All Christians should accept Jesus as proof that what we call death is not the end, because he rose and came back to his friends physically and has been there, for anyone who really believes enough to call on him, ever since.
As a child I was taken ill with Scarlet Fever (it happened just before Christmas in 1950). I became very poorly and was taken to an isolation hospital well away from my home. My parents were warned that I might not return. I remember being aware of the staff whispering that I was dying and the sensation of watching the scene from around the ward within which my body was an inert object on a bed. That vision was frightening but disappeared and I felt surrounded by warmth and peace. A voice said that I could let go (of that life) and I knew that all was well. Instead, I returned to consciousness in my body. It is very difficult to explain this experience because the only words available to convey it derive from this life and are not really appropriate to what was part of a greater reality.
Recently, I learnt from reading the work of Dr Ramses Saleem, the Historian and Translator, that Christ has an Egyptian root, Krst, which can be used to describe the ‘swathed corpse’. He says that the word Krst became ‘Christ’ in Greek and was used in relation to Jesus because ‘the swathed body expresses the concept that action is no longer performed by means of the physical body but by the perfected body in a spiritual form’. It seems relevant in this context that the description of Jesus’ followers as Christians started in Antioch as an insult. Presumably because they were considered stupid enough to believe in life after death!
Jesus, the Apostle Paul and modern Christian writers, such as Howard Storm all testify from their own experience (as I do from mine) that life as a human is only part of a greater life. If I can speak from my own understanding, it is that there is ultimately only The Creator. All individual selves are part of that Great One. We are all eternal because of that. Those who seem to be ‘dead to this life’ are not truly lost to us and, of course, are never lost to God. There is no such thing as a ‘short or wasted’ life. The pain the bereaved feel is only because they have temporarily forgotten the truth about themselves and those that they love but believe to have lost.
This maybe hard to comprehend but never forget that God is all that there is and we are all eternally one. All souls cannot help but come to this truth in the end.
Paul Newman
August 2001