Faith And Collective Trauma 7

The near death experiences all seem quite consistent, at least the ones that we hear and read about: on the impact of sudden mortality one finds themselves outside their body, observing and hearing those attending to them, then they are going up a kind of stairway or they are taken up through a great funnel then find themselves meeting loved ones who have already died and they are in a place full of love and light and beauty, then they are facing a great light that appears to be God, challenging and confronting them about their lives so far and offering them to be sent back into their earthly lives. They are revived and returned to life, and often find that their lives are drastically or subtly changed and that their new spiritual awareness has made them kinder and more generous people, often changing entirely their way of life and their manner of work in order to conform to this new sense of life calling. Atheists and scientists hate those accounts because they are not quite so easy to debunk as they originally thought. I find those accounts quite persuasive, but as a believing Christian I am already prejudiced. There Is something about near-death experiences that persuades me that we do live in a state of separation from the Holy, and it is in death that we are reunited. Every person reporting this kind of near-death experience mentions that they felt as though they had finally come home. As I said, I am not skeptical, and I look forward to when this should happen to me. But what about this state of separation? We go through our earthly existence cut off, or very distant from the Holy. Some have a sense that they live in a perpetually thin place and that God is always near to them. I seem to be one of those fortunate ones. But for most of us, it is an experience of separation, of being cut off. Now, I don't see angels every day. Actually, I never see them at all, except for one experience that stays with me to this day, and it really could have been just a dream. This happened in August, 1996. I was going through a very difficult time, struggling with near incapacitating toothaches and no money for dental treatment due to my incredibly stingy and meanspirited employers. A youth draped in white appeared on my bed. He had incredibly intense, dark and wonderful eyes. There was light in the room. I asked him who he was and he replied, I want you to tell me what is troubling you. So I told him, everything that I had been through, from early childhood to that present day. I felt enormously relieved and unburdened. Then I asked him again who he was. He smiled ironically and said, you think I'm twenty-two, but I am much older than that. Then I knew that he was at least tens of thousands of years older than that and I embraced him begging him to not leave me. I fell back to sleep. I woke up again in the morning, then drifted into a dream and saw all the planets aligned as they made their way around the son and a voice, it was the same voice as the angel, saying, I am always with you, you can never get far from me.