Let's write about the possibility of life after death....

Yes, there really is a blog about the subject of life after death....(*a personal story via my husband is this blog's postscript).

I suppose the question is, “What is hard proof?” 

A "Let's Write" echo published in the Quora* blog:

Personally, writes Christopher Pearsall, "I already know the answer".

When I was 12 years old I drowned. My mother saved me but not before quite a bit of work and more minutes than I care to count. During those minutes I saw everything my mother was doing to resuscitate me. I saw the breathing. I saw the chest compressions. I saw the people standing around. I heard what they were saying. I even remember trying to speak to my mother saying that I was okay and felt fine even though I saw my body lifeless on the sand. I can remember everything and the whole event in vivid detail.

Scientists theorize that when we die our brain still has electric energy, which causes us to remember or possibly hear certain things when we are resuscitated. This is the closest I have found to any sort of possible explanation. However, the explanation fails in my case. I SAW everything from an aerial view in vivid detail. While I might somehow have heard things through electrical impulses or some semi-conscious level, there is no way I could have seen things and then described them from floating a good 10 to 12 feet above my body and the circle of people surrounding me with such precision.

I was out of my body. I was my spirit but yet wholly me without physical form. I was peaceful as if in another dimension. No one could hear me. No one could see me as I verbalized in some manner that I “felt fine” despite what I was seeing because my mother was so panicked and upset. I then found myself suddenly literally pulled back into my body.

Is this hard proof? To me it is. I am as grounded as it gets when it comes to practical explanations for things but this is not something in all of my life that could be explained away by science or anyone.

I don’t have to believe in God or a supreme being; nor do you. But as a lawyer (Mr. Pearsall is a Rhode Island Family lawyer), who now thinks critically and tries to explain everything possible and find evidence of it, I still have no doubt that I not only touched, but was literally “in”, some level of what exists beyond this life.

Our body may degrade but I can assure anyone who wants to know: There is some sort of life… after death.

*Although my husband did not experience a "life after death" event, he did touch it, metaphorically.  When he was about 10 years old, he was with a group of kids who were swimming during the summer at a local unsupervised site in Maine. As kids tend to do, there was a lot of competition for the group about who could swim fastest from the shore out to a floating dock. During the flurry caused by the splashing water, he began to loose his energy and was unable to reach out to touch the safety of the floating dock. Instead, he found himself flailing and unable to stay afloat. When he looked up in panic to see if there was anyone to help him, he saw a lovely young woman on the dock who reached out exclusively to him and she said, "Just take my hand."  Somehow, he was able to touch her hand and she brought him to safety. After the incident, he was unable to locate the woman who touched him and saved him from near death. His was not a "life after death" experience, but he was never able to overcome the sense of gratitude he felt when he was touched by someone who he never knew and never saw again. In fact, my husband believes he saw and touched his Guardian Angel.

*Quora: A social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California, United States, and founded on June 25, 2009. The website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users. (AKA....a blog.)

Let's write about people who are saints

“Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

In Cristian history, the first day of November commemorates saints.  In fact, the day after "All Soul's Day" aka "Halloween", is All Saints Day.

An echo essay about how our spirituality is influenced by ordinary people, by Tish Harrison Warren, published in The New York Times.

For a religious holiday, All Saints' Day is surprisingly earthy. It reminds me that for all of us — so-called religious or non-religious people alike — faith and spirituality are shaped in profoundly relational ways. No one is a “freethinker.” None of us come to what we believe on our own.

For good or for ill, we believe what we believe because of our particular encounters with people and human communities. 

All systems of belief and practice are handed down in ordinary ways by people with particular names, faces, languages, traditions, limitations and longings.

In popular imagination, a saint is someone who is perfect and selfless, who dwells in holy ecstasy and impeccable goodness. 

But saints are imperfect people. And this is what draws me to this day. Christians don’t remember these men and women because they were perfect. We remember them because, like us, they were broken, selfish and fearful, yet God wrought beauty and light through their lives.

At the first Anglican church I attended, over a decade ago, we didn’t have a sermon on All Saints’ Sunday. 

Instead, congregants were invited to tell stories about people who had changed their life and faith. Some told stories of well-known saints — Teresa of Ávila or Francis of Assisi. But they also told of friends bringing casseroles after the death of a spouse, of people showing up when life was falling apart, of professors, parents and neighbors. It was like a less polished version of “The Moth Radio Hour,” but in church. I loved it.

The story of how I came to know God is one about chance encounters and long friendships, honest conversations and books I’ve read, people who have left the Christian faith and those who haven’t, communities who’ve loved me and dismayed me.

Though I grew up going to church, for most of my childhood, church history was a hazy and irrelevant idea. My imagination started with Jesus and his followers, then skipped across two millenniums and landed at my own congregation in a small town in central Texas. As an adult, I began learning about church history and it felt like an almost miraculous discovery. This broader global and ancient family expanded my vision of what Christianity is beyond the small confines of my culture, race and moment in time.

Ephrem the Syrian was born in 306 AD and died in 373 AD in Turkey

I learned about how Christians created orphanages and hospitals. I encountered Ephrem the Syrian, a poet and musician, who began women’s choirs and composed some of the earliest hymns for female voices, spreading literacy among women in the fourth century. He died tending the sick in a plague.

I read about Felicity, an enslaved woman who was martyred in the third century while offering forgiveness to her executioners. I learned about Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who hid thousands of refugees during the Nazi regime. Kolbe died in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner who was to be executed.

But learning church history was also deeply disillusioning as I discovered how parts of the church have been complicit in white supremacy, colonialism, abuse, misogyny and astonishing evil. All faith stories are shaped by human communities, and these human communities often disappoint us.

In a cultural moment where want to divide all people and institutions neatly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” those on the right side of history and those who aren’t, the righteous and the damned, this day reminds us of the checkered and complicated truth of each human heart. Martin Luther gave us the helpful phrase “simul justus et peccator” — simultaneously saint and sinner. It names how we are holy and wayward at once. It proclaims a paradox that we are redeemed yet in need of redemption.

All Saints’ Day reminds me that God meets us, saints and sinners, despite our contradictions, and makes good out of haphazard lives. It tells me that all of us, even the best of us, are in need of unimaginable mercy and forgiveness. The church is “first and foremost, a community of forgiven sinners,” writes the theologian Gilbert Meilaender. It is not “a community that embodies the practices of perfection” but instead “a body of believers who still live ‘in the flesh,’ who are still part of the world, suffering the transformations effected by God’s grace on its pilgrim way.” Recalling the stories of saints is, in the end, a celebration not of perfection but of grace.

Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”