Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, 
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.

John Newton, 1725-1807

 
The Lord has promised good to me
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
and mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we've been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun.

The author of these words, John Newton, was a former slave ship captain. After surviving a fierce storm at sea, Newton became an Anglican priest and abolitionist.

Dying woman experiences death & resurrection

I was feeling deep despair caused by an incurable disease that was diagnosed by the doctors. It seemed to me that I had no chance to live a normal and pleasant life, filled with happiness and joy. I was desperate. My despair was so deep that every night I prayed to God to take me. I hoped never to wake up again. At the time, I thought that death was permanent and I didn't believe in life after death.

I used to live in a small studio on the ground floor in Paris. I was living from social aids and wasn't able to work because of my disease. The medical treatment was extremely tiring. Despite brilliant studies at the university and the beginning of a doctorate about a great French writer, I passed my time to wandering through the city, visiting some friends and being unable to find a meaning to existence. So it happened that I walked for hours in the city. I was trying to wear out my last vital energy and hoping every night that God would put an end to my existence. I don't know if I died on that evening, but before going to bed I was in an extreme state of physical and mental fatigue. My pulse seemed to be hanging by a thread. So, in bed I said my usual prayer. “Please God, call me back to you.”as I fell into a deep sleep.

On waking the next morning, I opened my eyes looked at my room. I felt extreme well-being, and very full of light. I realized that I was about one meter above my body. All around myself an unbelievable light was shining; white and very luminous, like a fluid. My body consisted of white, very strong light. Surrounding my light-body, there were magnificent white flowers. They smelled so wonderful, that I couldn't explore their scents completely. It was as if they was bouquets of lilies all around my body and they were also emanating light. I felt light and it was not a dream, my room was as I knew it, perfectly real around myself and behind the curtains morning dawned.

I understood that I wasn't in my body but hanging slightly above it. I felt alive and very light, happy and perfectly at ease. I had no fear, but knew that my physical heart might have stopped and that life was continuing outside of the body. Everything was so soft, so light; and so good and pleasant.

I sensed a presence at my right. This presence wasn't really distinct from me. It was a perfect, loving, sweet and pleasant, nice and sensitive part of myself. It was like an intimate companion knowing me from time immemorial, and yet was also myself. This presence that I thought was Jesus, was whispering something into my ear that I don't remember exactly. I was something like, “You/we have to go back now to the physical body, as I love you and everything is well.” Then I remember thinking, “I'm coming back.” I agreed to come back to my physical body.

My return to the physical body was so gentle and so simple. It was like a river gliding gently down into its bed. I remember that I laid down in my physical body, so tenderly, so gently and pleasantly. I was again back in my physical body when the echo of my sentence, 'I'm coming back' called for a follow-up, something like a goal about existence. Coming back why? I had been so happy and so calm. Then I remember saying, this time with my mouth in my physical body. “To love the world.” Such was my assignment. Then, I looked at my room, everything around me seemed calm and serene. Everything was as I left it the evening before, but there was an atmosphere of indescribable peace and simplicity. I saw that I was well awake and a choice came to me. I could go back to sleep to keep this experience deep down, or I could get out of bed and try to understand it. I decided that everything was ok, that what I came to experience was a gift. I looked at my room, slightly illuminated by the morning sun, and closed my eyes and went to sleep in perfect peace.

I experienced several strange experiences since, but this one remains engraved in my memory. It seems to me that I was resurrected on that morning by the grace of God. I keep in mind this sensation of peace and perfect well-being, that I try to find and/or to recreate as soon as I can by prayer or meditation, or simply by coming back towards my heart. I take very seriously my new 'mission' to love the world. As it seems to me that that's what we are here for - to learn to love.

Even though other experiences happened in my life (of which one was quite amazing), I keep this first experience as a proof of life after death and that we shouldn't worry at all. We are known, loved, supported and guided. We are loved so much, in such a gracious and gentle way, without any setbacks or suffering. If only we knew how much we are loved, and especially with this very subtle and strong quality, like the infinite scent of the flowers, like a gentle and perfect breeze. We are loved in all our details, in our tiniest aspects and everything in us that loves is called to exist for ever. Of this I'm convinced today.
 

https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1francois_d_ste.html

Near-death experience reported to NDERF

I had been on a long music tour with Country artist Merle Haggard. We had traveled all the way to the upper western corner of Canada from California and then returned to California. Most of the trip I had spent in the bus bunk with my laptop computer being my connection to the outside world. We traveled for days, probably 4 or 5.

When we finally got back to California I got in my little car and headed for my home about 40 minutes North on interstate five. I hadn't noticed yet that I had become badly dehydrated during the long trip.

