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Are after-life assurances
the truth?

NOT too many years ago, my mother told me we were going to go to Haleiwa and have lunch with a friend of hers. She said it just like that. She did not ask, because this was non-negotiable. So we went.

At the lunch, the friend of my mother, an old friend who was also quite elderly, started to hit me with stories about how bad the church is. On that subject I cannot be beaten, so I topped each of her stories with one of my own. After all, I have been a priest for more than 30 years, and I know there is an endless supply of arrogant church people ready to oblige others with examples of perfidious priests and bishops. But of course, this was not the reason for having my mother and me drive up for lunch. It was only a ploy to see if I were honest and not threatened by such assaults. It was not the first time someone had tested me that way before getting down to business.

And we did get down to business. What she wanted to ask me about was an experience she had had in 1941! She had had a serious, near-fatal case of diphtheria. The doctors had given up on her, and in fact she felt herself dying. But the experience was not what she had expected. Instead, she said, it was like standing before a door that was about to open or the door of a bus that was about to open. She had the clear sensation she was going somewhere good and that the people she left behind would be taken care of. Then the door closed, and she was not allowed to go through. The diphtheria had not killed her after all. So 60 years later she wanted to talk about the experience.

She had never told anyone before; she had not read the literature on near-death experiences; she did not want to become a Christian. She wanted to know what I knew about death and dying. The question had not been provoked by her own aging and diminishment, but by the death of her husband, who told before he died, "Don't worry, babe, we'll see each other again." Was he telling the truth? Had what she experienced in 1941 been the truth?

So I shared stories of what dying people had told me or told my friends attending them. Much of it was similar to what she had experienced a long time ago before it was fashionable to talk about near-death experiences.

Peter Berger, a devout Protestant and a keen sociologist, wrote a tiny classic called "Rumor of Angels." He is too Lutheran to offer "proofs" for God's existence, but he is also a good reporter of what people actually say and do, and in that he hears rumors about God's existence.

One of the things that struck him was the comfort mothers automatically gave their children who woke up hollering from a nightmare. The mother without reflection holds the frightened child and says, "Everything is going to be all right." The bogeyman, the monster in the dream, is not the final reality. Everything is going to be all right. And Berger asks, as did my mother's friend, "Is she lying or telling the truth?" Is the bogeyman, the void, the monster, going to have the last word by swallowing us up? Or is everything going to be all right?

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