BACK FROM ETERNITY
Mike Cunningham
December 21, 2014

It’s usual for me to hum and silently sing the lyrics of my favorite hymns throughout the day. At this time of the year I include Christmas carols such as Oh Come, Oh Come Emanuel, Silent Night and Joy To The World. As I was crafting today’s sermon, I surprised myself when I unexpectedly switched to the following portion of the classic song, “Old Man River.”

I’m tired of living and I’m scared of dyin,
But ol’ man river
He just keeps rollin along.

At my age I sometimes get tired of living. I must admit that I’m also scared of dying. Who wouldn’t be? After all, I don’t know what I will have to experience before I leave this world and enter into Heaven. It’s been one of the desires of my heart that when the time comes I will know.

In relating their near-death experiences to him, Raymond Moody says that, in a few instances, persons have expressed the feeling that the love or prayers of others have in effect pulled them back from death regardless of their own wishes.

“I was with my elderly aunt during her last illness, which was very drawn out. I helped take care of her, and all that time everyone in the family was praying for her to regain her health. She stopped breathing several times, but they brought her back. Finally, one day she looked at me and she said, “Joan, I have been over there, over to the beyond and it is beautiful over there. I want to stay, but I can’t as long as you keep praying for me to stay with you. Your prayers are holding me over here. Please don’t pray anymore.” “We did all stop, and shortly after that she died.”

Others feel that they were in effect allowed to live by “God,” either in response to their own request to be allowed to live (usually because the request was made unselfishly) or because God apparently had some mission in mind for them to fulfill.

“I was above the table, and I could see everything they were doing. I knew that I was dying, that this would be it. Yet, I was concerned about my children, about who would take care of them. So, I was not ready to go. The Lord permitted me to live.”

One man remembers,

“I say God was surely good to me, because I was dead, and He let the doctors bring me back, for a purpose. The purpose was to help my wife, I think, because she had a drinking problem, and I know that she just couldn’t have made it without me. She is better now, though, and I really think it had a lot to do with what I went through.”

Another woman told Moody,

“The doctor had already said that I was gone, but I lived through it. Yet, the experience I had been through was so joyous, I had no bad feelings at all. As I came back, I opened my eyes, and my sister and my husband saw me. I could see their relief, and tears were pouring from their eyes. I could see that it was a relief to them that I did survive. I felt as thought I had been called back-magnetized back-through the love of my sister and my husband. Since then, I have believed that other people can draw you back.”

Another woman said that,

“I was above the table, and I could see everything they were doing. I knew that I was dying, that this would be it. Yet, I was concerned about my children, about who would take care of them. So, I was not ready to go. The Lord permitted me to live.”

On the other hand, some remember being drawn speedily back towards their physical bodies, often with a jerk, at the end of their experiences.

“I was up there at the ceiling, watching them work on me. When they put the shocks on my chest, and my body jumped up, I just fell right back down to my body, just like dead weight. The next thing I knew, I was in my body again. (1)

Concerning Near death experiences, in her book “Dancing Past The Dark,” Nancy Evans Bush informs us that:

The remembered experience remains embedded, a vital aspect of everyday functioning in ‘this life,’ in the here and now, and must be dealt with in those terms. The pragmatic question is whether it will be dealt with well or badly, and that depends largely on the information and resources available. Information is available, though not without effort, as it must be chiseled out of other disciplines like trilobites out of rock. It is a task of mythological proportions. We begin with a close look at the elements within a disturbing NDE.

The elements

The basic components of near-death experiences since Moody-by Ring, Sabon, Greyson, Gallup, and others. With only percentages changing from study to study, these are the interchangeable elements of that pattern that makes them recognizable as near-death experiences: out-of body event, movement through darkness, intense emotional response, ineffability, noetic quality, presence or absence of light, encounters with entities, transiency, and so on.

