Science, Near-death, and Pastoral reassurance

Parnia Lab data and some practical applications

Image: Sunguk Kim (Unsplash.com)

Lovely chat with a woman I met this morning after the service in a church I was visiting. Fascinating person, and we had a conversation that rolled on for miles. I really enjoyed learning and sharing with her.

I told her about our last post, the one on late brain survival and how new findings might, I thought, intersect with our religious death-narrative. She spoke of her own near-death experience. It was a traffic accident, about which she remembered nothing. This amnesia is a feature of NDE stories. She said she was inclined to think that we’re intentionally ‘lifted out’ of awful moments of death, and not required to experience them. She spoke of finding herself in the presence of people in robes, whose faces she couldn’t see. She was aware of being, as she always has been, in the presence of Jesus. The feeling in that moment was one of profound love – so much that it was nearly too hard to bear. I asked if this was transformative in her life since. She said very much so.

This would seem a good moment to unpack some of the pastoral mileage we can get out the Parnia Labs data I wrote about in our last post. I alluded there to what this might be. Let’s consider how the expanded scientific, or anyway technical, knowledge fund elides with what we’re taught – and I believe what we know – as Christians. This ought to be of real use to people entering or observing the death event.

To start with, there is the matter of knowing things. I think here of Dr. Aufderheide’s sentient and discerning patient, who appeared able to drift around and read minds. Okay. Didn’t Jesus ‘know’ people’s hearts? Didn’t the disciples? Weren’t they aided in this by the Holy Spirit? Wasn’t interacting with the Holy Spirit itself an act of knowing something – and here’s the point – in such a way that biological brain activity functioned in part of that, but not beyond? That is, didn’t neurons mediate for them some kind of knowledge, but knowledge that came from beyond neurons? Maybe knowledge, and consciousness, is managed by the brain, but the brain is not its source. Think about what it’s like when we hear people, particularly women or children, say, ‘I don’t like that man.’ Or when we contemplate an action and know somehow that it’s unsafe, or that it’s not right to do in some ethical way. Lest we think that ethics are not a point of knowledge (distinct from a philosophical calculation), it’s worth observing that the subject of returning patients’ narratives is always whether or not their lives had been well spent, in a Good or Bad way. No surprise there, given the nature of what Jesus spent 100% of his time among us discussing. The universe is about Good and Bad, and we are wired finally to ‘know’ this.

To say it slightly differently, let’s consider miracles, another form of divine revelation. Do we apprehend these with physiological things, like eyes, ears, and frontal lobes? Obviously. We detect their meaning, if it’s given to us, with something else. Neurons are a part of how we experience the miraculous.

To make it pastoral: when people watch their loved ones die, and hope their ‘spirits’ will feel happy release somehow, as though bodies are foils to spiritual functioning, we might say this. What was Jesus’s resurrection like? Did he come back with a body? Did he do physiological things, like eat and be touched, when he wasn’t doing supernatural things in his presumably transformed body, like passing through walls or walking on water? Nowhere in the Bible is there any talk of separating from our bodies, as though they have no place in our experience of the divine. We don’t have souls, in other words. We are souls. Part of that, and the Parnia experience dovetails with this, is having bodies.

Is there utterly non-biological sentience? Sure. Besides God, there are angels. And there are fallen angels, who, as I interpret scripture, masquerade as ghosts.

We aren’t like that. Nor was Jesus. It’s probably not incorrect to say that in heaven there is a man. In heaven there will one day be lots of men, and women, and children. Let’s assume, and let’s suggest to the worried families at dying patients’ bedsides, that our general resurrection will resemble that of Jesus. We, too, are children of God. When this happens, our identities will be intact, as his was. His friends recognised him. So will ours. As C.S. Lewis suggested to us, we meet God face-to-face once we grow faces. What the Parnia patients report is above all the enduring and valuable and one-of-a-kind identity that each of us seems to have, known to and called into existence by God.

Will the patients and families we meet in hospitals as clergy doubt the resurrection of the body? Of course. Believing in long-chain polymers in ninth-century graves being recast into bodies is a big ask. We might suggest to them that God called each of us into existence out of nothing once before. He is quite capable of doing it again. And he intends to, on the evidence of Jesus’s own rising from the tomb.

Where will we be, between the all-the-way death of completely decomposed brains and our restoration? Jesus said ‘asleep’, knowing nothing, until he calls our names. Does that mean that we’re not really dead after we die? I think so. The language of seeds ‘dying’ before they come back to life is unfortunate, though it is useful poetry. Seeds are not dead when they’re shed and planted. They are dormant. We could suggest to our bereaved counselees that nobody is dead, not all the way.

Selfhood seems to arise from some origin outside us. We are defined, and midwifed into the existence we know, by something that is not us. We are aware of being known by this something when we meet it. And we, in our neonatal way, recognise this something as a sort of parent, profoundly, in the hours after our deaths. I believe I see this happen in the hospice, when it seems to me that dried-up and shriveled people are actually very busy, away somewhere, expanded and exquisitely alert, doing important things. Those of them who return to the present dispensation instead of continuing on remember it and talk about it for the rest of their lives.

Parnia Lab data should be very encouraging to the dying and to the people who love them. That, in fact, is what the scientists there at NYU say. Scientists, and here is another Richard Rohrism, can actually be more religious than religious people are. They are the ones most likely to accept new data, extrapolate what they can, and then sit comfortably with what remains as mystery. The physicists are doing this with transcendence and time, I understand. I heard one of them say, ‘An Eternal Now is counterintuitive to me, but the math does support its existence.’ The Dominicans, who gave us the very word, ‘science’, drew on Aristotle for logical underpinnings of different forms of matter. They thought it was very logical that Jesus could eat with his friends and then vanish through walls. They thought angelic bodies made sense, and angelic intellects. Resurrected bodies, clothed in immortality, living outside time, and perceiving eternity as Now, also made sense. Who knows? Maybe a physicist resurrected some day will recognise the way spirits seem to be able to interact with physical objects as a form of quantum entanglement. The very fact that we’re able, as children of God, to see and understand how our divine parent works, is in the end a quite reasonable proposition.

Should scientific revelation, let’s call it, be a source of pastoral hope and comfort? Of course it should. As I’ve quoted Richard Rohr already, if something is true, we should be seeing it everywhere.