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Book 5 ”The Book of Questions”

247. Prologue

Book Five of the Heavenly Revelations of Christ to blessed Bridget of the kingdom of Sweden is rightly entitled the Book of Questions because it proceeds by way of questions to which Christ the Lord gives wonderful answers. It was revealed to the lady in a singular manner, as she and her confessors have often testified explicitly. Once it happened that she was going by horse one day to her castle in Vadstena along with several of her household who were also on horseback. While she was riding, she began to lift up her mind to God in prayer. Immediately, she fell into a spiritual rapture and continued on as though somehow outside herself and separated from her bodily senses, suspended in an ecstasy of mental contemplation.

She saw in spirit a ladder fixed firmly in the earth, the top of which was touching heaven. At its top in heaven she saw the Lord Jesus Christ sitting on a wonderful throne like a Judge in the act of judgment. At his feet stood the Virgin Mary, and surrounding the throne was a countless host of angels and a vast multitude of saints. Lady Bridget saw a certain monk midway up the ladder, a man whom she recognized and who was still alive, a learned scholar in the science of theology but full of guile and devilish wickedness. With his most impatient and agitated bearing he seemed more like a devil than a humble monk. For the lady could see all the inner thoughts and feelings of the monk's heart and how he disclosed them to Christ the Judge seated on the throne through his uncontrolled and agitated way of questioning, as follows below.
Lady Bridget then saw and heard in spirit how Christ the Judge, with a meek and gentle bearing, responded to those questions briefly one by one with utmost wisdom, and how the Virgin Mary, our Lady, spoke a few words now and then to Lady Bridget, as this book will explain below in greater detail.
In that one moment Lady Bridget received this whole book in her mind in one and the same revelation. As she was now approaching the castle, her servants took hold of the horse's bridle and then began to shake her gently and to waken her, as it were, from her rapture. When she came to herself again, she felt terribly sad over the loss of such divine sweetness.
The Book of Questions remained thus effectively fixed in her heart and memory, as though it had all been carved on a marble tablet. She wrote it down in her own language straightaway, and then her confessor translated it into the literary language, just as he had been accustomed to translating the other books of revelations.

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