As mentioned in Chapter 5, it was Margot Grey in her 1985 British study who first observed that frightening NDE’s include the same basic elements as blissful experiences but with differing details and emotions. As Ring and others detailed blissful experiences, she noted the distinctive features of disturbing ones:

A feeling of extreme fear or panic, emotional and
Mental anguish, extending to states of the utmost desperation, a great sense of desolation, the brink of a pit, the edge of an abyss, being tricked into death and [needing] to keep their wits about them to prevent it from happening.

The hell-like experience, including all [those] elements, often a definite sense of being dragged down by some evil force, visions of wrathful or demonic creatures, [or] unseen beings or figures which are often faceless or hooded, intensely cold or unbearably hot, sounds that resemble the wailing of ‘souls’ in torment, a fearsome noise.

Sounds

Distressing NDE’s often feature uncanny or jarring sounds (wails, moans, buzzing, shrieking): “The noise was fearsome, with snarling and crashing like maddened wild animals, gnashing their teeth.” (Grey, 70)

Sudden sound,” says a Franklin Institute (2004) article titled “Noise and Stress,” “is an urgent wake-up call that alerts and activates the stress response-a biological alarm that affects the brain in powerful ways. Because loud noise often heralds bad news, animals and humans have evolved a rapid response to audio stresses.”

From to outset, then, a disturbing NDE may involve the kind of sound guaranteed biologically to suggest crisis, even in an unconscious state.

Odors

Just as sound can generate instant emotional response, so does the sense of smell. David B. Givens (undated), of the Center for Non-verbal Studies, says, “The olfactory sense evolved as an ‘early warning system’ to detect food, mates, and dangers (e.g., predators) from a distance, aroma cues are taken very seriously by the brain. More than any other sense, smell evokes strong emotional tendencies to approach or avoid.”

As might be expected, blissful NDE’s are often said to smell like flowers, whereas less pleasant NDE’s includes distasteful, sometimes putrid odors. Howard Storm mentions smelling like rotting chicken.

Movement

Most NDE’s include a definite sense of movement, suggesting that like the apocalyptic voyages of medieval times, these are journeys; one is “going somewhere.” When that sensed movement is downward, it may trigger the instinctual fear of falling, like the sudden jerk of a baby who feels unsure of his stability.

The Images

What are the constituent images within distressing near-death experiences, and are they unique to NDA’s or can they be found elsewhere? What might they mean-or are they simply arbitrary images without meaning-as the now disappeared blog of a schizophrenic once put it, “suffering before the incomprehensible.”

The first generation of professional near-death studies dealt largely (and necessarily) with descriptive reports of near-death experiences. As a result, with little comparative work going on, there has been in much of the literature a sense of uniqueness in near-death experiences, as though they themselves were a floating island with few or no moorings in the broader bed of other scholarship or social witness. With few exceptions, it is as if near-death experiences were a Columbus-like discovery of a new world beyond anything else in human awareness. There has been little “archaeology” of the images in NDE’s. (Among the exceptions I think of the work of sociologist Allan Kelleher (1996), with philosopher Michael Grosso (1986) and religious scholar Carol Zaleski (1987). (2)

Commenting on Moody’s book, Dinesh D’Souza says that,

While Moody’s book stirred up immediate controversy, it also attracted a multitude of new researchers, seeking to confirm or discredit his claims…The work of these researchers confirmed, extended, and systematized Moody’s original claims. Shortly after Moody’s book, the International Association for Near Death Studies was founded to study the NDE phenomenon, and its publication, the Journal of Near Death Studies, has featured a wide body of data from around the world. Near death research now involves separate tracks of inquiry into the various categories of the near death experience-the out of body phenomenon, the tunnel of darkness, the bright light, the sensation of love and warmth, the life review, and the subsequent life transformation.

What emerges from this work is how vivid and real these experiences are to the people who have them. Moreover, several people reported seeing things when they were clinically dead that seem impossible for them to have been aware of. One 11-year-old boy who suffered cardiac arrest and had no heartbeat told of an out-of-body experience in which he could see the doctors and nurses working on his body. After his recovery he accurately summarized the resuscitation procedure used on him, the colors and whereabouts of the instruments in the room, and even what the medical staff said to each other.

