A Lifelong Task

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A friend recently described to me his near-death, or out-of-body experience. Like many who have had such experiences, he said he is a changed man. He is religious in a way he never was before and he doesn’t fear death.

I've written about this in these blogs before, recounting that as a journalist back when the subject was less well-known, I interviewed three or four people who said they had near-death experiences. All seemed to be sincere and all believed their experiences were real. And all of them, including the man with whom I spoke recently, described the great, white light they saw – some say in which they were enveloped.

The 2014 movie, Heaven Is For Real – about a boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery – elicited skepticism but revived the topic among the public. The media reports that there is a remarkable similarity in experiences among people who have had such experiences.

An on-line article in the magazine The Atlantic describes the phenomenon.

A Loving Presence

“Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body; spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm; meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God; encountering long-lost relatives or friends; recalling scenes from one’s life; feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love; and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body.”

Some scientists are skeptical, saying that they are hallucinations caused by chemical changes in a dying mind. Maybe, but the scientific explanations seem inadequate, failing to explain, among other things, the commonality among many various accounts.

Henri Nouwen

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The “light” part of the experiences is especially interesting, seems to me, because it reflects hundreds of passages in the Bible about light as a metaphor for God and the life of faith. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” say the psalms, which also proclaim that “in your light, we see light.” And Isaiah urges us to “walk in the light of the Lord.”

The Gospel of John calls Jesus “the light of the world,” and “the true light that enlightens every person.” And in the same gospel, Jesus advises us that “while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become children of the light.” Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus in the Acts of the Apostles appears to be more than a metaphor. He reported that “…about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me.”

Christians, traditionally, have spoken about life after death as entering into eternal light as well as eternal life.

Light, of course, is matter and according to Christian tradition and that of other religions, only the spirit survives the body. By definition then, the spirit, or soul, is incapable of detecting light in the human sense. For the most part, the Bible uses light as a metaphor, so people who have near-death experiences are presumably in some kind of transition from body to soul.

I recently read the book, “Aging, the Fulfillment of Life” by Henri Nouwen and Walter Gaffney who point out the shared significance of light among Christians, Buddhists and Hindus.

Same Essential Word

“I proceed from the simple irrefutable fact that in the crucial moments of life ... (such as death),” writes Nouwen, a well-known theologian and psychologist, “even though people come from diverging cultures and religions, they find that same essential word: Light!

“For isn't it true? There must be a basic similarity between the Enlightenment spoken of by the Hindus and Buddhists and the Eternal Light of the Christians. Both die into the Light. One practical difference could well be that the Buddhist, more than the contemporary Christian, has learned to live with the light (nirvana) as a reality long before he dies…

“…But whoever has once met God no longer finds the hereafter question interesting. Whoever has learned to live in the Great Light is no longer worried by the problem of whether the Light will still be there tomorrow…. The need to pose skeptical questions about the hereafter seems to disappear as the divine Light again becomes a reality in everyday life, as it is meant to, of course, in all religions.”

Most of us haven’t had the kind of meeting with God that eliminates skeptical questions. And the kind of out-of-body experience my friend described - sort of a foretaste of the hereafter, making one less dependent on faith – doesn’t happen to everybody. For most of us, learning to live “in the Great Light” is a lifelong task, dependent on faith, patience and love.