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

Experiencing the presence of God

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).

Near-death experiences of God

After years of researching near-death experiences, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long is convinced that conscious human experience transcends brain death. Long writes that in 1998: ”I started the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and its corresponding website, NDERF.org. One of my goals for the site was to collect as many NDEs as I could and to collect them through a questionnaire that would make it easy to separate and study their elements. At NDERF we explored all of the elements in the NDEs of more than one thousand people, examining consistency among the accounts. In reaching conclusions about these accounts, we followed a basic scientific principle: What is real is consistently seen among many different observations.”

Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2011), 1 and 3.

Long intended the God Study “to be an objective view of the powerful experiences with God that many people report when they are at death’s door.” He analyzed responses by NDE survivors to multiple-choice questions and reviewed their responses to open-ended questions. The study considered all the responses to the NDERF questionnaire from November 11, 2011, to November 7, 2014.” In this material, the narratives clearly verify: “NDErs were usually highly confident that it really was God in their NDE.”

Before their NDE, 39 percent of the respondents believed that ‘God definitely exists.’ “At the time they shared their NDEs with NDERF, an average of twenty-two years later, 72.6 percent of the NDErs believed ‘God definitely exists.’ To put this another way, there was an 86 percent increase in those who believe God definitely exists after their NDEs.” Combining the “NDErs who currently believe that ‘God definitely exists’ with those who currently believe ‘God probably exists,’ you find that this is the belief of a whopping 81.9 percent of NDErs — compared to 64 percent for the combined group before the NDE.”

Jeffrey Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (2016), 35-36, and 39).

 

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.