I drove to my house in the mountains with little trouble, but it was morning and I was restless. My brother called me from the local Casino and wanted me to come down and play some slots with him. Although I felt light headed, I was still wanting to do something to break my feeling of restlessness from the long trip on the tour bus. I got in my car and headed back into town.

I arrived at the Casino to find my brother and a friend playing slots at the bar. I ordered an orange juice since I was remarkably thirsty and it was too early for a beer.

I sat on the bar stool for about 10 minutes playing Keno with my brother when I began to feel extremely light headed. I could tell I was going to pass out, so out of reflex I tried to stand up to try to regain control of myself. Then everything went dark. My brother says he saw me stand straight up and then become stiff like a board and fall directly backward onto the concrete floor. He also said that blood started to pool at the back of my head near the impact although I don't remember any of that.

Suddenly I was in an ethereal space, floating without my body. I remember being hyper aware of everything around me and I could see my body on the floor with my brother and our friend shaking me and yelling at me to wake up!

The first thought I had was "man, I'm glad that's over with!". I also remember being amazed that my sense of humor was still intact, and that I was still "ME" in this other place. I remember feeling so good and so light with no cares at all. I felt like I was finally going home and immediately was experiencing a presence through my being that I was communicating with instantly. It said to me first "Don't worry, we've got ya". Every thought I had was instantly answered as soon as I thought it. Time seemed to be irrelevant and I didn't care because I was enveloped in a blanket of what I could only describe as pure love and acceptance. I instantly knew everything was ok and I was welcome here (wherever here was). 

I then felt my focus going out into the heavens into a warm dark space with light all around. I knew I was connected to everything instantly and I knew I wanted to stay here. I can't overstate how much it felt like I had already been there before and that it felt like home overwhelmingly.

Then I had the thought that I never wanted to leave this place and wanted to continue further. As soon as I had that thought came the knowing that I had to return to my body because there was more I had to learn on Earth. I felt slightly disappointed at this thought but my bravery kicked in and I felt my focus returning to my life on Earth. It was then that I had several flashes from the past of interactions I had with others on Earth and I could feel and sense the emotions of everyone involved in the exchange like they were my own thoughts and emotions. I then understood the way that every little action we take in our lives echoes in this place forever and that we are all connected to each other and to God.

I cannot say if I was communicating with God or something else but I could feel the presence of what I can only describe as God from the moment I transmuted into this form and space. I felt a tug back toward my body and felt myself going through a dark tunnel that ended with my eyes opening slowly and hearing my brother and our friend yelling my name.

The paramedics had shown up by then and I was carried out on a gurney to the ambulance. I tried to communicate what I had just experienced but was unable to at the time. The paramedic told me I was in shock which slowly subsided. I spent the night in the hospital and even received a visit from my employer Merle Haggard that night in the hospital which was a wonderful thing!

I haven't talked about my experience much until I began seeing NDE videos on youtube with other people describing their experiences. It wasn't until then that I realized what had actually happened to me. Since the episode, I no longer am afraid of death because I know in my core that we continue to be ourselves after we leave this body. It has changed my thinking on the subject profoundly. I am very grateful that I was able to get a glimpse of the other side. Since then, I have lost quite a few friends and family who were close to me and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I will see them again and that they are experiencing the same love and eternal playground that I got to visit on that fateful day.

Doug C NDE 9502 at https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1doug_c_nde_9502.html. 

The Christmas story in Matthew 1-2

The story begins with a genealogy that places Jesus in the line of descent from Abraham and David. An angel in a dream tells Joseph in this birth story that Mary's surprising pregnancy is the work of the LORD. Joseph accepts this as the will of God and takes Mary into his home. Jesus is born, and then the gospel relates the story of the wise men. After the wise men slip out of Judea, King Herod sends soldiers to kill all the children of Bethlehem under two years old. But Joseph is warned in another dream and so he escapes with Mary and Jesus to Egypt. He only returns to Judea after the death of Herod the Great.

If we listen closely to the story in the gospel of Matthew, we will hear that events are taking place according to prophecy. Mary's pregnancy, the birth in Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt, the slaying of the children — all these events, the narrator of the story tells us, were foretold by the prophets. This theme is repeated throughout the gospel of Matthew. Jesus is the fulfillment of the hope of the people of Israel, as expressed through the prophets, who were speaking for God. Jesus is thus the fulfillment of the covenant of God with the people of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, reflecting the earlier covenant between the LORD God and Moses on behalf of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The gospel of Matthew was written for a Jewish Christian community. In Matthew's gospel Jesus gives the famous Sermon on the Mount, in which he says he has come to fulfill the Law of Moses not to abolish it. This gospel was a powerful argument in the hands of Jewish Christians who were resisting the growing influence of the Gentile churches.

