A scientist's experience of heaven

While many see compatibilities between science and religion, many others see conflict. An Oct. 15 article in Newsweek, “My Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, tries to bridge that conflict in a dramatic way.

Alexander is a neurosurgeon who has taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities. He tells of an experience he had four years ago when he awoke with an intense headache. “Within hours,” he writes, “my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down.” Doctors at the local hospital determined that he had contracted a rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid, and the bacteria were eating his brain.

For seven days he lay in a deep coma, and his higher-order brain functions were totally offline. Then, as his doctors weighed whether or not to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open.

Alexander writes about his experience as a scientist because he knows how stories like his sound to skeptics. He notes that while he considered himself a Christian before this happened, it was “more in name than in actual belief.”

But his experience changed that. He writes: “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.” He describes “a larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, precoma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.”

Alexander is not the first to describe such an experience, but he is one of the few who does so as a scientist, and a neurosurgeon at that. And, as far as he knows, no one before him ever traveled to this dimension “(a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation.”

This is important because the chief arguments against near-death experiences “suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.”

His cortex wasn’t malfunctioning; it wasn’t even functioning. “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind,” Alexander writes, “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

He goes on to describe his experience, with frequent disclaimers about language not being able to adequately capture what happened.

The message that “went through [him] like a wind” had three parts. He summarizes them thus:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Regardless of Alexander’s science credentials, most nonbelievers, I imagine, will simply deny the truthfulness of his experience, believing (yes, having faith) that some nondivine explanation will eventually emerge.

Many Christians, I imagine, will also deny his message because it’s too inclusive. It lets people off the hook. It doesn’t punish evildoers.

Alexander writes that the universe he experienced in his coma is “the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

I’ve read (and heard) other accounts like Alexander’s, and each time I feel encouraged. But I also know it comes down belief. While science feeds our knowledge, what we decide about the universe and our place in it comes down to faith.

An exemplary peacemaker

Two years ago, in August 2010, 10 aid workers were found killed—execution style—in a remote pass in Afghanistan. One of those killed was Dan Terry, who for almost 40 years had navigated not only the roads but the various factions of that land, forging peace and reconciliation between sworn enemies and helping bring medical care, food and education to many isolated villages.

I’ve just read the galleys of a book due to be published in a few weeks with the bold title: Making Friends Among the Taliban. It comes from Herald Press and is written by Jonathan P. Larson, a friend of Terry’s who has penned a well-told account of this remarkable man.

Larson eschews straight chronology and uses multiple stories to show how Terry overcame barriers and exemplified loving one’s enemies. While we tend to demonize the Taliban (and even more with the recent shooting of Malala Yousafzai), Terry made friends with many of them.

He made a point of drinking tea with shuras (elders’ councils) in the villages he visited and listening to their concerns. He did not try to ramrod his ideas for how to improve the lives of Afghans but let them initiate how to help themselves.

One Afghan called him “more Muslim than Muslims” because of his self-sacrificial service to others. Others affectionately called him Pagal (crazy), which referred to his often fearless faith and weird behavior that helped break down barriers. He was held captive and made friends with his captor. He often intervened in tense situations, using humor to dissolve conflict.

Larson makes clear that Terry had his foibles, and his colleagues in the International Assistance Mission did not always agree with his methods or his failure to follow protocol. His prophetic tendencies often grated on those trying to administer aid.

After Terry died, messages of condolence came from the governments of Afghanistan and the United States and from faith groups abroad. But more tellingly, at his funeral, a “silent throng of drivers and mechanics, welders and farmers, laborers and cleaners, shopkeepers, sweepers and launderers … came in wordless, eloquent testimony.”

He preached peace by living it. He said, “In the end, we are all knotted into the same carpet.” And he showed that “all” included enemies, like the Taliban, as well as friends.

The massacre was denounced by the local Taliban and was likely done by a group funded from sources outside Afghanistan, though Larson leaves that question unanswered. While his death seems so unjust and wasteful, Terry’s story, as told here, is a powerful witness. It’s one worth reading.

An Ojibwe storyteller

Louise Erdrich has created an oeuvre that is unique in American fiction. She combines excellent prose with captivating storytelling while unveiling a community much neglected, that of Native Americans. While other good writers address this diverse group, she has done so now with 14 novels, along with short stories, poetry, nonfiction and children’s books.

While her novels are primarily stories, they also provide information and greater understanding of Native people. The Round House, her latest, is no exception. Set primarily in 1988, it tells the story of the rape of an Ojibwe woman, Geraldine Coutts, and what follows.

Set in a North Dakotan community where Erdrich set her 2008 novel, The Plague of Doves, the story is told by Geraldine’s 13-year-old son, Joe, some 20 years later.

Geraldine is a lawyer, and Bazil, her husband and Joe’s father, is a judge. An important element in the story is “the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape on many reservations,” as Erdrich writes in an Afterword. There she mentions a 2009 report by Amnesty International that included these statistics: “1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.”

Geraldine is traumatized and reluctant to give any details about the attack. Bazil wants to know just where it happened, because if didn’t happen on reservation land, the rapist cannot be prosecuted.

Meanwhile, Joe is anxious to find his mother’s attacker. He and his three friends search the area near the Round House, a sacred space and a place of worship for the Ojibwe that sits near the border of the reservation. He uncovers details about his mother’s attack but also learns secrets about the tribe’s history.

Erdrich grounds her story in a time and place and includes details about Indian life: “the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history.” One character says, “You go to your doodem first. … Find the ajijaak,” noting that Joe’s father and grandfather were ceremoniously taken into the crane clan, or Ajijaak. And the crane was Joe’s “doodemag,” his luck.

Later, the narrator explains that “an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan, thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings.”

At times, this kind of detail feels intrusive, as if imparting an anthropology lesson that interrupts the story. Yet it also feels needed. Even if this borders on being didactic, it’s good to learn such details.

Erdrich also shows her poetic skills, as in this passage: “Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.”

Much of the novel is taken up with Joe and his friends’ exploits as rambunctious boys. They encounter danger and learn surprising things about the local priest. The book is a coming-of-age story as well as a mystery. And while the suspense eventually builds and comes to a riveting end, the narrative meanders too much along the way.

Although The Round House is not among Erdrich’s best, it is one more piece of a remarkable body of work that deserves reading. She is one of our literature’s treasures.