To write Stable in Bedlam, a memoir, a meditation: try homosexual, try intense, devout Irish-Catholic upbringing, try scholastic upbringing leading to Law School. Mix in a vulnerable, wounded brain-chemistry known as manic depression. Try twenty-three years of misdiagnosis.

The stage was thus set for a life-journey featuring visions and experiences of sublime ecstasy and horrendous torture from hell. A man is given immense challenges by his Creator, a world hostile to his so-called ‘life-style,’ hatred of which precipitates him into madness and depressive desolation.

Slowly, out of the Mystery of a kind of loving, something else bubbles up: a call to the Kingdom Jesus promised. A most profound joy. The man begins to see his journey as having deeper meaning than total nightmare. As Catholic as he is, why is it surprising that he can lay out in his writing an experience of what he dares call ‘mental stigmata’? Possibly sharing a psyche related to that of his Saviour in His Passion. An outsider as gay, a shame, a ‘biological mistake’ as mentally ill – was that all there was? A resounding ‘NO!’ to all negativity.

This is Stable in Bedlam.

--- from the publisher


‘The book enlivens the Christian Story so that the entire Passion-Event is seen and experienced. Truly, it is an awakening journey of a wounded healer that points toward so much that needs to change in our churches, society, world. Refreshingly passionate and visionary, even prophetic.’
--Nan Merrill, author of Psalms for Praying and Meditations and Mandalas


‘Michael Armstrong takes his readers on an unexpected journey to the intersection of madness and religious passion… These meditations fully embrace the life and death of Jesus as friend and lover. Armstrong combines his painfully honest journey through schizophrenic misdiagnosis with his own deep faith in a Christ who embraces people of every sexual orientation in their own life-journeys.’
--J. Michael Clark, author of Doing the Work of Love and Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows


‘To read Michael Armstrong is to be moved, instructed and disconcerted. He describes with rare vividness the intimacy of his relationship with Jesus. He carries out with holy candour the most exacting self-examinations. He pierces again and again the boundaries between madness and holiness. With Stable in Bedlam Michael Armstrong shakes us out of spiritual complacency.’
--Mark Jordan, Dept. of Religion, Emory University, Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism


'Stable in Bedlam examines the struggle of a gay psychotic to achieve stability within a deep spirituality that originated in his devout upbringing. Without anger, without self-pity, the author discloses his helpless entanglement in a terrifying mental illness, and his courageous return from a shattered career in law, through the difficulties of being homosexual during an unaccepting time, to a healing that is gracefully and movingly expressed.

'Stable in Bedlam incorporates the author’s reflections on his unusual life, half of it lost through costly medical mistakes and the rest nurtured by a loving family and a loving piety. The breadth and richness embraced by this modest-sized book will awaken new understanding and compassion in a spectrum of readers wider than a list of topics could indicate. The gradual movement from bedlam to stability is, in a way, an aspect of most lives. Here it is center-stage and unforgettably powerful.'
--John C. Meagher, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto