Dying and meeting God
Dear H,
When I left Seattle I said it was because it was Godless; an overstatement, really, because God was still there whether people admit it or not, and He was working miracles behind my back. As He has a tendency to do.
Many of those miracles were happening at Seattle Children's Hospital. And there were so many of them that researchers started going there to document it. Kids were dying and talking about a Being of Light, and chatting with Him, and hearing music, and playing in fields — so many things that adults report about near-death experiences (NDEs), it turns out; except many of these kids had never heard about Jesus, or heaven, or near-death experiences in general. The very godlessness of the place gave us another reason to believe them.
John Burke says in his must-read book, Imagine Heaven, that well over a hundred kids at Seattle Children’s alone have reported NDEs, and that their experiences are always unique, but that they share too many similarities to write them off as dreams. He says these experiences are actually pretty common, and that so far as we can tell, at least 1 in 25 Americans have had them — a staggering number, which researchers have been documenting since sometime around the 70's. And now that we're 50 years into it, we’re piecing together some pretty good statistics. Burke writes,
Over 900 articles on NDEs were published in scholarly literature prior to 2011, gracing the pages of such varied journals as Psychiatry, The Lancet, Critical Care Quarterly, The Journal for Near-Death Studies, American Journal of Psychiatry, British Journal of Psychology, Resuscitation and Neurology. The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences chronicles fifty-five researchers or teams who have published at least sixty-five studies of over 3,500 NDEs
And as far as the actual experiences go, what do people report?
Dr. Long reports on the percentage of each core element described in his study of 1,300 NDEs from around the world.
Out-of-body experience: separation of consciousness from the physical body (75.4%)
Heightened senses (74.4% said “more conscious and alert than normal”)
Intense and generally positive emotions or feelings (76.2% “incredible peace”)
Passing into or through a tunnel (33.8%)
Encountering a mystical or brilliant light (64.6%)
Encountering other beings, either mystical beings or deceased relatives or friends (57.3%)
A sense of alteration of time or space (60.5%)
Life review (22.2%)
Encountering unworldly (“heavenly”) realms (52.2%)
Encountering or learning special knowledge (56%)
Encountering a boundary or barrier (31%)
A return to the body (58.5% were aware of a decision to return).
You can ignore these things if you like, but too many people from a wide diversity of societies report meeting this “Being of Light.” And many describe a feeling of radical love, unlike anything they ever felt here on earth. Many report communicating without words; as though people get connected on a deeper level than ever before. People blind since birth report (as best they can) seeing colors for the first time, and deaf people report hearing music. Many others describe the rooms where they were having operations, totally sedated; and according to a Dr. Rawlings, we get many reports of being in hell too.
Many Christians are skeptical about these kinds of reports, especially since good NDE's happen to people of all religious backgrounds, and Christians believe Christ (and His corollary, salvation) belong exclusively to them. But this is all a misunderstanding, I think. Paul got knocked off his donkey by God before he was a Christian; and beyond this, he claims what we would today call an NDE anyway.
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know — God knows. And I know that this man — whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows — was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.
This should lead us to ask, if we believe in God, isn’t God who we all see when we die? And secondly, is this phenomenon happening more frequently because of modern medicine? Isn't it possible that the defibrillators, blood transfusions, iron lungs, adrenaline shots and such are bringing more people back from the edge — and letting them tell us what they saw there?
Whether or not we can explain it is beside the point: it’s happening, and we're meeting Someone, and if you want to know who we’re meeting, and what it’s like, I strongly recommend this book. It turned me from a hardened skeptic into a real believer, and has changed my whole life immeasurably.
Yours,
-J
P.S. When a man has a life-changing event, how does he explain it? We cram it into a word — "epiphany,” or "conversion;” a few syllables for what took a lifetime to build. After all he wasn't saved in a moment. It was years of preparation inside him, probably; a conditioning of the emotions, a clearing of obstacles and hurdles and objections. An epiphany is the arrival, but never the journey itself. The point we call “a conversion” began the moment we were born, because we were born for it. But who can explain that all in a moment?
My favorite thing about this book is that over the years I had several very serious objections to Christianity, and all of them were totally demolished. And in fact my objections became my reasons for belief. To really get an idea how, you’ll have to read people's accounts in the book; but in short, I objected:
That Christ’s morality was absurd — that it was impractical, impossible, and unfair.
That nobody could describe heaven because pure happiness is fleeting and impossible.
That if Christianity was real and Christians were inspired, real Christians wouldn’t lag so far behind the damned in art.
That strokes can get rid of our memory, reason, and emotions; and if the soul doesn’t have these properties, then an afterlife may be impossible.
The first objection against Christ’s morality was demolished because of the way people describe interaction in Heaven. One NDE’r writes,
[When] beings wanted to communicate, generally they did so through thought only. Because everything is alive, everything can communicate so that you “experience” the communication—you don’t just hear it. There was no miscommunication, no misunderstandings. There was nothing you would hide from one another . . . every thought was pure [1].
If this is the case then all the mystical sayings of Christ make sense. For instance, when He says inasmuch as you do to the least of these, you do unto me, He's saying it literally: to do an act of kindness or selfishness to a Christian is to directly make God feel it. Our good deeds aren't wasted on meaningless projects. There's no act too small either. Everything has eternal significance. Everything is an act toward your Creator, saved in a cosmic bank account, paid out in eternal love, and waiting for you to receive it. Which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. Christ says,
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Now consider how this passage fits into it so neatly:
Everything I ever thought, did, said, hated, helped, did not help, should have helped was shown in front of me, the crowd of hundreds, and everyone like [in] a movie. How mean I’d been to people, how I could have helped them, how mean I was (unintentionally also) to animals! Yes! Even the animals had had feelings. It was horrible. I fell on my face in shame. I saw how my acting, or not acting, rippled in effect towards other people and their lives. It wasn’t until then that I understood how each little decision or choice affects the world. The sense of letting my Savior down was too real. Strangely, even during this horror, I felt a compassion, an acceptance of my limitations by Jesus and the crowd of others.