Yet, the author of the gospel of Matthew extends the hope of Israel beyond any narrow interpretation of ancient prophecy by masterfully telling the story of the three wise men. They represent the non-Jewish world of wisdom, which in the birth story of this gospel recognizes the sovereignty of Jesus and comes to pay him homage.

Luke's birth story is about women and shepherds, and Matthew's birth story is about men and kings. (Later in the life of the church the wise men are called "kings" because of a verse in Psalm 72 that refers to kings bringing gifts to the king of the Israelites.) The three wise men come looking for the one born to be king of the Jews. They come to the ruler of Judea, bringing gifts fit for a king. And this ruler massacres the young boys of Bethlehem in an effort to kill the child he perceives to be a threat. In contrast to the birth story in the gospel of Luke, the story in the gospel of Matthew is not about poverty and receiving the Holy Spirit. It is about the birth of a new king of the Jews whose life is threatened by a Roman appointed Jewish leader.

What might the birth story in Matthew's gospel mean for us today? I suggest, first, that its focus is God. If the story in Luke stresses the humanity of Jesus, the story of the three wise men reminds us of the sovereignty of God. Jesus is God incarnate, and in this story he will rise to rule in heaven. The story in this gospel tells us that God's mysterious plan is being worked out through history.

Second, this story reminds us that human rulers are subject to God. The star created by God summons the three wise men. Herod is foiled in his attempt to destroy Jesus, who will be king. Furthermore, Matthew's gospel relates the story of the ministry of Jesus, his death as the king of the Jews, his resurrection as the king of kings, and his commissioning of the disciples for a ministry to the whole world.

Third, the birth story in the gospel of Matthew tells us that the promises of God will be fulfilled. The story calls us to faith by affirming that God is faithful. The covenant that God established with Israel is being renewed through Jesus. If we have faith in him and follow his commandments, God will keep faith with us. Prophecy and promise will be fulfilled. 

Robert Traer

The Christmas story in Luke 1-2

The anonymous gospel attributed to Luke, a missionary colleague of Paul, begins with the story of the birth of John the Baptist. Elizabeth and Zechariah are elderly and without a child. Yet Elizabeth conceives and an angel tells Zechariah that the child's name will be John. Six months later the angel Gabriel comes to Mary to explain that she will give birth to a child with the help of the Holy Spirit and to tell her that Elizabeth is also pregnant. When Mary visits Elizabeth, the older woman feels her babe leap in her womb. Elizabeth says to Mary, "Blessed are you among women . . .." Then Mary sings praises to God, in words that have come to be known as the Magnificat — words that bring to mind (for those who know the Bible well) Hannah's song of praise after her prayers for a son have been answered with Samuel's birth. (1 Samuel 2:1-10).

The story of the birth of Jesus follows. We hear of Joseph and Mary traveling to Bethlehem, finding no room in the inn, and taking shelter in a stable. During the night Jesus is born, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, and then shepherds are directed by angels to come and adore him.

The Christmas story in the gospel of Luke gives a prominent role to women, in contrast to most of the narratives in the Bible. The story also emphasizes the humble birth of Jesus in a stable, attended only by his mother and father, and then by shepherds. At the very beginning of Luke's gospel we read the author is writing his account for Theophilus, a Greek-speaking Christian. If we know our Bible well, we also know that Acts of the Apostles is a companion volume written by the same author. Thus the story of Elizabeth and Mary, and their children born in Judea, is the beginning of a story that includes not only accounts of the ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, but also of the conversion of Saul (who becomes the apostle Paul) and of Paul's missionary work until his imprisonment in Rome.

What meanings might this birth story have had for Theophilus and the other Greek-speaking Christians of his largely Gentile church? The birth story in the gospel of Luke sets the birth of Jesus within the Roman Empire at the time of a census decreed by Caesar Augustus. When the author of the gospel of Luke and Acts concludes his narrative with Paul in Rome proclaiming new life in Christ to Jews and Gentiles, we see clearly that the “good news” of this story is directed far beyond Galilee and Jerusalem to a much larger and more diverse Greek-speaking, Jewish and Gentile community throughout the Roman Empire.

In the second century some Christians began to claim that Jesus was a divine being who merely appeared to be human. Luke's gospel became a defense against this "Gnostic" heresy, because the birth story emphasizes Mary's pregnancy and the human birth of Jesus. Yet we don't hear of a Christmas celebration in the life of the church until the fourth century, when it is listed in an almanac as the Feast of the Nativity. Most likely this feast began in churches dominated by Gentiles during the reign of Constantine, after he was converted to Christianity in 312. In the Julian calendar of that period the Feast of the Nativity was celebrated on December 25th, which was the winter solstice. As the birth story in the gospel of Luke does not mention any date, the winter solstice was undoubtedly chosen to coincide with the pagan celebration of the rebirth of the sun. Thus, Jesus was proclaimed in the Roman Empire as the "true sun."

