Love is the link

Hospice physician Pamela M. Kircher believes Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and what she describes as Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STEs) that do not involve nearly dying are very similar. From listening to many people’s stories, she concludes:

"First, and most important, is that NDEs and STEs are two avenues to the experience of being in the presence of God. One is not more important than the other. They are just different paths. Each is a type of spiritual awakening. Second, it is easier for some people to dismiss their mystical experiences as just an unusual event than it is for those who have had an NDE to do so. Lastly, it is difficult to differentiate between an STE and an NDE. Sometimes the mystical experience occurs in a terminally ill patient who has weeks or months to live.

She gives two examples of STEs that seem to have similar life-altering consequences as NDEs. “Prior to the experience, the scientist was a confirmed atheist. He felt certain that when we die, all that we are returns to the earth. In his spontaneous mystical experience, he suddenly understood the Universe and knew that it is all unfolding in exactly the way that it needs to unfold for understanding to develop. He could see how everything relates to everything else and how truly beautiful and intricate it all is. When the experience was over, he was changed man."

Kircher also tells the story of a woman who “was already feeling very discouraged when someone told her she ought to kill herself because she was of no use to anyone. That evening as she was recalling the encounter, she suddenly found herself surrounded by a peaceful white light that seemed to imply she was very much worth having around. She said that the experience was very unexpected. It was a life-changing event, and she has never felt so despondent since." 

Pamela M. Kircher,  Love is the Link: A Hospice Doctor Shares Her Experience of Near-Death and Dying (Awakenings Press, 2013).

 

Surrounded by God

Hospice physician Pamela M. Kircher describes her own near-death experience as a six-year-old child, when a leaking abscess in her throat led to meningitis. After her mother told her she would either live or die, and then put her to bed, Kircher had what she would later describe as a near-death experience. As if telling the story of someone else, she writes:

“The next thing the little girl experienced was suddenly, inexplicably, being in the corner of the room near the ceiling, and looking down at a little girl in the bed. She was not surprised or frightened, even though nothing in her solid Midwest background had prepared her for an out-of-body experience. She was totally without pain and in perfect  peace.

“She had the strong sense that she was surrounded by God. She did not feel like a boy or a girl or a child or an adult. She experienced the essence of herself — the soul that had existed before she came into her body and that would exist when this life was over. She felt strong and peaceful and totally connected with God.

“Looking down at the little girl in the bed, she was aware of the girl’s pain and felt compassion for her. As she further contemplated the situation, she realized that she must be that girl, and then the experience ended. “That little girl was me,” Kircher writes, “and the experience influenced the path that my life would take. Partly as a result of that experience, I have come to understand how tiny the distance is between the world we think we inhabit and the world of the Spirit." 

Pamela M. Kircher, Love is the Link: A Hospice Doctor Shares Her Experience of Near-Death and Dying (Awakenings Press, 2013).

There is only Love

I was in hospital about to get an intravenous (IV) drip with anesthesia. When the line unkinked, the drugs came racing into my body. I felt my heart immediately go into extreme tachycardia. 'My heart!' I yelled, 'My Heart!' The nurses came running toward me.

Suddenly, I was flying about 8 feet over my body. I was watching the scene below as the nurse scrambled through the cabinet looking for something. She was pulling things out and onto the floor. The nurse assistant ran into the surgery room. She grabbed the doctor, who ran over to me and started doing compressions while the nurses got the big needle out. they were arguing about whether it would be better to put it into my chest or into the IV line. I thought I was in a dream state until I looked at the EKG, and it was all flat lines with the alarms going off.

I said to myself, 'Oh Fu#$! I am Dying!' I could see the doctors down below trying frantically to bring me back. I said, 'I don't want to die! Oh My God! NO!' I tried to dive back into my body, but instead I was falling backward through a dark tunnel at what seemed like thousands of miles per hour. It was horrifying until I started slowing down. I realized that it wasn't a dark tunnel. It was a tunnel with so many lights. There were so many colors I had never seen before. I wasn't afraid any more.

