3.30.08 Life After Life: Fact or Fantasy?
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
March 30, 2008 “Life After Life: Fact or Fantasy?”
Text: St. Paul said, “Now we see through a glass darkly.”
It started off like any ordinary Monday afternoon at Glenview Presbyterian Church. Some ladies began to come in to prepare for an afternoon tea. I came out of my office and sauntered down the hall towards the church secretary. When I rounded the corner, I saw her very agitated on telephone calling for an ambulance and gesticulating wildly for me to go back down the hall. Then I saw what the problem was—a lady collapsed on the floor. As I ran up, I saw that she was in a bad way. It looked like she was having trouble breathing, as a choking sound seemed to come from her throat. Suddenly, she ceased to move. All the blood ran out of her face and I suddenly realized that she was gone. I picked up her arm—no pulse—no pulse at the neck. Desperately I thought, what do I do now? I had heard that you were supposed to press sharply on the chest in imitation of the heart beat. I tried that. Then I thought she is not breathing. I’ll have to blow into her mouth and so I did, not knowing that I would have to hold her nose. I soon found out that I was getting nowhere and so I held her nose, breathed in her mouth and pumped her chest.
I did this for a minute and I began to get discouraged, then I suddenly got mad. I said this woman’s just like a car that won’t start! It flashed through my mind that it was either gasoline or electricity that was the problem. In this case it was blood movement or oxygen. I decided I’d work harder on the blood and really pumped her heart. Suddenly to my amazement she responded with a great gasp of air—she began to breathe again. After about ten minutes the ambulance came. She was taken to the hospital. Diagnosis—cardiac arrest.
I remember sitting totally exhausted by this experience in my office. I recall thinking about Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, the popular book published in over 30 languages that claimed that there was life after this life. People suffering cardiac arrest had claimed experiences of another world. And now I had seen a cardiac arrest. I remembered how very dead she seemed to me for that first minute. How could people claim that they saw and heard things when their eyes were closed—when there were no signs of life? I decided that one day I would do my homework on this phenomenon.
While on my study leave I finally had the time to plunge into the research on Life After Life. What did I discover?
The George Gallup book Adventures in Immortality told me that according to Gallup Poll, 23 million Americans had been resuscitated following clinical death. Of these eight million reported various kinds of life after life experiences.
These experiences could be categorized into roughly nine experiences that were common to some, but not to all.
1. Some people felt that they had left their bodies;
2. Some while out of their bodies had acute visual perception of surroundings and events following clinical death;
3. Some heard audible sounds near the vicinity of their body;
4. Some experienced a sense of peace and painlessness;
5. Some experienced a blinding light or a series of lights; 6. Some experienced a fast review of their entire life like a high speed film;
7. Some experienced what they described as a different world;
8. Some experienced the presence of other special beings while surrounded with a feeling of unconditional love as well as the presence of dead relatives who greeted them and told them it was not their time yet;
9. Some experienced going through what was like a tunnel into a different world.
As I read the Gallup research, I began to ask myself how experiences like these could be scientifically evaluated. Gallop had also surveyed leading scientists about whether they believed in life after death: 68% said no; 16% said yes and 16% had no opinion.
The 68% of scientists were into explaining the data of life after life experiences by such things as residual electricity in the brain; hallucinations and a thousand other totally physical explanations.
The 16 % might have the problem of trying to slant the research to make it say what it does not say, because of a prior belief in the afterlife.
Probably the best researchers would then be the scientific agnostics who was simply open to the question; What is this near death experience about when people are clinically dead and then resuscitated?
So one day I walked over to the research section of the University Of Toronto Library Of Medicine. There I came across a very interesting book called Recollections of Death, a Medical Investigation, by Michael Sabom M. D. Sabom, a noted cardiologist, had had the same problem I had had with life after life experiences. How do you prove or disprove them? Sabom, at first hostile to this research, decided on a method which he thought would scientifically disprove these claims.
As a cardiologist he had intimate knowledge of resuscitation procedures used in the intensive care unit. Only one out of the nine surveyed general experiences was at all verifiable and that was the claim that when people were clinically dead, with no respiration or heartbeat, their eyes closed etc., that they were able to see exactly what the medical team was doing to their bodies while in intensive care. Sabom’s method would be to question patients on the medical procedures used during that periodof time—to attempt to trip them up perhaps in technical detail to show that really they had only imagined the experience. Sight and hearing, while comatose, or clinically dead, was classified as the autoscopic experience –the ability to leave the body and watch what went on following death.
