Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better
                 Philippians 1:23

Christians share another hope -- more fundamental even than that of meeting one another, which after all is common to many religions. To us, to "go to heaven" means above all, to be with Jesus.

In "Crossing the Bar," that beautiful meditation on his own death written at age eighty, England's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, likened death to setting out to sea. This poem, he stipulated, was always to be placed at the end of any collection of his works. In its last two verses - the final word, therefore, that Tennyson wished to leave with every reader - he looks forward to that most important of all reunions.

Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark:
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

In the 1970s I wrote a book about a young man who came to the very brink of that sea. Return from Tomorrow recounts the experience of George Ritchie who, in 1943, at the age of twenty, was pronounced dead of influenza in an army hospital in Texas. In the more than ten minutes before his heart started beating again - a medical "impossibility" - he had an experience so vivid and detailed that it launched three decades of life-after-death research.

Unlike John's and my heaven game, George's vision of another world was completely unsought. Since the book appeared, other Christians have shared similar experiences with me - none of them intentional. Images of the afterlife catch these people by surprise, in fact are usually contrary to their previously held ideas.

Their reports are no more "factual" of course than those of any subjective experience. But subjective experiences have their own truth. George Ritchie - Dr. Ritchie by the time I knew him, a medical doctor and psychiatrist - has based his entire life, his choice of career, his extensive volunteer work, on those few minutes spent in a different kind of consciousness.

He was absolutely sure - "surer than I am that I'm sitting here with you right now," he'd say - that he'd spent those moments with Jesus. Like John's experience in the recovery room at Memorial, Jesus came to George as light. "Like a million welders' lamps all blazing at once," George said. I'm glad I don't have physical eyes, he remembers thinking. That light would destroy the retina in an instant.