At the end of this tunnel was the most beautiful place in existence. I seemed to have arrived back in the room but in another dimension. I was looking at everyone and everything in that hospital through what I can only describe as 'through the eyes of God.' I felt the Love of God for all these people in the hospital; the patients, the staff, and the receptionist. I never saw my own life, but I saw everyone else's life pass before my eyes. I saw the receptionist and everything about her. I saw her heart. I felt her love for her babies. I felt her pain and her thoughts. I saw the technician and everything in his life right then. I saw each person for who they really truly were. I saw what motivated them and I saw their beautiful soul-full hearts. I saw their souls as if through the eyes and heart of God. I saw them and I loved them, each and every person. I seemed to pull back from the room and up, out of the building. I saw people on the street and knew their pain. I saw them with pure love.

Then I began getting an information download. There was no talking, just information going into me with absolute love. It was very clear, very loud, and very certain, that We are ALL VERY IMPORTANT TO GOD. The message was that our lives are deeply important to God and to the existence of the universe. Our love we have and the love we cultivate on earth, especially for people we have a hard time liking, that love somehow expands the universe and does some very important things. I felt that there was something at stake, that we have a very important job to do. Human Beings are beloved and our choice in how to act is given to us to prove God. I don't know how to describe it, I am trying hard to explain it here but it's hard to explain. It may take my lifetime to explain what I learned.

In this place we go to, we will have lightness, laughter and joy, and our soul family is there waiting for us. Our jobs on earth are to find out how to break through all these illusory walls everywhere that we erect to hide who we are. We need to really love each other and love ourselves. I felt as though there was a sense of humor too. I was like a deep appreciation for our lives and even for our failures. We are suppose to learn from our failures and not beat ourselves up over them. We find a way to forgive and love ourselves because in reality, in the real place of creation, there is only Love. It seemed the message was that if we couldn't find a path to love, then we are destroying something very very precious.

I recognized a big crowd of people around me, but they didn't have human form. I recognized their souls. They had pink shapes but also resonated to the energy which was them. My great-uncle Steve, I felt him there. I also felt the presence of my grandmother who is actually alive. It was then that I realized that when we pray, we actually send our soul-self to the side of the person. It is an act of love which makes creation. The love was incredible and the beauty was so absolutely, outrageously incredible. When I was looking down at all these people and the doctor who was trying to save me, I was thinking, 'I love these people. Oh, these people are so loved!' I wanted to go back so badly and tell them how loved they were. I was standing alongside this soul family of mine and in the presence of what I would describe as total love from the one who made it all. Yet, I wanted to go back.

NDERF.org

Let go and let God

I have not had a near-death experience (NDE), but my father did when during surgery he suffered cardiac arrest. A scientist by training, he had never heard of this experience and doubted his own memory of it. Yet seeing himself outside his body, observing the surgeon trying to revive him, moving through darkness toward a clear vision of my deceased mother, and feeling unconditional love from the brilliant light behind her, before returning to his body.

He lost his fear of death, he told me, and I saw that he became a warmer person. My life was also transformed by his experience, as researching NDEs has altered my view of life, death, consciousness, and God.

For surgeon Bernie Siegel, “the knowledge that God is a loving, intelligent, and conscious energy” has come from dreams, drawings, and near-death experiences. He believes: “first, there was consciousness and consciousness was with God” and “consciousness was God, because God speaks in dreams and images―the universal language.” In his experience with patients, Siegel has learned that consciousness can be healing. 

To a cancer patient Siegel proposed: “visualizing God’s light melting a tumor that appears as a block of ice.” To another: “Let go and let God.” Siegel tells his patients: “By accepting ourselves as God’s creation, seeing beauty and meaning in what we are, just as we are, we accept others as God’s creation too.”

Bernie S. Siegel, The Art of Healing: Uncovering Your Inner Wisdom and Potential for Self-Healing
(New World Library, 2013), 198, 42, 36, 163, and 92.