After investigating many cases, what was Sabom’s general conclusion at the end of the book?
“During the autoscopic portion of the Near Death Experience survivors claimed to have seen and heard events in the vicinity of their own unconscious physical bodies from a detached elevated position. The details of these perceptions were found to be accurate in all instances where corroborating evidence was available. Moreover, there appeared to be no plausible explanation for the accuracy of these observations involving the usual physical senses… The out of body hypothesis simply seems to fit best with the data at hand.”
Now to the New Testament experience of the resurrection. When Mary returned to the disciples to tell them that Jesus had risen from the dead, the disciples were totally skeptical and regarded this assertion as an idle tale. But two of them went to investigate, Peter and John. They saw the tomb open, the stone rolled to one side, the linen cloths used to wrap the body separate with the head piece in a place by itself and something about that experience of that empty tomb that made them believe.
Likewise in the Gospel lesson we read of the skeptical men on the road to Emmaus. They were joined by a stranger who said: “Fools and slow of heart to understand all that the prophets have spoken.” Then he delivered a survey of Scripture showing that the Messiah in Judaism had to suffer and die. When the evening was come this stranger took bread and wine and broke the bread and blessed it and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they knew him!
So in light of modern research into the Near Death Experience what do we make of these older stories? Do we dismiss them or remain open? Personally I believe in the resurrection of Jesus. And I think that at the very least that the resurrection of Jesus simply means that there is life after life at the end of this life for you and me; that the universe is governed by a Great Spirit who has shot reality full of meaning purpose and hope. In other words, there is a plan, not oblivion after our death.
I also believe, that as the research is building constantly into near death experiences in great universities such as Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Virginia, New Mexico, Berkeley, Seattle Pacific and Denver—all of which have life after life research; that for those people who say that this life is all there is, it will become increasingly clear that what we have here in this data is a glimpse of the first ten minutes of an afterlife, whether the skeptics like it or not! There is just too much evidence.
Michael Sabom writes: “In short, my involvement in the lives and deaths of the people in this book has made me humble to the ways of the universe much like (the most brilliant scientist the world has ever known), Albert Einstein, who once wrote: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a Spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we, with our modest power, must feel humble.”
Sabon says, “It is precisely this Spirit which has been acknowledged time and time again.” He quotes from a patient with a near death experience, “Dr. Sabom, I think its God s work. That’s the only thing I can figure. God had me that time and he could have kept me. From this experience, I know there is life after death and not just death itself. God wanted me to get a peek into this big secret and then shove me right back again.”
Sabom says, “It is precisely this Spirit which seems to live on in the lives of those who were touched by some ineffable truth encountered face to face at death’s closest moments.”
One day in my last church a psychic woman came to worship. She became a fairly regular attender. After service one day she shared with me that she could see a man sitting up beside me at the front, much the way that Garry and I sit together for worship. But I was always alone up there on a Sunday except for very big days in the church year. Even the lay reader sat with the congregation. So it was just me and the choir and an empty chair beside me. But for her, on the Sundays that she came there was someone sitting in that so called ‘empty chair.’ She said to me, “I don’t know who this man is but he smiles at you so lovingly especially when you are preaching.”
So being a pragmatist, after she had described what he looked like, I got out a bunch of photos and asked her whether any of these people looked like the man? There was in that collection one photo of my father, which I deliberately put in there. Without hesitation she said; “That’s him!”
Some time after this my mother passed away and after that one Sunday this psychic came into the church to worship. After service she said: “He isn’t sitting beside you any more.”
Let it be clearly understood that my father had adored my mother. I thought, if there is life after life, I think I know where my father is…
According to Scripture, there is a plan. St. Paul said, “Now we see through a glass darkly.” That is part of the plan of living as human beings. But one day we shall be reunited with those we have loved and lost. So the plan goes on: and St. Paul says: “But one day we shall see face to face. And then we shall know God, even as we have been known by God.
And that is really something to think about!
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