Those opportunities never came up for me. I was a bit detached. I couldn’t speak for a long time, though, of course, I was being taught in abundance by the angels from when I was a baby.’
Today, she is very anxious about love. And our worrying lack of it.
Because while Lorna can see the love of married couples mingling in the air and siblings attached with threads of golden love, she can also see those dreaded iron bands, locking it away.
‘Everyone has that band. You too. We’re afraid to tell people that we love them.’
Only babies are exempt. ‘They are pure love. One hundred per cent.
The Virgin Mary: 'She is absolutely beautiful, with a crown of jewels,' Ms Byrne says of their meeting
‘As we grow up, love has got lost in our lives. We don’t love ourselves. Even children have become more cold-hearted and cynical.
‘I have been shown the future and love is lacking. I know this is why God has chosen me to write about love now. I know how important it is for the message to change.’
On and on she talks, soft-voiced, earnest, deadly serious — about wanting to address the UN, advise governments, meet the Pope, the perils of the ozone hole ...
‘We need to plant billions of trees — I don’t know why, but I’m told broad-leafed trees.’
Lorna met her (now dead) husband Joe when she was 17.
‘I knew who he was the minute I saw him working at my dad’s petrol station. The angels had told me about him.’
They’d also told her he would die young, but that she must never tell him for fear of spoiling his life. So she didn’t. Though she did once during their courtship mention her special gift.
‘I said: “I see angels, physically,” and he looked out of the window and said: “Ordinary people like you and me don’t see spiritual things. It’s impossible”.
‘And that was that. We didn’t talk about it again.’
In 2000, Joe died following a series of strokes, aged 47, leaving her a single mother of four.
They were so poor she was left ‘scrabbling for potatoes in the frozen ground’, making ends meet working as a cleaner and still diligently obeying her (rather bossy-sounding) angels.
The first her children knew about them was when she showed them the manuscript of her first book.
'No one else in the world can see them like me'
‘They weren’t surprised. They just said: “We always knew there was something different about you, Mum”.’
But the books changed everything. Today, Lorna is known all over the world. And money isn’t a worry any more.
But there are downsides.
Such is her missionary zeal that she is constantly away from her family: travelling, talking, writing and working through the messages on her website, many of which are in languages she doesn’t understand.
But the angels seem to help her through, occasionally telling her to stop and concentrate on a particular message.
‘It would be nice to have a man in my life again, but they seem to find me untouchable,’ she says sadly. ‘And I’m a bit distracted by the angels.’
They are nothing if not specific – even advising her to sign with a particular (and very successful) American publisher and wait patiently for the right director (such as Steven Spielberg) to make the film of her life.
I’m not a great believer in angels — despite Lorna trying to persuade me that my own guardian angel has made a sudden appearance in her full glory towards the end of our chat. (‘More beautiful than gold and so elegant and strong.’)
Regardless, Lorna doesn’t seem quite like your average mad woman or charlatan, preying on the vulnerable.
‘Of course, people laugh at me and say I’m away with the fairies. But I just remember how many lives I have changed. And that a person who is critical and cynical is just angry and hurt inside.’
So, what next — yet another best-selling book?
‘Yes. I don’t think the angels are going to let me rest.’
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