Margaret Anna gave short shrift to my qualms. She suggested that we forget about all that and get on with the project that would become this book. She began by describing to me her own death: ‘My friends put on my coffin: “Margaret Anna Cusack fell asleep June 5th, 1899, aged 70 years.” The thought was nice. I said goodbye to my poor old body, which had been tired out for a long time. It had struggled with ill-health for many years and had lasted a lot longer than I could reasonably have expected.’
Margaret Anna looked on as her friends lovingly dealt with her body. After the burial ceremonies were over, she suddenly became aware of what she could only describe as a radiant being smiling at her and then giving her a big hug. Without any perception of movement she found herself as a guest of honour at a big welcoming party. It was a wonderfully joyful reunion with many friends.
I asked her whatever questions occurred to me and she answered them directly, without any evasion. Did she expect to be judged after her arrival? She did, she said, but there wasn’t any sign of anything like that.
How did she recognise her friends? She said she just knew them. They were like effulgent beings of light, yet easily distinguishable one from another.
Were there gender distinctions in spirit? She answered: ‘There were and there weren’t. I know that’s a strange kind of answer. The best way I can try to explain it is that there was a transcendence of gender, like, say, when you communicate on a soul level with somebody. Yet there were some whom I had known as female and some as male, and I seemed to communicate with them in that way and they with me.’
Was there any sexual frisson? ‘I wasn’t always a nun! Yes, there was sexual frisson, as you put it, in the sense of a wonderful joyful intimacy, which is what sexuality involves, as I understand it.’
In asking her questions, I was aware that I was thinking in a linear way, from a time and space point of view. In her new situation it seemed as if everything was happening simultaneously. She explained that she was no longer aware of time. She was still getting used to feeling completely free. On earth she was always busy – things to be done, ideas to be explored, books to be written, bishops to be cajoled. Now here she was with no agenda, but full of the joy of just being, and surrounded by kindred spirits in every sense of the word.
In order to help me understand, she explained that the reunion went on for maybe a few hours or maybe a few days in my time. She hadn’t yet completely shaken off the feelings of illness and tiredness that were her constant companions on earth. At some stage one of her old/new friends suggested that she might like to take a little rest. She agreed, and instantly she seemed to be lying on a wonderfully comfortable bed in a beautifully appointed room with soft music enveloping her. She relaxed into the harmony of it all. She said that it was misleading to talk of things happening in sequence, because everything seemed to be happening all at once.
In any event, the relaxation process refreshed her and, once again, she found herself with a group of the friends she had met earlier. They had a lot of catching up to do. I asked her whether she was beginning to be curious about what she was going to be doing. I said that I couldn’t imagine her being happy sitting around relaxing and doing nothing, no matter how enjoyable the company.
She replied that she didn’t have to do anything – but that she wasn’t doing ‘nothing’. Impressions were coming to her all the time. Even as she thought about something – for example, how her Sisters from the Order were getting on – she found she was able to get a picture or a vision of that immediately. It was all completely effortless. She asked me to imagine this scenario: I want to visit my friends in America. I have to go through a lengthy process of booking tickets, paying fares, hours of travel interspersed with delays at airports. But in the world she was now in, there was none of that. The only drawback was that she couldn’t converse with her sisters in the Order or touch them. She could talk to them, but they didn’t hear her. Initially, that was a big disappointment, particularly as she had had to suffer the pain of separation from them while she was bodily on earth. After a while she adjusted to the way things were and began to enjoy helping out in unobtrusive ways.
Who is God?
Early on in our communication I asked Margaret Anna whether it was possible to prove for those of us on earth that there is life after death. ‘It’s often said that there is no proof of life after death, because no one ever comes back to tell their relatives, friends or even interested researchers about their new life; however, this is not the case. Many souls have been communicating through the centuries with those humans who have been open to receiving them so I can’t take any credit in projecting, as it were, a voice from the grave.’
Margaret Anna was very easy to work with, and her sense of humour was always evident in all of our communications. She regularly teased me, for example, by saying she knew that I had thought she looked very grim in the photographs I had seen of her, and we developed a light-hearted sort of banter that belied the extraordinary level and content of the information she passed on to me. It was strange for me getting used to the idea that she could read my thoughts like that, but as our conversations continued I got used to it.
My main goal in our early communications was to ask exactly what happens when our body ‘dies’ and we pass over.
Margaret Anna said that she experienced a lot of confusion in the aftermath of her passing. She had changed religions, had been a social reformer, had been regarded as a nuisance by her ecclesiastical superiors, and she had been vilified and condemned as an apostate. As she says, ‘It seemed as if I had created conflict where I had wanted harmony, and hate where I wanted love.’
She had become so accustomed to rejection, she was very concerned about what God would be like. What if He turned out to be like the figures of authority that she had known in the past?
I assumed that, as Margaret Anna Cusack, and then perhaps more particularly as Sister/Mother Francis Clare, she would have built up a relationship with God as a Supreme Being in some form. I asked her where God fitted into her new situation. She replied, ‘For a start, there was still no sign of any call to judgment and I began to realise that there wouldn’t be. There wasn’t any indication of God wanting to see me for any other reason either, which was both a relief and a disappointment.’
In my interaction with spirit beings I needed to be completely relaxed and quiet in my mind. I had an arrangement with Margaret Anna that whenever I felt tired or unclear we discontinued our sessions.
When I indicated to her that I was ready to continue, she said: ‘I was releasing the mental restrictions that were built up in my physical lifetime – having, of course, already released the material ones. Impressions came flooding back to me of what I had previously known, including the notion of God, not as a separate being, but as the life force in all of us. There was to be no judgment other than that which I chose to make on myself.’
While I was writing down these words, I recalled an occasion when I was travelling on a bus one evening. I was in a sort of meditative mood and I hoped that nobody would sit beside me and start talking to me. There seemed to be a good chance I’d be left in peace as there was a number of empty seats on the bus. Even so, a woman got on the bus and made a beeline for the seat beside me. I can’t describe her very well, as I was trying not to look at her, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was a large lady, conservatively dressed. She sat down firmly and decisively, with a very strong physical presence. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be dozing, but that didn’t work.
She said in a loud voice: ‘They’re real places, you know.’
I mumbled something, not wanting to encourage her by asking the obvious question. That didn’t stop her. She repeated her statement, so I felt I had to ask what places she