One of our retreatants that are here this week is a Hospice Chaplain and has been so for 13 years. Since I worked with the elderly here and was with many of the monks in their last moments, we had something to talk about. He shared some of his experiences with me about the dying seeing loved ones. One day he came into the room of a very elderly woman who told him that her mother, who had died many years ago, was sitting in the chair next to the bed. So Ed (not his real name) knowing that you go along with it nodded his head to the empty chair and said hello. Then the woman turned to him and said “my mother just told me that you can’t see her, that only I can since I am so close to death”. He smiled at that and we both laughed. The woman died the next day.
These experiences are very common, yet few people talk about them since they are so outside of our everyday experience, where it is obvious that dead is dead and they don’t come in for visits. There are many complicated explanations for these experiences, but the simplest is that they are simply real and have been known to occur all through history. It is only in modern times that doubt has been brought in about these phenomena. Our beliefs about reality have a powerful influence on how we interpret the world and the experiences that people have. In fact, for some people it is impossible to believe they are real, until that is they happen to them. Then many are befuddled and believe, at times against their will.
I remember around 1995 I was sitting with Fr. Cyprian who at the time was around 85 years old. He was dying of lung cancer. In his younger days he was a heavy smoker. I was sitting with him from 12-4 AM. I like to pray the Chaplet-Of-Mercy when I was with the dying; it kept me focused and awake. Around 1 AM the room changed for me. It was as if the wall suddenly disappeared and the room was looking out into infinity. At the time of the experience it did not seem strange at all, but normal. This is what happens for me when I have this kind of occurrence, it seems ordinary until it is over then I wonder what happened. Around three AM I felt the room filling up with presences, I felt them very strongly and Fr. Cyprian was also reacting. He was lifting up his arm, reaching for someone. This lasted until 4 AM when my replacement came in. He died that morning at 7 AM.
People ask me how people started believing in God and the afterlife. I do think it is easier to believe that dead is dead, but all faith traditions and indigenous beliefs all believe in another world. Why? I believe that all the books and papers and talks about the NDE, OBE, ADC’s are not new phenomena, but have been happening all through out human history. Ancient men and women accepted these experiences as real and pointing to something more.
Is our world that we think as the only real one; is it really a backwater, a place of isolation from a larger reality? We each have to make up our own mind on this matter. It has moved beyond science I believe, because everything that has been presented by skeptics to deny that the NDE’s point to a larger reality have been dealt with. The studies only get more and more widespread with doctors and other professional taking up the banner and studying this very interesting event that happens at the end of life. It is about truth, not wishful thinking. We would get along fine if we actually found out that there was no afterlife. Yet a depth to our life’s experience would be missing I believe.
The main lesson of these personal revelations points to the supremacy of love. The question, the main query is this: “How have you learned to love?” Love expands the human heart, allows the soul to be ever more open to truth. It connects with all. The life review points to this. Each incident has to be experienced that we had with others. If we caused anyone pain, we experience its repercussions and suffering completely. If we caused joy we also experience that. We learn possibly from the life review that our experience of being the center of all things is an illusion, and we become connected to the true center which brings us into one with all. Love is personal, alive, infinite, and these personal experiences should be studied and learned from.
C.S. Lewis said that in hell there are no human persons, but fragments. Evil consumes us because it slowly destroys our ability to love and have compassion for others. We turn in on ourselves, which is all based on a lie. We are not centers, only God is the center, and it is love and infinite possibility that flows from that center. Evil consumes until there is nothing left.
If you cannot love those you can see how can you love God whom you can’t?
Br. Mark Dohle, OCSO
Holy Spirit Monastery