Probably Christians in Rome were unaware that shepherds in Palestine did not tend sheep in the fields during the winter. When Christian scholars in the Middle Ages were confronted with this factual inconsistency, they concluded the shepherds had stayed in the fields because of the winter solstice. European Christians adapted the story in other ways. The manger was represented in paintings and crèche scenes as a wooden rack or "crib." In Palestine, however, it would have been a stone ledge, trough, or a niche in the wall of a stable, in which fodder was placed. In Middle English the Feast of the Nativity was called "Christes masse," that is, the mass of Christ. This eventually was shortened to "Christmas."

It is interesting to recall that after the Protestant Reformation, Christmas was rejected by most Protestant denominations because it emphasized the baby Jesus rather than the risen Christ. In 1659 the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made the observance of Christmas a punishable offense, and Protestant opposition to celebrating Christmas continued in some denominations well into the 19th century.

The flood of immigrants to the United States turned the tide. Germans brought their Christmas tree. Irish put lights in their windows. Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe sang their native carols and protested having to work on Christmas Day! It was the Roman Catholic Church that kept the "Christ mass" tradition alive until the holiday became acceptable to all Christians and to many others as well.

Eventually, a surge of enthusiasm swept away all resistance. Neither the moral authority of the church, nor the power of the state could prevent the celebration of Christmas. It is almost as if the spirit of Christmas has a life of its own ― undisciplined, chaotic, commercial, fantastic, seemingly irrepressible!

As the Christmas story is told in the gospel of Luke, what meanings might it have for us today? I suggest, first, that as a very human story of mothers becoming pregnant and giving birth it reminds us that life, as we know it, is the medium in which God chooses to dwell. Jesus is born and grows up in a family, before as an adult he challenges religious and political authorities, suffers, is crucified, and then appears after death to his followers. 

Second, the gospel of Luke reminds us that poverty is not a mark of human failure or divine rejection. The origins of the church are humble and poor. The gospel story shows that the kingdom of God is not for those who claim to have earned salvation because of their success in the world, but for those who have faith.

Third, this story of women, a baby in a manger, and shepherds in the fields who come in wonder to the stable, should elicit in us a renewed sense of awe and gratitude for life. Each child is a wondrous creation, and the birth of a child is cause for joy. 

At Christmas, therefore, we celebrate the birth of the true sun, the light that enters the darkness and is not overcome by it, the life we know together in Christ, and the joy we share with one another and with the world.

Robert Traer

 

Elizabeth Krohn's near-death experience

When Elizabeth G. Krohn got out of her car with her two young sons in the parking lot of her synagogue on a late afternoon in September 1988, she couldn't have anticipated she would within seconds be struck by lightning and have a near-death experience. She felt herself transported to a garden and engaging in a revelatory conversation with a spiritual being. When she recovered, her most fundamental understandings of what the world is and how it works had been completely transformed. She was “changed in a flash,” suddenly able to interact with those who had died and have prescient dreams predicting news events. She came to believe that some early traumatic and abusive experiences had played a part in preparing her for this experience.

 

Told in matter-of-fact language, the first half of this book is the story of Krohn’s journey, and the second is an interpretation and analysis by Jeffrey J. Kripal, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities at Rice University who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought. Kirpal is also Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and served as the Editor in Chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion. He places Krohn's experience in the context of religious traditions and proposes the groundbreaking idea that we are shaping our own experiences in the future by how we engage with near-death experiences in the present. Changed in a Flash is not about proving a story, but about carving out space for serious discussion of this phenomenon.

 

Krohn writes: The NDE changed me in ways I never could have imagined. On September 1, 1988 I was a skeptic. Nothing could have dissuaded me from believing that when a person dies, that’s the end—that they are gone and nothing of them remains. But a bolt of lightning literally jolted me into reality.

 

On September 2, 1988, that lightning bolt bestowed upon me a gift, the power and profundity of which remain unmatched more than three decades later. That gift was knowledge that death isn’t the end; knowledge that where we are now is a temporary place, and where we go when we die is home; knowledge that what we do with our time here matters and affects our afterlife; knowledge that our souls, the vessels that carry our consciousness, continue on after bodily death and actually become keenly aware, awake, and all-knowing once unencumbered by our bodies.

 

One of the things I learned in the afterlife is that no two souls have identical afterlife experiences. Each experience in the afterlife is tailored to each individual soul, their expectations, and their needs. Each soul perceives the afterlife, and everything about it, differently.