And what about the Sermon on the Mount? All that talk about hate being murder and lust being adultery is 100% necessary when two minds are directly connected. Of course hatred in your heart is murder then: hatred is enough to ruin one person without it poisoning everyone else.
My objection about happiness was demolished because our entire physical world will be remade, and we’ll experience joy as a positive — and not mainly as an escape from the negative. We have yet to feel, on a permanent and total basis, the radiating of God’s love, and the joy that comes from being clean. These things are almost impossible to describe, and a lot of NDE'rs admit our language is inadequate. But with some things we can come close. One of them writes,
Part of the joy I was experiencing was not only the presence of everything wonderful but the absence of everything terrible. There was no strife, no competition, no sarcasm, no betrayal, no deception, no lies, no murders, no unfaithfulness, no disloyalty, nothing contrary to the light and life and love. . . . The absence of sin was something you could feel. There was no shame, because there was nothing to be ashamed of. There was no sadness, because there was nothing to be sad about. There was no need to hide, because there was nothing to hide from. It was all out in the open.
My third objection was that Christians make some of the worst art and are often on the losing end of culture. But Christianity isn’t a political creed or an art movement; and from the descriptions of heavenly music and architecture and art in general, Christians just haven’t been able to make them yet. Another NDE’r writes about heavenly music,
The voices not only burst forth in more than four parts, but they were in different languages. I was awed by the richness and perfect blending of the words—and I could understand them! I do not know why this was possible except that I was part of a universal experience. Communication between us was through the projection of thoughts. . . . We all seemed to be on some universal wave length. I thought at the time, I will never forget the melody and these words. But later I could only recall two: “Jesus” and “redeemed.”
And there are going to be lots of surprises. One NDEr reports something I never even imagined:
Dean heard “God the Father singing back to each and every being giving Him praise before the Throne. He was singing an individual love song to each of His creations. The song was alive and seemed to go inside of the beings it was meant for. . . . That is what was going on in Heaven. Father God was expressing His love for each being and they were expressing their love for Him.”
Imagine singing to God from the bottom of your heart — and God Himself singing back.
And what of all the other art? After reading this book, I believe we will be the art. Not only as finished products unbelievable to anybody alive right now, but something even more impressive. Our past lives could be the “fiction.” God's genius will point out the poetry and the tragedy and the comedy and the irony in ways we’ll never have guessed, and will blow our minds for eternity. The Devil will keep Gossip Girl and every lousy remake of Scooby Doo. We’ll be able to see Christ walk on earth and raise Lazarus from the dead. Every single one of us will be a masterpiece from an angle we ourselves never imagined.
This book is so full of things I’ve never heard or even considered that instead of fearing death I’m looking forward to it. Before reading this book I sought God. Now that I’ve gotten less than halfway through it, I’m dying to meet Him — and to be the kind of person He wants to meet.
[1] I had a friend ask me this week, if heaven is real and God just sets everything right, why didn't He just do it right in the first place?
This is a question I can't answer authoritatively; but if I had to guess, it's because only adults could understand Heaven. Jesus did of course say we had to be like children to get into the Kingdom; but this had more to do with accepting things we can’t understand than the piling up of experiences. We need to believe the impossible is about to happen. But we need to know why the impossible is so much better than what we see here today, right in front of us. And we can only judge how great something is when we know the alternative.
I was told this week about a little girl who likes Jurassic Park, where people are torn to shreds by animals, but can't handle murder scenes in other movies. It was a mystery to her aunt but made total sense to me. She’s okay with violence but terrified by evil. A distinction that a child can feel, but only an adult can judge and appreciate.
The same I think goes for heaven. You can die in utero and meet your Creator and everything can be fine. But if you never knew what it was like to miss Him; or to try to hang on to something beautiful and worry about it being torn from you; or what it was like to have your heart broken, or to love someone and see them hurting badly, or to go hungry, or tired, or to be in physical pain; or to feel dirty, or to dream about how something would be and be deeply disappointed, or to see people doing evil and getting totally away with it, or to be abandoned by your dad or lose him to brain cancer, or to wonder your whole life if anybody could ever love you if they knew the real you, then you could never really appreciate Heaven.
What, then, about the one year-olds who go there? Do they miss out forever on the real experience of Heaven? I imagine we’re their ticket to understanding. They may never have experienced real suffering, but we have; and when we’re connected together, they’ll see everything we saw and feel everything we felt and know how good God is, and then burst out with thank you's forever.
Then we’ll see suffering and death as an extreme act not of just mercy, but goodness. We broke from God and He said, go then; but only go so far. Then He tore us slowly from this life, assuming we die of old age; and we lose all the magic of youth and the feelings that go with it; and we get tired of things and tired in general; and our loved ones die off and the world leaves us behind and we don’t like where it went and we don’t have anything left to chase. But this all happens slowly, and incrementally, and thus almost imperceptibly — almost tolerably, like boiling a frog. Or we get hit by a bus and take the short route to God instead. Either way God sends the parasite, the heart attack, the tsunami, the war, the famine, the gulag, the robber, the cross, to tear us out of this cheap and deranged copy of real life, and then greets us personally at the other end — not as an enemy, for those of us who love Him, but as the only good thing we ever really had. We see things down here and say there is no God or where is He? And He's watching us the whole time, smiling, because He knows we’re about to find out who He is, and that many of us are going to like it.