DETAILS
In Service to Spirit
by Richard Lanigan
92 pages
$20
Tellwell Publishing
Lanigan will have an event to launch the book during the reopening of St. Brigid's Spiritualist Church of Edmonton, located at #101, 10441 178 St. in Edmonton. The event will take place from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 12. This will occur following regular services starting at 10:30 a.m.
Every spiritual event in this book is completely true, says St. Albert author Richard Lanigan, offering a sober but sadly necessary confirmation that he is not out to swindle anyone with the kind of celebrity psychic antics you might have seen on late-night TV.
In Service to Spirit offers many anecdotes from his life that are indeed extraordinary — fanciful even — but it seems preposterous to suppose the gentle and congenial fellow invented them all. Why would someone do that and curry the slander that might come his way? The book, in a way, is his announcement party for the special gift the 70-year-old has had his entire life.
“Although I knew these things were happening, how do you tell people?” he said, reflecting on the many ways he has seen things without his eyes and knowing things without being told.
“They look at you and say, ‘You’re crazy’. As a matter of fact, one of my very, very best friends said to me one day, ‘Richard, you’re working with the devil,’” he said with a laugh, reflecting on the comment from his “very Catholic” friend.
“I said, ‘It’s nothing like that at all. It’s actually very sacred.’”
The Irish-born Lanigan was only four when he began to have his experiences with Spirit, he recalls in the first pages of the book. He would stop playing with his toys to tell his mother stories, stories that later would come true. Soon, he would be having out-of-body experiences called astral travels.
His mother urged him to not tell anyone.
“I had to keep it to myself for two reasons. People didn’t accept it as much as I would like to have had. It’s more accepted now ... much more. The other part is I couldn’t prove any of this to anybody anyway. And I didn’t understand it. ‘How did this happen? How is this happening to me?’ It was just incredible,” he said, adding, “It was really tough because you couldn’t go and tell people about it. I was yearning to talk to people for somebody that might understand me.”
He was in Canada when Spirit told him things about his ill mother in hospital in Ireland he couldn’t possibly have known. Talking to his family later, they related those premonitions as true.
Later, he would learn more about his abilities as a medium by calling on Spirit to help heal people who needed it. In the book, he offers all these stories, along with testimonials.
Skeptics aside, the author wants to not only step away from keeping these things secret as his Catholic mother once bade him to do. He’s not out to convince people if they doubt what he says. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs and opinions, he said.
He simply wants to spread the message so others who might be like him, or those who wish to be so, can also develop their own connections to Spirit and live better lives.
It was by chance that he met a woman who knew about his spiritual connections by “reading” him. That meeting led to him become involved with a community of other spiritualists. He is now a reverend in St. Brigid's Spiritualist Church of Edmonton, which offers meditations, mediumship readings, and spiritual healings, not to mention regular Sunday services as any other church would. There, he has learned to further develop his connections and abilities.
Beyond that, however, it has been a blessing for Lanigan to get these stories down on paper and published for the world to read. He lives his life by the Golden Rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. He also lives to serve others through Spirit because that is his calling.
Part of his service is to say that everyone can access Spirit; you only have to be willing to allow it in.
“The things that have happened to me in my life, especially with the healings, are just incredible ... out of this world. But that power is available. I decided that I wanted to share it with the world. I’m not writing this book about me to make me famous or anything like that. I’m writing the book to tell you ... what is available to everyone, and to also show that there are real mediums in the world.”
