Embarkation

continued

"The light was a Man, and this man loved me unconditionally He knew every unlovable thing about me, every mean, selfish thought and action since the day I was born, and loved me anyway"

Jesus' total knowledge, George went on, was simply an observable fact. "For into that room along with His radiant presence had also entered every single episode of my entire life. Everything that had ever happened to me was simply there, in full view, all seemingly taking place at that moment."

Thousands upon thousands of simultaneous happenings. How this was possible, George didn't know. He saw himself in a classroom at the University of Richmond before enlisting in the army. And at the same time - "there was no earlier, no later" - saw his own birth and the ill and dying young mother he'd never known. He watched himself go forward at a church service at age eleven to ask Jesus to be his Lord - and watched churchgoing swiftly became a dull routine.

Illuminated by that same all-seeing Love were "future" events, fragments of the life that follows earthly death. It was only the outskirts of heaven he was shown, George believes: a region where men and women seemed engrossed in self-forgetful tasks of many kinds.

What strikes me most about all these near-death experiences, however, is not the details, but the emotional response of the individuals to whom they occur. The "dying" person, revived by medical intervention, is grief stricken at leaving the glorious realm he seemed to be entering. He fights his enforced return to an existence drab and dull by comparison. He pleads to stay with a presence so overwhelmingly loving that even the closest earthly relationship seems a mere shadow of the real thing.

Fond husbands,. mothers with small children, young people with beckoning careers - people with literally everything on earth to live for - want only to go back to the heaven they've glimpsed however briefly. "I cried out to Jesus not to leave me," said George, "not to abandon me in this dark and narrow place!"

It's so completely the opposite of the usual view - earth the sunlit realm, death the dark one - that I'm struck by the universal agreement of Christians who've stood at that threshold. Are their experiences simply the result of illness or trauma? Drug-induced delusions, perhaps, or a delirium caused by fever? They themselves, at least, say no. For the rest of their earthly lives, they continue to believe in a bright afterworld no skepticism of their hearers can tarnish.