 

"When you find yourself dead, in a place of otherworldly love and beauty, with a sudden understanding of everything, and you hear your beloved deceased grandfather tell you to sit on the most elaborately crafted bench you have ever seen, you sit. I took a seat on the ornately carved bench and found that it conformed to whatever my individual 'body' had become as soon as I sat down. The bench morphed around me. As I sat, cradled in the most comfortable seat imaginable, I began to look around. I saw that I was surrounded by a Garden of foreign plants, the likes of which I had never seen before, or even imagined.

 

My grandfather’s soft familiar voice, complete with the French accent that made it so distinct during his life, was a soothing presence. He said that audible speech would disrupt my absorption of the surroundings, so he was going to give me information, knowledge, and answers to my questions silently. I believe that this voice was actually not my grandfather speaking to me, but was God using my grandfather’s voice to put me at ease. This was a strange reckoning for me, given that in life I had been such a non-religious and non-spiritual person who gave very little, if any, thought to the existence of God. And yet, here I was, sitting on a bench with someone I thought was God in a place that I knew was Heaven. 

 

The calming voice shared things with me about our family that only my grandfather, and of course God, would know. This presence gave me information that showed a total knowledge of where I was and what choices I would need to make if I chose to go back to my life on Earth. He relayed the clear impression that the choice to remain in the Garden or to reoccupy my burned body was mine to make. I understood that I could take as long as I needed to make the decision to either stay in the Garden or return to my life on Earth, and that I would be given information that would help me make that decision. 

 

I was dead, but I was more alive, conscious, and aware than when I had been that twenty-eight year old woman with the children and the umbrella in the synagogue parking lot a mere second earlier. I was surrounded by and suffused with an unutterable feeling of unconditional love. The love was all-encompassing and embraced me in every possible way. Everything in the Garden emanated love. The lull of a gently babbling brook, the cadence of the soothing otherworldly music surrounding me, and the resplendent, fragrant visual feast of constantly blooming flowers and hypnotic colors I had never seen before, all reinforced the knowledge that I now had: that I was safe, protected, and unconditionally loved by God. I was home. 

 

The glow that I had followed into the Garden initially had moved away from me. It seemed to be a living energy, a conscious entity that moved with purpose. It was still to my upper right, but it had now shifted behind a mountain range, whose outline in the distance was backlit with the glow’s shimmering light from behind the mountains. I resisted the impulse to follow the living glow to the mountains, since the peace, comfort, beauty, and ineffable love that surrounded me where I was sitting were all that I could ever want. The sound of the brook nearby, the music in the air, the sweet scents of the otherworldly vegetative oasis, and the vivid backdrop of the sky and mountains lulled me to depths that I had never known my soul to possess.

 

Regardless of whether my companion on the ornate bench was actually my grandfather or, as I suspected, God, I knew that I was not alone in the Garden, and I knew that the feeling of abundant unconditional love that this presence communicated to me would never leave me. Still today, I can draw on that memory of unwavering acceptance and love when I need to do so. I could have gratefully and willingly remained there for eternity. That love, that place, that afterlife was a gift, tailored to me, from a higher being that loved me unconditionally.

 

The landscape was clearly meant to comfort me and put me at ease. The sound of flowing water, be it a gentle brook or crashing ocean waves, is something I have always found to be soothing. A view of any landscape has always been enhanced for me if there is a body of water in the scenery. I think that is why it was so prominent and noticeable to me among the other sweet sounds that permeated the Garden. What I understood is that all who arrive in this place encounter and perceive whatever is most comforting and beautiful to them. My source of comfort was the all-embracing feeling of unconditional perpetual love and the unmatched beauty of my surroundings all captured in the Garden. This was my personal Heaven.

 

I understood that all who come to this wondrous place are soothed and welcomed by whatever they find soothing, comforting, and pleasurable in life. Therefore, it made sense that my Heaven looked like a perfectly manicured garden. I love gardens and find peace and joy in spending time in a well tended garden. During my time in my heavenly Garden, I saw people in the distance. I instinctively knew that those people perhaps had visions of something other than a garden as their perfect Heaven. People I saw in the distance may have expected their Heaven to be a thickly wooded forest. Others may have seen a boundless field of wildflowers, or a quiet beach with gently rolling waves. Yet we were all in exactly the same place. We were each in a Heaven tailored specifically for each individual soul there. Understanding this loving kindness added to my ease during my visit to the Garden.