 

Going Home

The third verse of the hymn “Amazing Grace” ends with the affirmation that “grace will lead me home.” Home surely refers to heaven, but when I noticed this I thought it was unusual for Christians to think of heaven as home. I discovered, however, that African American spirituals often affirm heaven as home.

The spiritual based on the story of Elijah riding to heaven in a chariot of fire includes the phrase, “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.” In the song “O Freedom,” each verse ends with: “And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave. And go home to my Lord, and be free.” And the chorus in “Steal Away” includes this phrase: “steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here.”

Early in the 20th century William Arms Fisher, a student of Antoin Dvorak, wrote a hymn to reflect African American spirituality using the Largo melody from Dvorak’s Symphony #9, known as the New World Symphony. The chorus affirms: “Going home, going home, I am going home.”

Modern hymns rarely refer to heaven as home, but survivors of near-death experiences often note the presence of a brilliant Light, a feeling of overwhelming Love, and that they are “home.” Here are three examples from physician and researcher Jeffrey Long’s 2016 book, God and the Afterlife.

Anna: It was the most real thing that’s ever happened to me. The life I’d been living was an insignificant experiment that I’d volunteered for. The me, the I, wasn’t Anna, the woman who’d just given birth. I was a light being—“light” in every sense. I was made of the same light as the light that shone from the clear pool in front of me. The light sensed and felt everything, thought and understood everything; it knew I was finally back home! The light was God.

Andy: The Light knows me, knows my name! Surrounding this Light form are millions of other Lights welcoming me back home. I know them all and they know me; we are all pieces of the same Light. I tell them, “It’s good to be back home.” I know we’re all home together again.

Sandy: The Light was a sparkling glowing cloud. I heard a voice in my head and knew it was God. We never talked about God at my house, and I never went to church, but I knew it was God. And I knew that this place, with this beautiful light that was God was my real home.

Going Home is about the spiritual reality of life after death, which we can experience before death, as the New Testament promises. And now thousands of those who have survived near-death are witnessing to their loss of fear of death and the Love that awaits each dying person.

With hope in God’s grace . . . Bob Traer

Living with love and hope

You have been raised with Christ, so set your hearts on things above. For you have died and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God. (Col. 2:1-4)

 

Resurrection is not about what happens to a body after it dies. As Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15, resurrection is a spiritual reality. A final hope, but now a Way of living. As Paul says in his letter to followers of the Way in Colossae, a small city near Ephesus in what is today Turkey, faith is dying to life as an everyday, material existence and being born anew in a life marked by hope and love. This is what Paul means by living "in Christ."

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer

Living without fear of death

May the God of perseverance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves following the example of Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and one voice you may glorify God. (Romans 15:1-6)

Paul struggles to achieve support for his teachings in Rome and elsewhere. Paul argues that diversity can exist within the body of Christ, but his teaching is also a cause of division. He blames the conflicts on those who oppose him, but Paul's opponents must have blamed Paul. And who are Paul's opponents? The former disciples of Jesus, the apostles in Jerusalem who, we learn in Galatians 2 and in the second half of Acts, are led by James, the brother of Jesus.

The apostles in Jerusalem seem to believe that some if not all of the commandments of Jewish law must be kept by all following the Way of Jesus. As they knew Jesus during his lifetime, it is hard to believe that the historical Jesus set aside the Jewish law as Paul claims the risen Christ does. Paul never knew the historical Jesus, but he acknowledges that both he and the former disciples know the risen Lord. Why then do they differ?

Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew from a Roman city; the disciples of Jesus who were the first apostles were Aramaic-speaking Jews from Galilee. Perhaps their experience of the risen Christ was different, because their lives were so different. Yet, despite conflicting beliefs about Jesus, the first apostles and also Paul were transformed by their experience of the risen Christ.

In our time, thousands of survivors of near-death experiences have been transformed by the love and light that embraced them when they were unconscious and their brains were incapable of constructing perceptions, feelings, or memories. Nonetheless, these witnesses had striking perceptions, feelings, and memories. And now tell us that we all are going home. If you trust in their testimony, you too can live without fear of death.

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer