July Journal, Fifth Sunday after Trinity

It has been many years since my birthday fell on a Sunday as well as a Sunday when we were home and not traveling. And so it seemed fitting that I give thanks to God in our Berkeley Chapel for my life on Earth at age 76 and consider my life in Heaven (who doesn’t?).

It is also fitting that I was reminded of Heaven this last week in an interview with an author who has consolidated decades of Near-Death-Experiences (NDE’s) and come to some remarkable conclusions. These experiences involve dying, then returning to life, often in a hospital, resuscitated by technology. We have millions of witnessed accounts of these remarkable events.

John Burke began his study in 1989 and, while he hasn’t experienced this himself, he became interested in the commonalities of the accounts and how or if they relate to Holy Scripture. He was an agnostic to start but soon became a Christian and a pastor as well. I have read several witness accounts, ones by authors I trusted – Don Piper, Mary Neal, and Eben Alexander (the last two medical doctors). The idea of tracing common threads through these unique experiences fascinated me. You can see an interview with Mr. Burke on Amazon. He is also interviewed by Andrew Klavan of DailyWire.com.

Mr. Burke’s 2015 book, Imagine Heaven, Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Baker, 2015) is on my reading stack. After that I’ll go for his release this fall, Imagine the God of Heaven, Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted (Tyndale, 2023).

That there is more to life than life on Earth we feel intuitively. We search for meaning, for justice, for order in our world, for peace in our hearts. We know we are far more than mere animals, but created for something else, something better. We yearn for intangibles – beauty, love, truth, goodness, Eliot’s “hints and guesses.”

I was blessed throughout my lifetime, in so many ways, but most of all in the joy of conversion at age twenty by C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, in which he walked me through my agnostic thinking to reasonable conclusions. He demonstrated, to my severe reason, that not only does God exist but that the Christian God exists. Once you arrive there, there’s no going back. One can only step through a forest of discovery and delight, learning and praying and receiving Christ in the Eucharist. There is only choosing this path, desiring to be the creature your Creator means you to be, and with each breath, enjoying his company and conversation along the way.

For every birthday is a reminder of who we are and who we are meant to be. Every birthday brings us back to those first breaths, when we entered the world of oxygen, having lived in the watery world of the womb. Every birthday takes us to our moment of conception, when we were conceived by God outside and inside time to love and be loved for all Eternity.

We are mirrors, I suppose, reflecting the love of our Creator, and not only reflecting that inexpressible love, but holding it within our flesh, becoming that love, incarnating love in our hearts, minds, and souls.

And so I step into my future, having stepped out of my past into this present. I follow the path through the forest of song, along with my brothers and sisters, in a little chapel in Berkeley, alight with the love and joy of God himself, made present in the Real Presence of Christ.