 

I also understood that one’s own appearance there projects the best of each person’s soul in their most recent Earthly life. The type of person you are here on Earth colors the experience you will have in the afterlife. What we do with our time here on Earth matters. A lot. Learning this was surprising to me as I never thought that my actions or thought processes during life would have any bearing at all on my death. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I learned in the Garden that not only the acts I performed during my life but even my very thoughts and feelings had woven together to create the tapestry that was my afterlife—my Garden. The fact that I had been a good person in life mattered in the Garden. The fact that I had not been religious did not.

 

I feel so inadequate in my attempt to convey the overwhelming totality of the Garden. Time there is perpetual. Its events and sensations all occur at once. This idea of simultaneous time, the physics of it, is something I understood while I was in the Garden but have difficulty explaining, or even understanding, now. I do understand, however, that it is possible to return from another realm or dimension and be completely unable to help those who have not seen it to understand that it even exists at all. Something can be perfectly true yet completely unbelievable and impossible to scientifically prove.

 

This knowledge that I was absorbing while on the ornate bench in the presence of the loving being who spoke in the voice of my beloved grandfather was also shared with the other humans (or souls) whose forms I saw in the distance. Everyone was in pairs, and no one was alone. Everyone was dressed in what I knew as street clothes. And they were all perfectly beautiful, youthful, and healthy. I wondered: If they were all so perfect, was I?

 

I looked at my left hand, curious as to how the burn from the lightning strike had affected it. My hand looked as if it belonged to a younger woman. There were no chipped nails or imperfections on the skin, and certainly no burn from the lightning. I noticed that there was also no wedding ring. All I saw was the pristine skin of myself at eighteen or so. The skin on my hand was flawless.

 

As soon as I thought of questions, I had the answers. I saw people in the distance, although no one approached me. Why were they all paired up? Did I appear to them to be alone? My companion explained that I was also part of a pair, and that he was the other half of the pair. We must have appeared to the distant human forms as they did to me—as a pair, and as beautiful as I ever was at my best.

 

As quickly as I was receiving answers to my seemingly unlimited stream of questions, I had more questions. There was only one question for which I never received an answer: What did my companion in the Garden look like? Did this partner of mine look like my grandfather at age ninety when he died, or did he look as he did at age eighteen, as everyone else there seemed to? Or did he have an entirely different appearance? I don’t know because I never looked at him. I now think I was not supposed to see him because I would have been overwhelmed at the sight of my beloved grandfather.

 

Or by the beauty of God. 

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn is the author with Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness.” 

Elaine Pagels affirms life after physical death

Elaine Pagels, History of Religion professor at Princeton since 1982, is best known for her research and books about what are generally identified as the Gnostic Gospels. Her book with this title published in 1989 received both the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Her 2018 book, Why Religion? A Personal Story, reveals her struggle for a religious faith, after the deaths of her son Mark, who died in 1987 from pulmonary hypertension at age six, and her husband Heinz, who a year later fell from a cliff while hiking.

Her son’s death devastated both Elaine and Heinz. “We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. I was moved by what another bereaved mother, Maria of Paris, a Russian Christian whom Orthodox Christians revere as a saint, wrote after her six-year-old daughter died; she felt her ‘whole natural life . . . shaken . . . disintegrated; desires have gone . . . meaning has lost its meaning.’

“But instead of sinking into passivity, she risked her life to save the lives of other people’s children during the Nazi occupation. When German soldiers forced Jews into a central square of Paris before shoving them into trains hurtling toward the death camps, Maria slipped into the square to join them. There, whispering hastily, she persuaded several parents to allow her to hide their children in garbage bins, and so to save their lives, which she did, finding families to care for each one of them. Later, when she and her own son were arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to the death camps, she exchanged places with someone targeted for the gas chambers, serene in the conviction that she’d done what her faith required, choosing to enable others to live. Many other parents whose children have been killed by gun violence, war, drunk drivers, or disease also choose to create meaning by working to spare other people unfathomable losses like their own.”

The death of her son and husband led Pagels to seriously consider if she could believe in a life after death. She writes: “Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.

“More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled ‘Superman at Fifty!,’ which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.

“Could this be coincidence? Of course, it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them ‘across the shining river.’ At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.”

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion?  (p. 104, 137-138). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 

Jane Goodall's experience of God's purpose

 In her autobiography Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Jane Goodall writes:

“Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.