Another remarkable case involved a Seattle woman who reported a near death experience following a heart attack. She told social worker Kimberly Clark that she had separated from her body, and not only risen to the ceiling, but floated outside the hospital altogether. Clark did not believe her, but a small detail the woman remembered caught her attention. The woman said that she had been distracted by the presence of a shoe on the third floor ledge at the north end of the emergency room building. It was a tennis shoe with a worn patch and a lace stuck under the heel. The woman asked Clark to go find the shoe. Clark found this ridiculous because she knew the woman had been brought into the emergency room at night, when she could not possibly see what was outside the building, let alone on a third floor ledge. Somewhat reluctantly, Clark agreed to check, and it was only after trying several different rooms, looking out several windows, and finally climbing out onto the ledge that she was able to find and retrieve the shoe.

Some of the most sensational claims in NDE research involved blind people reporting out of body experiences in which they were able to see. These were first mentioned by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a pioneer in research on the stages of death. In her book On Death and Dying, Kubler-Ross told of patients who had been blind for at least ten years recounting near death experiences in which they could give detailed descriptions of their medical procedures and even identify the jewelry and colors of the clothing of the people around them. Unfortunately Kubler-Ross offered no case studies, but in their book Mindset, Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper cite more that twenty cases of blind patients who reported detailed near death perceptions “indistinguishable from those of sighted persons.”

Not surprisingly, near death research has faced derision and even ferocious attack from various quarters. Oddly enough, some of that derision had come from religious believers who might be expected to welcome this empirical support from one of the central tenets of their faith. The liberal theologian Hans Kung and the evangelical magazine Christianity Today both criticized near death experiences. To an extent, we can understand why liberal theologians might be hostile. Some of them regard religion as mainly about sharing and social justice and consider the whole subject of the afterlife to be an embarrassment. It’s less obvious why traditional Christians might protest. The reason could possibly be summed up in Billy Graham’s objection that “seldom in these experiences does death appear to have any negative consequences.” In a 1992 monograph, John Ankerberg and John Weldon write that near death research seems to promote “a universal religion” in which “God seems to be indifferent to evil, and just about everyone ends up living happily ever after. This, they argue, is not Christianity. These objections may sound vindictive to some, but I think they reflect a legitimate concern with justice that is not specifically religious. Which of us would be comfortable, for instance, in contemplating Hitler enjoying eternal bliss without having to pay for his monstrous crimes?

Even so, the Christian objection seems overdrawn. Certainly the overwhelming majority of near death experiences seem to be about love, forgiveness, and bliss. These themes resonate in the work of Moody, Ring, and Sabon. But physician Maurice Rawlings in Beyond Death’s Door reports a number of frightening reports and hellish near death encounters, sometimes experienced in retribution for bad things that the person had done. Rawlings suggests that only about half of NDE’s are positive, but that people with negative experiences either repress them or are embarrassed to report them, a phenomenon commonly observed in victims of rape and abuse. Rawlings is an evangelical Christian who has been faulted for producing work that track his religious beliefs. But Dr. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush have issued their own report on “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” and the British researcher Margot Grey in her study Return From Death also reports a number of dark gruesome NDE’s that are very similar to those in Rowlings work. So Christians need not worry that NDE;’s somehow undermine mainstream religious beliefs. Most significant for Christians and other believers, Sabon and other researchers consistently report that “NDE’s seem to produce a stronger faith and a higher level of commitment to traditional religious practice. (3)

Today’s sermon about folks who have come “Back From Eternity” has provided a lot of food for thought. As usual, I hope each of you folks have found it to be helpful. I’m hoping that, in one way or another, the Lord will incline you to let me know.

Lord willing, next week….

Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon-Survival of Bodily Death, © by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D. Various pages throughout the book.
Dancing Past the Dark. Distressing Near-Death Experiences, © 2012 by Nancy Evans Bush. Pages 187-190
Life After Death, © 2009 by Dinesh D’Souza, Pages 62-66