Writing this blog is the mental equivalent of training for a triathlon. You have no idea! Because the subject matter is both so personal and so experimental, everything has to be examined: “Do I really mean this?” “What does it mean to say [that]?” “How true is it that…?” “Who knows about …[subject requiring a decade of study].”
And so it occurs to me that I must have lost my mind to undertake a topic like religion and near-death experience, especially distressing NDEs with their connotations of hell. The readers of this blog range from “I-know-I’ve-been-there” experiencers to convinced evangelical Christians to puzzled mainliners (having nothing to do with drugs), to a whole range of non-Christians to religiously-dismissive atheists to believing-but-confused atheists and Nones, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and all points in between. How to speak to all those perspectives…especially as mine may be altogether different?
What I am trying to do, you see, is to get down underneath all the preconceptions and assumptions, all the theories and doctrines, and ask, “What is bedrock?” Is it possible to get beyond overlays of supposition to something so simple I am able to trust it? Can we begin to see near-death experiences through lenses other than doctrinal or disbelieving? As you surely recognize by now, I don’t have answers. All that’s possible is to share with you my questioning and tentative conclusions, recognizing that we can barely see to the end of our own skin. The meaning of the universe may well be elsewhere; I offer merely a weathervane.
Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon; and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
Although I have loved this quote from Saint-Exupéry since I was in my early teens, of those four clauses, there’s only one of them I trust absolutely. (At least it’s a start.)
You can see that my engagement, shall we say, with the weekly Bible group at church is different than most (yes, every Wednesday morning, in the parish hall at St. Philip’s). Last week, this doctrinally heterogeneous Episcopal group was intently debating the utility of the creeds for today, dating as they do from around the year 323. And one man, a charming and orderly-minded retiree, said he relied on the creeds to give him a sense of structure in the world.
“There’s so much confusion,” he said, “how could I know what sense to make of it without the creeds?”
And that’s when it struck me that in a universe where so very many of our questions and fears are unanswerable, doctrine and creeds are like grab bars in the shower—something to hold onto so we don’t fall. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re provable or genuinely part of the underlying structure; they’re at least architectural features offering stability when we’re a bit off balance. Some of us need more of them than others do.
All our descriptive systems—theologies, ideologies, disciplines, paradigms—are grab bars of one sort or another, ways of ordering information to help us find our way around this vastly mysterious universe without falling into a chaos of disordered observations. Models. Maps. Architectures. And we all like to believe that ours is The Right One, the true description of The Way Things Are. At least, we say, our own makes sense, unlike those others!
Over at the Paranormalia blog this week, host Robert McLuhan points to an article in which the writer says of her avowedly atheistic system of confirmed skeptics, “I’m part of a growing community (some would even call it a movement) consisting of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who value science and critical thinking. …I felt we were doing important work: making a better, more rational world and protecting people from being taken advantage of.”
In that writer’s “better, more rational world,” people are protected from anything religious because it constitutes an intellectual scam. Meanwhile, at the extreme other end of the scale, as this blog’s commenter Philemon points out, reviews of Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven have included “attacks on the book [for] not according with Christian doctrine and one goes so far as to call it a trick by Satan to lead Christians astray.”
We do persist in clutching our own treasured beliefs as Truth.
And here’s where the trouble begins. By simply stating this observation, suggesting that perhaps we can’t quite discern which is the only Truth, or that there may be no only, I kick at the foundations of somebody’s grab bars, the supports which make that person’s life feel secure. If our systems, our grab bars, are all models, if they are maps rather than actuality, if there can be more than one set of supports, how can we know which one is True? And if none is uniquely True—especially if mine is not the Truth, how can I believe anything? Do all supports fall?
How we answer this, it seems to me, will determine everything else about the way we think and live. Stay tuned.
Hi Nancy,
I want to be a bit more self-disclosing with you now than I have up until now as a way to make sense of the intensity behind some of my statements that I have vented on your blog.
Like you, I was born and raised a member of the U.C.C. My whole family belonged to various local churches within the U.C.C. only a few miles apart. We’re all Pennsylvania Dutch. Our ancestors were both members of the Lutheran and German Reformed churches at the same time, attending the services of both churches on Sundays until they collapsed under the unified umbrella of the U.C.C. a ways back. A couple years ago my immediate family and I was booted out of our local U.C.C. as we (and a number of other congregants) did not involve ourselves with strife going on within our congregation related to gay marriage. Our church, which had been an U.C.C. for many years disaffiliated with the U.C.C. a few years back over the matter and became pretty much a fundamentalist break away. My family is now without a church.
As a child, I was an acolyte in this church. I believed sincerely in Jesus and in God and considered myself a member of a very large family which extended far beyond my church to every person who sincerely wanted to do what was right. On several Christmas Eves I helped to light the candles which would then light many other candles, until the whole church was alight with hundreds singing hymns. I felt at the time that this was symbolic of the souls of the world being illuminated with God’s love and the world being won over in triumph by the presence of Jesus in the world. I completely believed in a spiritual presence in the world – and it wasn’t hard, because I felt it in a way that can’t be grasped by the intellect. I prayed fervently that Jesus would save us all and I believed, because I prayed for it as honestly as I could, that God would not deny me this. I prayed that every last being on this planet would be saved and that God’s love would prevail over all.