 

“That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so, I must believe in a guiding power in the universe—in other worlds, I must believe in God.” [pages xiii-xiv]

 

Through the years I have encountered people and been involved in events that have had huge impact, knocked off rough corners, lifted me to the heights of joy, plunged me into the depth of sorrow and anguish, taught me to laugh, especially at myself—in other words, my life experiences and the people with whom I shared them have been my teachers. At time I have felt like a helpless bit of flotsam, at one moment stranded in a placed backwater that knew not, cared not, that I was there, then swept out to be hurled about in an unfeeling sea. At other times I felt I was being sucked under by strong, unknowing currents toward annihilation. Yet somehow, looking back through my life, with its downs and its ups, its despairs and its joys, I believe that I was following some overall plan. To be sure there were many times when I strayed from the course, but I was never truly lost. It seems to me now that the flotsam speck was being gently nudged or fiercely blown along a very specific route by an unseen, intangible Wind. The flotsam speck that was—that is—me.” [2-3]

 

After World War II Jane began to attend courses on the teachings of Theosophy. She writes: “I was especially drawn to the concepts of karma and reincarnation, because I was still trying very hard to make sense of the horrors of the war. If karma was operating, Hitler and the Nazis would pay for their crimes in some future life, while those who were killed in battle or tortured in the death camps may have been paying for former transgressions. They would then either be reborn to a better life or to some kind of heaven or paradise. I had never been able to believe that God would give us poor frail humans only one chance at making it—that we would be assigned to some kind of hell because we failed during one experience of mortal life.” [32]

 

Jane’s ecstatic experience in Notre Dame occurred in 1974, after she had divorced her first husband and the father of her only child. Later in her autobiography she asks: “Was there a guiding force in the universe, a creator of matter and thus of life itself? Was there a purpose to life on planet earth? And if so, what role were we human supposed to play in the overall picture? In particular, what was my role to be.”

 

She responds to these questions in her next paragraph. “There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the ‘evolutionary goof.’ Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ In other words, a plan and a purpose to it all.

 

“As I thought about these ultimate questions during the trying time of my divorce, I realized that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective. I personally was utterly convinced that there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah, or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.” [92-95]

 

Excerpts from Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, (1999, Warner Books), selected by Robert Traer.

Light around those who are dying

Science writer Nick Cook reports: This light phenomenon has been reported by almost all near-death experience (NDE)  researchers, including psychologist and physician Raymond Moody MD, who coined the term ‘near-death experience’ in his 1975 best-selling book, ‘Life After Life’. In his book on shared death experiences, ‘Glimpses of Eternity’, Moody cites a large number of witnesses to light phenomena amongst relatives and carers of the dying. One, Sharon Nelson, told Moody about her encounter with the light at the death of her sister. 

 

‘About one week prior to my sister’s actual passing, a bright white light engulfed the room. It was a light that we all saw and a light that has stayed with us ever since.’

In another case, Moody was approached by two sisters, Maria and Louisa, at a medical conference in Spain who told him about a ‘brilliant light’ that filled the room at the death of their father. ‘The light stayed for maybe ten minutes after he died,’ said Maria, ‘We saw no forms or figures in the light, but it seemed to be alive and have a personal presence.’

And this from a hospice nurse in North Carolina, who, having had a deep fear of witnessing her first death – that of a Mrs Jones – told how she heard Mrs Jones’s voice in her head calling her into the room: ‘I saw her draw her last breath. Right then, a light that looked like vapour formed over her face. I never had felt such peace. The head nurse on duty was very calm and told me that Mrs Jones was leaving her body and wanted me to see the dying experience. I saw a luminous presence floating near the bed, shaped somewhat like a person.’ The experienced nurse witnessed the light in the room, but not Mrs Jones’s ‘presence’. 

 

Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from This Life to the Next, Raymond Moody Jr., MD, PhD, and Paul Perry, SAKKARA Productions Publishing, 2010.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was among prize winners in the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition.

Dr. Reggie Anderson's experiences of heaven

Dr. Reggie Anderson writes from the perspective of a firm Christian faith. He describes, however, his loss of faith as a young man and how the love he shared with the woman who became his wife—and having what he describes as a very powerful dream—renewed his childhood faith.

Anderson begins his book with his first experience as a resident caring for a dying patient. “Throughout medical school I had taken care of dying patients, but this was the first time that I, as the senior resident, would be the one in charge when a patient died. I didn’t know what to expect.

Dr. Anderson, the elderly woman began, her voice starting to fade. Will you hold my hand? I’m going to see Jesus, and I need an escort.

“That night, I experienced the veil parting—the veil that separates this life from the next. As I held the dying woman’s hands, I felt the warmth of her soul pass by my cheek when it left her body, swept up by an inexplicably cool breeze in an otherwise stagnant room. I smelled the familiar fragrance of lilac and citrus, and I knew the veil was parting to allow her soul to pass through.

“Since that first patient, I’ve walked with countless others to the doorstep of heaven and watched them enter paradise. On many occasions, as I held hands with the dying, God allowed me to peer into heaven’s entryway where I watched each patient slip into the next world.

“Sometimes I’ve even witnessed patients leave this world and come back. As they’ve shared their stories with me, I’ve often remembered the time early in my life when God allowed me to step into heaven’s foyer, even though I no longer believed he was real.

“The one thing these experiences have in common is the intensity of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and feelings that I sensed. Heaven is more real than anything we experience here, and the sense of peace, joy, and overwhelming love is beyond description.”

Reggie Anderson with Jennifer Schuchmann, Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters with the Hereafter (Tyndale Momentum, 2013), 4-5.

 

Near-death experience as a spiritual awakening

“For a few people,” UK neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick notes, the NDE confirms the religious faith they have. “But for many, perhaps most, it is a spiritual awakening that may have very little to do with religion in the narrowest sense, and nothing to do with dogma. It certainly tends to confirm belief in some form of afterlife. But when the presence of some higher ‘being’ is felt, this is only seldom defined as, for example, a Catholic or a Jewish God. And Christian icons such as Jesus and Mary are notably absent except in very rare cases. The experiences have a universal quality.” If an NDE were simply a psychological experience, “one would expect it to be much more culturally influenced than it seems to be.”

Mrs Joan Hensley wrote: Certainly my life changed. I am less frightened of dying personally, and I do believe there is life after death. But it hasn’t particularly made me more ‘religious;’ what I do feel is that there are so many religions in the world, why should our God be the only one or indeed the correct one? I feel my experience proved there is a God—before that I don’t think I really believed in anything, just accepted what my parents believed in.

“Almost everyone who has studied near-death experiences has found that at least some of the people have become more sensitive or intuitive. After his NDE, Dennis Stone of Coventry began to foresee future events. In August 1938 my first premonition of impending disaster occurred. I saw a vision of the Second World War. I found myself standing about a hundred yards or so from my home, watching Coventry burning and hearing the bombs whistling down and bullets spanging off brickwork. I looked down the London road and watched a bomb set fire to a fuel dump close to the local cemetery.

All this I told my family and I became agitated because they did not believe me. That is until it actually happened in precise detail—with one exception: I was not quite in the precise spot on that fateful night. I was ducking the machine-gun bullets from German planes, which, I might add, killed nine of my neighbors close to me.

“One of the most fascinating and detailed letters we received was from a man who suffered two cardiac arrests after a coronary thrombosis, and had several experiences during this time. Most were positive, but he also had an experience of ‘Hell.’ It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occasionally I was basted by people (devils) sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the ‘devils’ used to make sure that I was being truly roasted. I wanted to call out but no sound would come; it felt as if my brain or consciousness was buried deep within me and was too deeply embedded for either them to hear or for me even to make it work. I was overcome with the feeling of utter doom and helplessness.

He explains away this experience, however, as being due to the treatment he received in hospital. I was wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, an electric heat cage was put over me and during that time I was turned several times and innumerable injections were given.

Fenwick comments: “In those organized religions in which Hell figures, suicide is a sin and might well be considered an entrance qualification. And yet none of the people who wrote to us about a near-death experience during a suicide attempt reported a hellish or even an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, what they experienced seemed to provide a reason for continuing to live.

Anne Thomson wrote: I could cope no longer with three small children and one dreadful husband (whom I later divorced). I took a massive overdose of sleeping tablets and was not found for four hours. I was rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance from the RAF base in Wales, where we lived at the time. I very nearly died and was unconscious for four days. On the fourth day I was slipping away. I had a cardiac arrest and the doctors and sister were working on me.

I left my body. I went up very slowly, not looking back at myself in the bed. The peace was beyond what I can explain; it was so beautiful, I felt so light in weight and I saw I was going towards a white light—not the white like this notepaper I wrote on, but a spiritual white. I almost reached this light, when suddenly I was pulled downwards and did not stop till I was back in my body. I was heavy, everything seemed so dark and then I came to and slowly came to realize I could not be taken, as three children needed their mother.

I always did believe in God but only because it was bred into me. But since that experience I have a lot of faith towards God and towards life beyond our lives on Earth. I firmly believe God made me well and helped me through all my time of rearing three children alone in the years that followed.”

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

 

Amazing grace will lead us home

The Pharisee Saul was persecuting preachers of the Way of Jesus until he was struck blind as "a light from heaven flashed around him." (Acts 9:3) After a follower of the Way explained the gospel to Saul, his sight was restored and his life transformed.

Writing as an apostle to the followers of the Way in Corinth, Paul explains: "But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" He answers from his own experience: "Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." (1 Cor. 15: 35-44)

Former slave-trader John Newton in 1772 wrote the words to "Amazing Grace" after he, too, experienced a spiritual "resurrection." The words to the first and third verses recall his personal transformation and affirm his new faith in grace and immortality.

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come,
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer