There Is Life After Death. Tom Harpur
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beside Lake Ontario, not far from the Toronto Star offices where we both worked at the time. When we had eaten, we decided not just to talk but to have a discussion. I asked Susan: “What would you most like to talk about?” She replied very calmly, “Let’s talk about death. What do you really believe about death?” Considering it was our first time alone together and that it was a simply glorious day, I could tell this was no ordinary woman! This book now wholly revised and updated is my best effort at answering her profound request.
“Oh, their eyes, their eyes are so beautiful!”
CHARLES TEMPLETON, a one-time associate of Billy Graham, was a leading light in Canadian media for many years. He began as a charismatic, evangelistic star with Youth for Christ (an independent Christian youth organization) and then made headlines when he announced in 1957 that he had lost his faith and was leaving the ministry forever. Active as a politician for a time, then as a radio and television commentator, newspaper editor and a novelist, he quickly gained a reputation as the country’s most articulate agnostic. In his 1996 book, Farewell to God, he set out myriad reasons why he found it impossible to be a believer. Yet, as I watched his career and got to know him personally—we worked together on his earlier book, Jesus, and he would often call me at home on Sundays to discuss my column—he always seemed to me a God-haunted man. Templeton, whom I had visited in his home not long before his death from Alzheimer’s disease, June 7, 2001, had a remarkable visionary experience on his deathbed. He saw a vision of angels “waiting for me on the other side.” Madeleine, his wife, was alone with him in the hospital room when it occurred and she called me the day following his funeral to tell me what had happened. She asked whether I’d be interested in hearing of Charles’s encounter with “something quite transcendent and wonderful.” Although I had already sent off a tribute to Charles to the paper, this was too interesting to miss and I wrote the following account that appeared in a front-page Toronto Star story a day later:
“Charles had been ill for seven years when his condition suddenly worsened and he required full-time hospital care. There were times when he seemed ‘very sweet’ and others when he had furious rages. He had grown worse in the three weeks leading up to his death, even fighting with the nurses at times.
“He always quieted down when his wife was there and this was the case when she visited him on the afternoon of June 6, about 24 hours before he died. He’d had a terrible, rage-ridden morning but became quite calm as she kissed and soothed his forehead.
“Suddenly he became very animated and alive, looking intensely towards the ceiling of the room, with his blue eyes ‘shining more blue than I’d ever seen before.’ He cried out: ‘Look at them, look at them . . . they’re so beautiful . . . they’re waiting for me.’ Then with great joy in his voice, he said: ‘Oh, their eyes, their eyes are so beautiful! . . . I’m coming!’
“Madeleine Templeton describes herself as ‘somewhere between an atheist and a deist’ but she spoke with deep emotion as she described what happened. ‘It’s such a surprise and such a tremendous comfort,’ she said.”
Recent polls in North America reveal a remarkable upsurge in the number of people reporting that they have had one or more paranormal experiences. For example, priest-sociologist Father Andrew Greeley has done several major surveys showing that millions of Americans undergo psychic and mystical experiences, from extra-sensory perception (67 percent of all adults) to being in some form of contact with the dead (42 percent). In all, Greeley and his associates have discovered that 74 percent of Americans believe in a life after death where they will be reunited with their loved ones.1 In a special survey of Canadian beliefs about life after death, published in 1983 as Death and Beyond: A Canadian Profile, University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby found that 40 percent of the population believed it might be possible to communicate with the dead. Only one in three ruled it out as a total impossibility. Some 70 percent said they believe in “something after death.” A 1990 Gallup poll of Canadians had almost identical findings. Slightly over 70 percent of those interviewed stated they “believe in heaven.”2
Greeley, whom I got to know in Rome during the year of the three Popes, 1978, says he first became interested in what are generally referred to as “paranormal” experiences in the early 1970s when he began to be aware of just how many people have them “even if they don’t tell anyone.” He found that in the case of those North American adults who now believe they have had experiences of contact with someone who has died, the dead person is usually a spouse or sibling. Studies were conducted in 1973 and 1986 at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Council. Greeley’s data show that there had been a marked increase in the number of people claiming to have had contact with the dead—from 27 percent in 1973 up to 42 percent in 1986. Among widows alone, the figures are 51 percent in 1973 and 67 percent in 1986. What is perhaps most striking is that there seems to be a split between scientific belief and personal realities. Greeley stated, “For example, 26 percent of the 30 percent of Americans who do not believe in life after death still say they’ve been in personal contact with the dead.”
Belief in a hereafter appears to be increasing among North Americans. A 2000 Harris poll showed that 86 percent believe in the survival of the soul after death and another 9 percent say simply they don’t know. A 2003 Barna Group poll reported that eight out of ten Americans believe in an afterlife of some sort—over 80 percent, in fact—while again approximately 9 percent say it may be true but they’re not certain.
At the same time (2003) www.religioustolerance.org, which tracks religious trends, recorded that 51 percent or roughly half of Americans believe that ghosts exist. Those between 25 and 29 years of age were more likely (65 percent) to say they believed than their seniors—persons 64 and over. The figure for the latter group was 27 percent. One interesting statistic was reported in a Washington Post special feature on religious trends on April 24, 2000. The story by Washington polling director Richard Morin said that even Americans who say they have “no religious preference” are expressing greater belief in the hereafter, 63 percent of them today compared with 44 percent three decades ago. Overall, the proportion of people who believe in life after death rose from 77 percent in 1973 to 82 percent in 1998, Morin says.
Greeley has quoted a theologian friend, Father John Shea, who says encounters with the deceased may well be real and the cause, not the result, of man’s tenacious belief in life after death. One argument in support of this thesis is that Greeley and his colleagues found that many of the widows who reported contact with a dead spouse said they had not believed in life after death before their experience. Another important finding in this study was that the people making such reports were “anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases.” In fact, Greeley maintained, “They are . . . ordinary Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement.” Subsequent studies bear out these findings.
Other researchers have confirmed the vividness of these experiences. At the University of North Carolina, a team led by an associate professor of family medicine, P. Richard Olson, found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of widows at two Asheville nursing homes felt they had been in touch with a dead person at least once or twice. Of those reporting such contact, 78 percent said they saw the deceased. Some 50 percent said they heard, 21 percent touched, 32 percent felt the presence, 18 percent talked with the departed one and 46 percent had some combination of these experiences. Most found the contact “helpful” and not one had mentioned it to her doctor! Greeley himself did another survey in 1984, which, among widows and widowers in the general population, just about replicated Olson’s findings in North Carolina.3
In England, Oxford biologist David Hay, director of the Alister Hardy Research Centre, conducts scientific research in religion. In one large survey of English nurses, he discovered that two-thirds of them reported mystical events, “brought