When I was eleven, my grandmother suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack. My family and I stayed with my grandfather in the aftermath and I slept on the living room floor, where my grandmother spent her last remaining moments of her life. During one of these nights she came to me in a dream in which my mother and I were driving over a nearby mountain ridge. When I turned around to see her, shining and radiant in the back seat of the car, I said, “Gram! – What are you doing here!? You’re dead!”
“No,” she said, smiling, “I’m not dead. Tell your mom I’m not dead.”
Later, when I was a teenager, I spent several years in regular prayer at night, after school. I did it even without my parents realizing what I was doing, because I wanted to do it as Jesus instructed – entirely in private and for no other reason than that I wanted to grow closer to God. After a couple of years of this I asked God if it would be OK to just be a “regular kid” and date girls and experience the regular life that other kids seemed to be enmeshed in. That night I awoke to see a male angel, golden and radiant, staring past me in an unbelievable display of power, pointing to illegible, but flaming words that appeared in the air next to his outstretched finger. I jumped down off my bed and began to kneel on the floor, when I stopped myself because I felt I shouldn’t bow this way before only an angel. In just a few seconds the angel was gone and I was left alone in my room when suddenly a much brighter light exploded before me and sent me head-first into the carpet. The light was so intense and so all-pervading that I felt it would destroy me any moment and I silently prayed, “Please leave me, or you’ll kill me.” A split second later it was done and I woke up, shaking on the floor of my bedroom both terrified and overcome with honor that God would visit *me* of all people in this way.
Since then I’ve had a couple OBEs, one in which I clearly saw myself from outside myself and in which beings of light told me that no matter what it appeared like, we are all here for a reason and that we are all amazing beings who are extremely brave to have chosen to have incarnated as human beings. I was assured at that time that no matter what it appeared like, we were all loved immensely and that all would be OK regardless of what it seemed like here in this world. I recall, before being sucked back into my body, observing plants and flowers – all during night time – awash in an energetic display of unspeakable beauty. I felt a total reverence for all things. The glory of God was displayed in everything I looked at, even the lowliest of things.
I bring all this up to point out that I am not a near-death experiencer, but I AM an experiencer of a sort. My grandmother shared with me only a few years ago that my great-great grandfather had an NDE that he emerged from only because he witnessed his wife shouting and screaming and hitting his body. He shared, many years ago – far before Raymond Moody published his book – that he saw himself floating into a great, bright light following a heart attack. My great-great grandparents all lived hard lives as farmers, so it should come as no surprise that when he returned from his NDE in order to remain with his wife that he was extremely angry with her and said, “If I ever die again, just let me stay dead!”
I am now 30-years-old. I have seen the world go from the pre-internet era to the internet era. When I went to college I and most other people didn’t have cell phones and now everyone has a cell phone. I feel that this has caused a sense of connection with all of humanity in my generation that has not been felt before now.
When I was a teenager, I prayed fervently that the whole world would be saved. In my naivete, I even prayed that Satan would be saved because I believed that Jesus would want me to pray for those who persecuted me. In my innocence, I sincerely believed that God granted my prayers.
I’m sure charges could be leveled at me that I was a bit unschooled in my theology as a kid – but I’ll tell you what: I believed passionately in a God who was a true father and who wasn’t going to rest with only reclaiming a partial family. I sincerely believed with all my heart that Jesus had come to reclaim every single last lamb, that until that job was accomplished, he would not rest. That was the God I knew as a child and that is the God I want so desperately to believe in now as a man.
Philemon, I am hearing you so loud and clear! That sense of immediacy you describe, and the passionate love, is so familiar, though I have no such visions to share. Thank you for those, by the way; you’ve just given us the kind of illustration which the rest of us greatly need to be reminded about.
As for your longing for the God you knew as a child, I have just come across a site about spiritual development that explains in very clear terms what would have taken me far longer to get across. I think you will find this helpful:
http://www.exploring-spiritual-development.com/Spiritual-Development-Stages.html
You’ll be hearing more from me about spiritual development, as I believe it’s essential information.
That was beautifully and poignantly written, Philemon. I could see you writing a novel about a person’s spiritual quest, following the outline of the developmental stages Nan posted.
Thanks for this – interesting stuff.
Wow. Wow. WOW.
Can i assume that Philemon is an Alias? A very clever one, i must say.
What a beautiful experience of life you have had. I like so many share with you the deepest of desires; to know God truly and completely, and that the same would be for all human souls. So wonderful. So wonderful. Today is a day I needed to read your story most, I think.
Over the last two years it has become a habit to wish I was dead. Begging God to kill me. Kill me. Kill me. just so that I could have even a chance to go meet him and know.
Not gonna tell you my life’s story. But thank you for sharing such an intimate part of yours.
Philemon, your personal sharing here is so rich, I hope you don’t mind my jumping in with a couple of observations.
I can very much identify when you say, “The light was so intense and so all-pervading that I felt it would destroy me any moment and I silently prayed, ‘Please leave me, or you’ll kill me.'” Dr. Jan Holden told me there is a subset of the NDE called the fear-death experience (FDE). I thought about that for a while, and decided that death is not enough to describe it for me. There has to be a fear of death as a consequence of contacting God’s ultimate holiness to accurately describe the quality of it. Depending on how real the fear of death was for you, and how much of a download you got in that split second, your episode might cross the line into an NDE. Not that I am the authority to draw lines or anything – I’m just sayin’ 🙂
My second observation is that I also very much identified with your faith in universal reconciliation, and thought you and Nan might enjoy this 1978 article by Richard Bauckham on Universalism, if you are not already familiar with it. From a doctrinal and cosmological point of view, I am pretty much with Plato and Origen all the way. But from an experiential point of view, I think Brunner really nails it.
You really struck a chord here. Thanks Nan.
I’m glad to have struck a chord. Keep your tuning fork handy, will you?
Speaking of striking a chord, you’ve just stepped into my realm. Musical flow within you, is also the universal flow. All true musicians seek to make contact with the universal flow within them selves during a performance. Listeners want them to make contact with it so they can feel it too.
In order to do this, everything intellectual has to be avoided like the plague. And this is important, all theories, and labels in regard to music. These are flow killers. All word language in your head has to be avoided. What’s the best thing to think about when you play…….nothing.
All negative emotions, Ego ( like “ain’t I great!!). Fear, this makes your contact with the energy flow diminish. Anger at yourself severs it. Frustration blocks it. This being said, OK what feeds and expands it? The answer is love, and confidence through contact with that love.
From this base the full spectrum of all emotions can be projected. One truly great musician I knew intimately called it his Center. This is felt directly in the center of your chest Listeners want the musician to reach their Center so they can also can make contact their Centers too. They feel in unison.
to make contact with the universal flow within them selves during a performance. Listeners want them to make contact with it so they can feel it too.
In order to do this, everything intellectual has to be avoided like the plague. And this is important, all theories, and labels in regard to music. These are flow killers. All word language in your head has to be avoided. What’s the best thing to think about when you play…….nothing.
Speaking of striking a chord, you’ve just stepped into my realm. Musical flow within you, is also the universal flow. All true musicians seek All negative emotions, Ego ( like “ain’t I great!!). Fear, this makes your contact with the energy flow diminish. Anger at yourself severs it. Frustration blocks it. This being said, OK what feeds and expands it? The answer is love, and confidence through contact with that love.
From this base the full spectrum of all emotions can be projected. One truly great musician I knew intimately called it his Center. This is felt directly in the center of your chest Listeners want the musician to reach their Center so they can also can make contact their Centers too. They feel in unison.
Yes!
My reaction to your writing is completely different from my reaction to Shore’s. This post resonates without a hitch, and has me really tuned in for the next step, FWIW.
You say, “What I am trying to do, you see, is to get down underneath all the preconceptions and assumptions, all the theories and doctrines, and ask, “What is bedrock?” Is it possible to get beyond overlays of supposition to something so simple I am able to trust it?”
Amen.
🙂
I became involved with the Eastern Orthodox Church a few years ago. The church is pretty adamant about their creeds and rituals being the correct ones. But they have a saying “you can say where the church IS, but you can’t say where it ISN’T”. A priest explained to me that that Buddhists can go to heaven (though when they get there it will be Jesus waiting for them, not Buddha), and that God and his truth is like a crystal that reflects differently from different angles.
Til I experienced Eastern Orthodoxy, I’d thought that creeds and dogma were opposed to open-mindedness (which led to cognitive dissonance in the evangelical church and made it hard to accept Roman Catholicism).
I’ve been really interested by the number of people recently who are moving in the direction of the Eastern Orthodox Church. “God and his truth is like a crystal that reflects differently from different angles”–great.
“There’s so much confusion,” he said, “how could I know what sense to make of it without the creeds?”
This pretty much says it all.
Things like the creed, etc are maps for reality, they are not reality, but over time people forget that they are maps and make the mistake of thinking the map IS the reality.
“We do persist in clutching our own treasured beliefs as Truth.”
It’s an interesting thing to drop ones beliefs.
If we drop them, “who are we”, “what is reality”, “am I lost”?
These are questions that need answering, not from me to you, or you to others, but from ourself to ourself.
Blessings
Exactly! Can be very scary, dropping the beliefs. Thanks for speaking up.
Nan — We’re thinking of you in coastal North Carolina and hoping very much that you and yours are OK after Sandy.
Thank you so much for the thoughts! We’re okay. Sandy was well offshore at this latitude and produced nothing worse than two days of heavy rain and winds nearing 50 mph. No damage. We even got the late-season tomatoes in before the wind took them! Again, thanks. <3