I had a "shared death experience". I just learned that there is a term for it. This was during a season of late-stage deconstruction in my life. In my wanderings, a friend had taught me a format for Native American meditation. So, one day, in a parking lot waiting for Don, my husband, to return from an errand, I decided to give this new way of prayer a try...
I found myself beside a pond with tall grass, looking at my reflection in the water. But then the image changed to a young woman that I hadn't seen since she was a child--and she had just died. I was planning to be with her family at her funeral in a few days.
I was an exiting Evangelical. When I saw her, my first thoughts were, “Uh-oh... this person died. God, am I allowed to talk to a dead person? But, she doesn't look very dead... She's right here."
And she was, sitting beside me next to the pond. We had a remarkable conversation. She was in turmoil, and this challenged my Evangelical boxes. She wasn't speaking, as we think of it, but I “heard” that she was devastated, her friends and family were not with her, she didn’t want to be there, and she was in distress; there was a question of her sanity in her death.
She began to come apart, changing into shards of black broken glass. I stretched myself around her, pulling her together and holding her until she was a girl again. I remember telling her, or thinking to her, that her family was upset as well. I asked her to visit and comfort them, and I said that we would all be together before she knew it.
After a moment, she got up and walked to the edge of the meadow, throwing her arms in the air and blasting a tornado of black shards out of her mouth... until the shards ran out and changed to thousands of white and coral-pink flowers.
The epilogue to this story was the service a few days later, where she lay in state looking just as I had seen her-- and the room was filled with white and coral-pink flowers and tall grass. Her aunt turned to me and let me know the young lady had had Lyme’s disease and had not been quite in her right mind. Then she said, "She wanted to be a florist, you know, and as I chose her flowers, it felt like she was right there helping me ... and yet ... she was also in a meadow, beside a pond, with tall grass."
It took years for me to begin to wrap my brain around all this.
I owe a lot to Native American spirituality. My short time looking into it triangulated enough of Christianity to send me back to it with an enhanced understanding of scripture. At that time, I could not have approached anything mystical by a Christian route.
This event was amazing, but there are many, many others. We've all had them. It takes a lot to process something that doesn't fit into this life, and some of us never do. Our experiences often go into a brain file labeled "What The Heck?", and there they stay. But when we all talk about them, people get brave, and begin to pull out those files.
Paul said we see through a glass darkly. He was "caught up to the third heaven" where he probably saw things with a clarity beyond anything he could have imagined. Perhaps much of the faith we follow today has his profound vision at its core... a life-changing experience that gave Paul the ability to "rightly divide".
Plato taught something similar to “seeing through a glass darkly” in his cave analogy, where people were chained to face a wall of shadows, trying to deduce what objects were producing them. I can't help but wonder if our theologies and sciences are still there, when in fact we have no chains that keep us from spinning around and beholding multiple layers of reality directly.
Humanity has been submerged in a mechanistic age for a long time now, and we did not have permission to think in these directions. Science told us we were pond scum and religion told us we were depraved. The grassroots had their stories silenced, and were made dependent on a priesthood of authorities.
But quantum mechanics and social media have shaken things. The grassroots are talking to each other. Quantum mechanics has departed from the view that the material creation can be reduced to formulas that make logical and predictable sense. That was an awfully big assumption for a tiny planet to shackle the universe with.
I can see our religious arguments as nested parallels of the greater dialogue. Many of us take parroted fragments to extremes, while having no idea where our thoughts come from. We've “separated ourselves from the world”, so our terms are different, but we haven't really escaped the human conversation. Had we grasped Godel's incompleteness theorem from the ’30s (most Evangelicals haven't even heard of it), we might have been spared some of the ravages of things like biblical inerrancy doctrines. Mathematics was supposed to lead to certainty, but Godel showed that math can only conclude on some levels, and that outside of them it keeps asking layer upon layer of questions. If anything, "biblical inerrancy” is also a formula for endless fracturing-- the opposite of the agenda implied in the term.
Maybe the polarization and turmoil in our world these days is simply our collective ego resistance before things bust wide open. I'm not an expert in any of these fields, but it seems that the dialogue might soon have to leave both religion and science--or maybe science and religion need to marry and produce something we don't have a name for yet.
I watched a panel of experts discussing how scientists are beginning to realize that inexplicable things can happen in meditation, and that they echo descriptions of near-death experiences. One of the speakers said, "At a certain point, anecdotes become statistics”. I've seldom heard anything so beautifully liberating. Science and spirituality meet unexpected in that sentence, and they are meeting now at many other junctures. Regarding this, it is an amazing time to be alive. Perhaps the grassroots will become the largest source of raw knowledge of our brilliantly conscious universe.
“… your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams…”
Astronomer and physicist Robert Jastrow said, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
My experience in religion has been a murky combination of certainties, superstitions, and the invocation of sovereignty doctrines whenever we smacked into an inconsistency. So I might rewrite Jastrow's story like this: The scientists are climbing one side of the mountain, and the theologians are climbing the other. As both groups pull themselves over the final rocks, they find it isn’t a mountain at all but a volcanic shell of verbal constructs-- and then they see birds, children, artisans, and mystics flying far above their heads on the Wind.
--WJ Francisco
Thank you
Posted by: pam j baker | February 14, 2022 at 11:29 PM