Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife by Miller Lisa

Author:Miller, Lisa [Miller, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

Carol Zaleski is the mother of modern heaven studies. A practicing Roman Catholic, she became fascinated with heaven as a young child. “Heaven has always been the best, most perfect place people can imagine,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Who wouldn’t want to think about that?” Now a religion professor at Smith College, she and her husband, Philip, have together written or edited a number of books relating to heaven, including an anthology called The Book of Heaven (which I thumbed heavily during my research) and a book on prayer. Her most intriguing book by far, however, is the one that came out of her doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. Otherworldly Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, published in 1986, puts the popular visions of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the same category as near-death experiences (hereafter referred to as NDEs), though she adds that both need to be interpreted with care. Some are touchy about this analysis, for they feel it undermines the truth of their experience. Don Piper explicitly denounces those who say that what he saw was merely an NDE. “I didn’t undergo anything like [that],” he writes in Heaven Is Real. “One second I was alive, and the next instant, I stood at the gates of heaven.” Nevertheless, it’s a connection worth exploring.

I met Zaleski one winter afternoon in the beginning stages of researching this book, in a coffee shop in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was the Christmas season, and the streets outside were covered with slush. In the bustle of the shop, Zaleski’s calm, placid manner struck me—as if she herself had seen heaven and come back, changed. In a sense, she has. Zaleski grew up in a nonobservant Jewish household in Manhattan, amid tall buildings and other families like hers who “had ham for Easter dinner.” Her lack of formal religious training left a hole, a sense of something missing, and so she began to seek to fill it. She read poetry books given to her by her grandmother—William Butler Yeats and Allen Ginsberg. She volunteered downtown at the Catholic Worker Movement, the social justice group founded by Dorothy Day. She befriended a group of Benedictine monks in northern Massachusetts. In 1991, at the age of forty, she was officially received into the Roman Catholic Church. Her conversion was a long, slow process that came about after decades of resistance—she didn’t want to betray her roots. She believes in heaven—she likes the idea “that a perfect life is available to us, a more meaningful cosmos than the world allows.” Her favorite vision of heaven, she says without hesitating, is Dante’s Paradiso—“definitely.”

In modern America, with all the resuscitation techniques available to us, the number of NDEs is surprisingly high. According to a 2000 article in Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had one. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details. People who have had NDEs—like some religious

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