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Life After Death

By Ian Gregory.

More people read the ‘family announcements’ page in our local paper than any other part, including the racing results and houses for sale. It is the deaths we are all looking for. About 20 a day, noted in small print, and in jargon as taught in the Funeral Directors’ training school.

The word ‘re-united’ occurs in these announcements quite often, in accordance with a general belief that the deceased have been welcomed into heaven. News reports of tragic death frequently say that a friend or relative departed soul is now ‘looking down’ with approval and support.

This popular belief is widely expressed, but there is little teaching from theologians and church leaders, about a subject on which they might be expected to have something positive to say. Is it true? Can life beyond death be asserted with confidence? Have we anything believable to say about it to the bereaved, and all those who contemplate their own demise with anxiety: or at least interest; that is most of us?

Christians tend to be nervous about the ‘after life’ because it sounds as if they are moving into spiritualism. For all the wrong reasons it is assumed that our faith bans even the mildest speculation about what happens to people when they die. Evangelists point to the ‘sin of divination’ as when King Saul consults the ‘witch of Endor’ to call up the prophet Samuel after his death (1 Samuel 28), and Paul warns us against ‘witchcraft’ in Galatians 5.20.

But we cannot manage our lives on the basis of religious rules by which ancient priests maintained power over the masses in long-ago Israel. Nor can we ignore well-researched evidence for survival which should be as much part of the way we understand life as any other interesting subject.

My conviction about there being a natural ‘something’ called life beyond death arises from two sources: 1) The historic documents of faith, and 2) human experience.

Paul’s letters in the New Testament contain some ideas which may not meet normal tests of credibility in the 21st Century. But there is one curiously neglected text which contains a fascinating clue to the meaning of life and death. It is in 1 Corinthians 15.44: ‘If there is a natural body there is also a spiritual body.’ He analyses this idea in a tightly-argued chapter, and he returns to it in 2 Corinthians 5.

Why have I never heard this verse preached about and discussed? Simply because we are afraid of the immense truths that lie behind it. Spirit-sensitive individuals have been talking about them for years, although not in the context of traditional churches. Their ideas have been rejected because of the dreaded ‘spiritualism’ phobia.

Of course charlatans and illusionists made names and fortunes for themselves in Victorian times, and the bad smell lingers. Among the more bigoted fundamentalists there is still a will to hunt out, drown and burn witches. At the same time there are, today, large numbers of people who are sensitive to the unseen world of spirit, and are able, quietly and without profit, to communicate what they ‘see’ and ‘hear’ from the discarnate world. They tend to be quiet in case others think they are eccentric, or deluded.

The life of Jesus was plainly lodged in the two orders, of the physical and another dimension of reality which we may call the etheric. It is something we all share. This dual nature is indicated in Jesus’ teaching that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you’ (Luke 17.21). This Kingdom is the ‘other dimension’, which during mortal life interplays with our physical bodies, and which at death separates for an independent existence on a different wavelength.

If that sounds strange it is no more so than the things scientists are saying. We now know that matter is really different forms of energy. What our senses recognise as ‘stuff” is all composed of atoms, which scientists tell us are just empty space. The solidity we see all around us is a kind of illusion. It is not unreasonable, then, to think of our personalities as having an existence apart from the material form in which they are temporarily embedded.

They could be regarded as software programmes, dynamic patterns of information, operating through the hardware of a computer system - the physical body. But the software can be operated through a variety of hardware systems. So that after the decay of our physical equipment it can be re-formed and relayed through different hardware, the etheric body, the programme still being held intact in the mind of the maker.

We also know that radio signals are transmitted via wavelengths. The way we tune our radio sets is a perfect example of how signals may be received once the conditions are right. In our physical form we are not normally tuned to receive the wavelengths of the spirit world. But some people are more accurately tuned to receive such signals, and we call them ‘mediums’.

The spirit world is so different from ours that it is literally indescribable in any language or image we are wired to understand. It is like trying to describe to a fish the delights of mountain air: the fish does not live in that atmosphere and cannot understand the meaning of air; it thrives only in water.

So we in the ‘here and now’ thrive on time and physical space. But what of the hereafter? While it may be perfectly natural for our new bodies, we cannot conceive of it.

Can all this be ‘true’? It is as true as anything we can be told about the nature of physical reality. The writer Bill Bryson, in a profound but readable Short History of Nearly Everything confesses how little even the best minds can claim to ‘know’. We live, he says, “in a universe whose age we cannot quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distance from us and from each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformity to physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”

The mental effort required now to deny the existence of God, and a spirit dimension, is greater than the effort required to believe it. Of course we cannot ‘know’, but it’s a good bet: in the 21st Century truth poker game we Christians have a very promising hand of cards.

My mother was a ‘sensitive’ who made no commercial claims about her ability to communicate to and from ‘the other side’, as it is known. She demonstrated without guile the existence of ‘something other’. Visiting a sick woman once, she began to whistle a tune she did not know. She never whistled in the normal course of events. The sick woman sat up in bed, astonished. “How do you know that tune?” she asked. My mother was confused. It had just come to her mind. The tune was one the sick woman’s late husband always whistled when he came home from his work. He had been ‘dead’ for years. Neither of the women had been thinking of him at the time.

Of course, such events ‘prove’ nothing. But they serve to indicate that there are ‘more things in heaven and earth than this world dreams of’.

I am offering a five-session course on Life Beyond Death this autumn (2008 - see below for details. Ed) based on an excellent book of that name by an Anglican academic called Vernon White. It examines the case for belief with sensible caution. It is, White says, a subject on which the church has lost its nerve, and which should be put back on the agenda.

The Quaker Meeting house is an ideal location for the course, and we are using it for ‘agnostics and lapsed believers’ who say they are nervous about going into overtly church premises. The local paper is carrying a news item about it, and all the local funeral directors have been given a ‘flier’ to hand out to the bereaved at their discretion.

The course will centre on each of four chapters in Vernon White’s book:

1.       The persistence of the transcendent;

2.       The crisis of death and the credibility of theism;

3.       Meanings of resurrection;

4.       Living truthfully with hope.

The fifth session will be for de-briefing and discussion. The group - Agnostics OK - will then move to monthly sessions about the nature of other faith systems.

The course will be held on the first Sunday of each month, starting Sunday 7 September, 7.00pm at the Quaker Meeting House, Newcastle under Lyme. More details from: ian@congist.fsnet.co.uk.

Books referred to in the article are:

‘Life Beyond Death’, by Vernon White. The Sarum Theological Lectures. 94pp. Published by Darton, Longman and Todd. 2006.

‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, by Bill Bryson. Published by Black Swan. 687pp. 2003.