A lot has been written about near-death experiences, and the phenomenon by which a person’s spirit leaves their body briefly, only to go back in, once the body is revived. This phenomenon is real, and does no permanent damage to, or has any lasting impact on, either body or spirit. But there is a phenomenon that is a companion to this, that occurs when the body is working but comatose, and the brain is profoundly damaged. I call this state of existence “bumped out,” because that is how it appears to me — like a person’s spirit got bumped out of their body, and then refused to go back in. The causes of this may vary slightly, but the spiritual sentiment is the same: that the brain is too damaged and too limited in its functioning, and the soul would rather be out than in.
THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF IT ALL
I haven’t been myself lately. I probably should go live in a mountaintop monastery, completely cut off from the world, but I doubt even that would shield me from the energy of so much conflict and so many mass killings in the world of today. My psychic abilities make me sensitive to this energy, and keenly aware of what is going on in the world at a deep level, and while this keeps my love and compassion running on high, it also makes me feel ill and not myself, as the energies from conflict and chaos are like kryptonite to me. If I had a snazzy lycra bodysuit and the superpower of flight, I would be hitting an altitude of about four inches right now.
GOOD GRIEF
Grief is a messy business. We want it to be manageable and to progress in an orderly manner, but it isn’t like that. Grief comes uninvited, stays longer than it seems it should, throws our life and being-ness out of whack, makes us feel “not quite ourselves” for a very long time, and won’t leave us alone. We want it to be otherwise, to be something we can control, understand, and predict. But grief has its own way.
And a good grief is free to follow its own way. Because when we lose someone close to us, we haven’t just lost the person we talked to about this, or went with to that, we have lost a spiritual companion. And while we talk about “wrapping our brain around” what has happened, what we really struggle with is wrapping our soul around it.
TOO HEAVENLY MINDED TO BE ANY EARTHLY GOOD
I recently learned of the death of an elderly woman I disliked. Actually, I more than disliked her because she was mean, a misery to herself and others, and had no interest in changing. She put herself on a pretty high pedestal, and lived from a place of knowing that her perspective and opinions were the right ones. She did not appreciate her friends, did not return the love of those around her, sat in judgement of everyone she met, and acted more pious than the pope. My sister has a phrase for people like this who live with their nose in the air, their head in the clouds, and their hind-end in God’s judgement seat: too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.
To my dismay, I met this woman at church. I say “dismay” because I was a pastor’s wife for 25 years, and meeting this woman at church meant that I was not only stuck with her, but I was expected to be nice.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
I think we all generally agree on what constitutes unfinished business while we are alive: unfinished projects at work or home, unresolved disagreements, unsolved mysteries, incomplete estate paperwork, unsettled disputes. But what constitutes unfinished business once we’re dead? Good question. In my work as a psychic medium, I deal with the unfinished business of the dead all the time:
A young man committed suicide and didn’t leave a note. He did this to hurt his parents, wanting them to be left not knowing. But he did not realize that it would also hurt his sister and his closest friends. He had a tremendous amount of guilt and regret over this and other things, as he witnessed their unending torture from the unanswered questions he left behind. The guilt and regret were unfinished business for him.
A middle-aged couple was murdered and the person who was convicted and punished for the crime was not the person actually responsible. Their anger over the wrongness of this was unfinished business for them.
A CRY OF THE HEART
From a woman whose husband just died: “I don’t know what to do. How am I going to live without him?” From a young man whose father died unexpectedly: “What did he do, what did we do to deserve this?” From a mother whose daughter committed suicide: “Will God forgive my daughter for having a bad mother?”
All of these statements are great opening lines for a lamentation. An expression of woe that concludes with a statement of hope, there are times when a lament just rolls off the tongue or pours out of the heart, when the feelings of loss are almost too much to bear or too big to hold in. Loss can come from anywhere — certainly from the death of someone close to you, but also from the loss of a job you loved, or the loss of your health. And with any loss, there is grief, and grief demands expression.
BOOKS FOR YOUR SOUL
I was sick with a bad virus this past week, so my apologies for missing my usual posting day. My apologies also for this column, which is going to be a digression from my usual. I am on the mend, but I do not have it in me right now to delve into the greater mysteries of the universe, like death and life beyond death. And so I am going to write about books, specifically books that expand your mind, challenge your beliefs, and are good for your soul. This list is by no means exhaustive, as it is a list of the books of this sort that I know personally and can recommend without reservation, but it is a start.
THE TIES THAT BIND
In honor of Halloween, I decided to deal with the ghosts in my own house this week. I have known the house was haunted since before we moved in last spring, but the resident ghosts stuck to the third floor and didn’t cause mischief, so dealing with them was easy to put off. That said, it did bother me that there was an old lady ghost at the high front window, looking down at us every time we pulled in the driveway.
So, armed with my keen intellect and a pad of paper, I went up to the third floor. To set the scene……our house was built in 1885 and the third floor is in desperate need of a gut-it-to-the-studs renovation (photo provided). It looks like the setting for the climax of a Stephen King novel — crumbling plaster, 1800’s wallpaper peeling and falling off the walls, curtains at the windows that haven’t been washed since the 1950’s, scraps of incredibly old linoleum covering the floors. There are two big bedrooms (with closets!), but I can’t imagine anyone alive agreeing to sleep up there. We use one of the rooms for storage and the other for nothing.
A PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
The internet is a weird and wonderful thing, and this past week it connected me with a man who lives halfway around the world and is struggling with the death of his mother. I am about to do a reading for him, even though there is a language barrier — I only speak English and his deceased mother only speaks a regional dialect of her country. Everyone but me is concerned about this. I am not concerned because language is only one way to communicate, and is not the preferred way for spirits of the dead.
SAYING GOOD-BYE
My husband is a hospital chaplain and told of a man in the intensive care unit (ICU) who was dying of stomach cancer. The man had been fighting the cancer for several years, and was brought to the brink of death much faster than anyone anticipated. He had a wife and grown children, and the wife was angry — angry that he was dying and losing the fight. She wanted to be married to a winner, did not want to talk about death, did not want to make plans for when he died, did not like what the doctors were telling her, and dealt with this by refusing to visit her husband.
When someone you love is dying or has died, it is easy to get caught up in the fantasy of, “If I don’t say good-bye, they won’t leave.” But it doesn’t work that way. Death has a way of taking people away from us whether we like it or not, and whether we say good-bye or not.