After reading the back cover, people will either open my book titled The Messenger, or they won’t go near it. The subtitle: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide will intrigue some, while others will be put off by it. Those who begin to read it will find that it opens with this sentence: You do not have to believe this story. It happened all the same. I don’t ask my readers to believe it. I simply put it before them, as it was put before me.

Half the book is my story as I lived it—the gruesome, heartbreaking experience of the death of my child and its aftermath. The other half was given to me by someone who lived almost two thousand years ago in Egypt: My Spirit Guide, Lukhamen. Let me use the proper term for what happened. I channeled his story. Improbable? Indeed it was. Is.

I’ve read about other people who’ve experienced this phenomenon. I have also met some. They were not “woo-woo” people. They were not flaky or inveterate liars. Or con artists. Or on drugs. They were ordinary people with ordinary lives, ordinary jobs, and not particularly imaginative. The first one I happened to hear (on National Public Radio) was a well-known newspaper journalist. As for me, I have lived my own professional life in the company of hard-core realists – engineers, research scientists, and government officials. I spent my entire career in Washington, D.C., interrupted only by a brief stint as a diplomat in Brussels. My life was lived in two centers of government that are about as far removed from metaphysical philosophies as ever I could imagine. I was, and still am, tremendously impressed with intelligence and the scientific mind that is driven to explore the unknown, the unknowable, and the unbelievable. But let me stop there. I am not an apologist for channelers or channeling. It is, as they say, what it is.

What I would like to do is answer the most-asked questions put to me by my readers. I believe I should include these in an introduction to The Messenger II. (I’m working on a sequel.) The questions are, WHAT WAS IT LIKE? And HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

To answer the first question, the best explanation I can give is that it was like looking at television. Imagine that you are watching, say, a soap opera. (That is so unfair to my Spirit Guide, but it is a commonly understood form of a continuing story.) Each segment is just a few minutes long. You turn off the television and write down what you heard and saw. It was almost just that simple. Except that I was looking at television with my eyes closed. The story would always resume where it left off. Like soap operas do. One negative reviewer (gratefully, I’ve only gotten one so far) questioned my ability to recall conversations. He just chalked the whole thing up to the conclusion that I invented the whole thing. I must say I’m flattered that he would credit me with the massive imagination it would have taken to dream it all up plus the fiction writer’s gift for concocting a complicated plot.

Many of us can recall (more or less) scenes from our favorite movies. How many of us can remember the lines from a famous airport scene that ends with, “Here’s looking at you, kid?” Can you see the hat Ingrid Bergman is wearing? Can you see the tears in her eyes? I can.

And how did such an extraordinary, improbable thing happen? It happened because I requested it. Now, when I think of it, it was more like a prayer. I asked for a Spirit Guide to come to me, to help me. I was at the end of my rope and nobody had yet made me understand why my young son had to die. I asked and I received. I asked and Love answered.

The truth that I will ask my readers to believe comes at the end of the book. And it is this: There exists a Love that is greater than any of us can imagine. It will find us in the darkest hour. There is a light in the night for all who mourn, and death is banished. Life is all there is, and love is greater than fire, and wind, and time.

***

From the back cover of The Messenger:

Helen Delaney is in a railway book store, inconsolable and suicidal after the death of her son. A book at eye level catches her attention. She touches it, and it falls off the shelf, into her hand. It is a set of instructions on how to connect with a spirit guide. Thus begins The Messenger, the true, intimate story of a grieving mother, a gifted medium, and the spirit guide Lukhamen, who keeps her alive by recounting the story of his life.

The Messenger by Helen Delaney is available at http://www.Amazon.com