Feast of All Saints, 2012

     Over the past week or so, I’ve been deeply engrossed by a book of pretty accurate historical fiction titled, “World Without End,” by Ken Follett, that takes place in England between about 1335 and 1380, spanning that bit of history between the beginning of the Hundred Years War and going on through the time of the Plague or the Black Death.  It begins on All Hallow’s Eve (our “Halloween,”) when a handful of children playing in the forest, find themselves witnesses to the murder of two of the King’s men.  The novel follows the lives of these children as they grow to adulthood and live their lives through wars, intrigue and the ravages of the Black Death. The depictions of the horrors of the Plague are gruesome—but historically accurate.  The lowest estimate of the numbers of people of in England, Europe and Asia who died of the first wave  in 1348-1349, is that 1 in every 3 people died of it.  Suffering and death on such a scale is all but impossible to imagine.  
     And everywhere people looked, there was trouble: The Christian Church was split and splintering, with a Pope in Rome and another in France. There was war beginning and famine, too, as there weren’t enough people left after the Plague to farm and produce food. Many who survived the first Plague died of starvation.  And plague kept coming back, every summer—it came in waves, decimating the population, through the Fourteenth century. People came up astrological and theological explanations to try to make sense of it, with the most popular being, of course, that such destruction could only be punishment from God for the sinfulness of the people.      
     But not everyone.  I know of at least one prominent, notable exception: Dame Julian of Norwich.  It is thought that her husband and maybe children died of the plague.  When she was 30 years old, she got sick herself, and was dying.   The priest was summoned, she was given the Last Rites of the Church, and her mother reached out and closed her eyelids in death.  It was then she had what has to be one of the first recorded “near death experiences” way back in 13-something.  Nowadays we know it as the “Revelations of Julian of Norwich.”
     Perhaps it is intentional, so close to the Feast of All Saints, that so-called “near death” experiences have been in the news.  Last month, Newsweek ran a story on Dr. Eben Alexander, M.D., a successful Harvard neurosurgeon whose book, “Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience of the Afterlife,” was just published.   He came down with a case of bacterial meningitis, he fell into a coma.  While in the coma, which was expected to end in his death, he found himself in a place he says he can only describe as heaven.  He writes, “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.”

     "While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.” There, among others, he meets his sister, who died before he was old enough to really know her. Dr. Alexander goes on, “. . . . that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.”

     His is just the latest in a long list of published “near death experiences,” which really aren’t all that un-common---I know personally of many, in my work as a chaplain---but his is especially interesting because he’s a neurosurgeon, a brain surgeon—so he really knows about as much about the brain and consciousness as we medically know at this time.  His experience and other recorded near-death experiences have a lot in common.  The most consistent thing is that the experience is a sense of being loved, beyond words.  As he found himself moving into the afterlife, he was comforted by someone who seemed to embody love, and who reassured him over and over saying, “Don’t be afraid, you’ve nothing to fear, there’s nothing you can do wrong. You are loved. You are cherished.”  For some reason, he says, the voice and the words filled him with a vast sense of relief, then comfort, then joy. Do you remember where else that encouragement is offered, "Don't be afraid?"  It is the most often repeated phrase in the Gospels.

     Of course, his explanation of his experience is setting off howls of ridicule from certain other sectors, some scientists and some committed atheists—all who say Dr. Alexander must be delusional. Others are comparing his experience with what some people have written about getting high on LSD and other drugs.

     But other scientists and physicians say they are able to scientifically validate near-death experiences.  I’ve tried to read some of the original research but it is ‘way over my head.  But people are talking about it.  Yesterday an article was published in a news journal in Britain, The Mail On-Line.  The lead into the article explains the research, so let me just read it to you.

     “A near-death experience happens when quantum substances which form the soul leave the brain and enter the universe at large, according to a remarkable theory proposed by two eminent scientists.  According to this idea, consciousness is a program for a quantum computer in the brain which can persist in the universe even after death, explaining the perceptions of those who have near-death experiences. Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Centre of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, has advanced the quasi-religious theory. It is based on a quantum theory of consciousness he and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose have developed which holds that the essence of our soul is contained inside structures called microtubules within brain cells. They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).”

      “Thus it is held that our souls are more than the interaction of neurons in the brain. They are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe - and may have existed since the beginning of time.”  Which reminds me of the lead-in to the Gospel of John:
      “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”  Dr Hameroff holds that in a near-death experience the microtubules in the synapses of the brain lose their quantum state, but the information within them is not destroyed . . . it merely leaves the body and returns to the cosmos from which it came, if the person’s is said to die, and back to the body again in the near-death experience when the person revives.
       So on this, our celebration of All Saints, we remember and pray for those who have gone before us to that “home,” which Jesus told us, “has many rooms.”  And in the end, after all is said and done about quantum science and all of those scientific ways of thinking about how the soul travels from here to there, we are closer to the how and what of this, which leaves the most important question, “Why?”
     This was the question Julian of Norwich kept asking God.  She writes, “And from the time that [the visions] was shown, I desired often to know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward, I was answered . . . thus: 'Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing?  Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.  Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God made us, he loved us, which love was never slaked nor ever shall be.  And in this love he has done all his work, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us.  And in this love our life is everlasting.  In our creation we had a beginning.  But the love has neither beginning nor end.  And all this shall be seen in God without end.”  And then, someday we shall see for ourselves, not in, but apart from time, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing—shall be well.”