Light from the Other Side

The Paranormal as Friend and Familiar (Real Life Experiences of a Spiritual Pilgrim)

Ellens

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273008
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume presents the narrative of the author's personal spiritual journey, which is marked by numerous constructive life-changing paranormal experiences that can only be accounted for as special initiates of the divine spirit providing intimations and illuminations. These events are set in the context of the rich literature available, which reports similar events in the lives of many other persons, under both normal and extreme circumstances. The author, a clinical psychologist and pastoral theologian, interprets this broad panoply of psycho-spiritual data in terms of psychological science and biblical perspectives. He concludes that the divine spirit is pervasive throughout the universe and present in all the dynamics of life forms, constantly endeavoring to communicate with humans. Thus, the paranormal may well be more normal than the normal human experience and the veil between time and eternity, between the mundane and transcendent worlds, and between life and the life to come is apparently more permeable in both directions than we suppose.

1

Introduction

Trauma and Illumination

At ten o’clock in the morning of August 3, 1937 I was standing by the well on our small Michigan farm. I remember feeling the intense pleasure of the mid-summer sun and the beauty of our yard and blossoming world. I was five years old. I do not know what I was thinking about, vaguely conscious of my mother’s image through the kitchen window; but I remember I was deep in contemplation. I was also longing to run across the country road and up the neighbor’s sandy driveway to play with Esther.

She was a blond, blue eyed beauty, also five at the time. We were madly in love. She had been born in April of 1932 and I in July. Neither of us remembered when we started to know each other or when we fell in love. The thought or question simply never came up. I think now that we did not remember any time in life when the other was not there, nor considered that fact to be a thing to think about. We were oblivious of any such idea and sure that we would simply always be there in each other’s lives. As in the infinite tranquility of all happy and well cared for children, whose lives are secure, no other possibility ever arose. We were madly in love. We thought it wholly natural. I guess you would say that we simply took it for granted, as confident and trusting children do.

Esther and I spent a lot of time together that summer. We played in the sand and grass on sunny days like this one; or in each other’s homes if our mothers forbid us to splash barefoot in the puddles when it rained. We talked all summer about starting school in the fall. School was the East Side Christian School, a mile across the forests and meadows of the farmlands. We assumed we would walk together across our farm, through my grandfather’s forest and meadow, and then through the Hendricks’ woods and fields to the one-room schoolhouse. Neither of us had visited the school but we knew that all the important people we loved went there and seemed to like it. They were mainly my older brother, and her eight siblings. There was nothing to fear in the forests and meadows and those who had gone before us had trod a clear enough path for at least as far as we had ever explored.

In any case we had every reason to feel completely trusting about our life and its opportunities, and I doubt that either of us had ever really had anything to fear. My mother had been sick quite often during my first five years, so I remember feeling some grief and loss about her absences, but that was largely overlaid with the warm care with which my aunts Sena, Betty, and Gertrude embraced me. They were a constant cherishing presence. When my mother was well she was very warm to me; and my father was consistently, by a wide margin and without any exception, just the very best man I ever came to know. They were both full to overflowing of love and grace.

Esther’s home was equally rich emotionally, and exceptionally secure. Except for my older and immediately younger brothers, my siblings had not yet been born. Esther was the last of nine children, a number of them already nearing adulthood. She was part of a tribe of people who loved her and thought she was just the most beautiful jewel ever born. With complete assurance, I thought so too.

Moreover, we trusted God. Both of us were growing up in intensely pious homes in which our fathers’ prayers and Bible readings, our mothers singing Psalms and Hymns while they worked, and three deeply meaningful worship services on Sunday, were standard spiritual fare. I am surprised, in retrospect, how much I already got out of the long Sunday sermons every week, two in English and one in Dutch. I think we do children a great disservice today in taking them out of the worship services for Church School just before the preacher starts to preach. We had no Sunday School. Soon after five years of age we started Catechism every Saturday morning, walking the two and a half miles to church for the class. But I am still surprised at the extent to which I, fortunately as it turned out, had grasped the main lines of Christian truth by that fateful day in August of 1937.

I think Esther and I felt much alike on the matter of trusting the love and care of God in our lives. It seemed to simply be the way things were. Nurtured in warm and loving Christian homes, where the sense of the presence of God was immanent in everything, there seemed no other possibilities. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. That was clear from the way the cattle supplied our milk and meat, the pigs littered and produced food and cash, and the chickens laid lots of eggs. It was the middle of the Great Depression with its largely barter economy, as everyone knows, so we set the five gallon can of cream and the case of eggs at the road side every Friday morning. By noon the grocery man came for them and left three large boxes of food for the week. Things worked like clockwork so far as a five year old could tell. Moreover, the fields flourished. I remembered some years when my father delighted in the fact that we got more potatoes per acre than we used to get; and the meadows and grain fields produced more than enough food for the animals for all winter long.

The Great Depression had some painful aspects to it for our parents, but as five year olds I do not think we were aware of being poor. We did not know that we were deprived because we had no inside plumbing except a water pump, no hot water except what we heated on the kerosene stove, and no wash tubs or bath tubs. Our parents had no luxuries, but we did not know there were such things. Our mothers made our clothes but we thought that was because they loved us and liked to do it. I am sure we got that right. While there was no cash around I doubt that either Esther or I were aware of that. I did not know until years later, for example, that my mother had all those years wished for a wrist watch and some jewelry. I was not aware of the import of my father never having a wedding ring and my mother not getting hers repaired when the opals fell out.

Esther and I were secure, happy, and playfully in love, as children can be in innocent joy.

Whatever it was that I was thinking about that bright summer forenoon by our well, I remember only that it seemed important and interesting at the time. What I do remember was that I was sort of spending time waiting for Esther to appear in the Van Houten yard, so I could run over and play with her. I felt infinitely joyful, delightfully pleased. Surely all was right with God’s world in which we were privileged to live.

It was just at that point that I heard the screen door slam on the Van Houten farm house. I remember distinctly how my heart leaped, how I turned with excitement to see that little beauty, Esther. There she stood, at the top of the driveway, looking absolutely terror-stricken, and completely on fire. She burned to death right there before my face. I screamed for my mother, while Esther’s frilly summer dress and her beautiful golden hair flamed up into a ball of fire enveloping her. My mother ran to her but there was nothing she could do in those primitive days in that rural Dutch ghetto in the woods of Northern Michigan, such a long way from everything.

Esther died. My life stalled out and ended, there and then. A shroud of palpable darkness descended over me like a heavy black blanket drawn down over my head. It drew down over my eyes, and tangibly descended until it closed in on my whole self, and the lights of my mind and memory went out—completely.

I have no idea now who I was before Esther died; no idea of who I would have been had we gone on growing up in the security of that childhood world and of our mutual affection. I have no clue how it would have been to continue to savor the flavor of our spritely joy and the resilient delights of our fond friendship. It is still too painful to allow myself to deeply contemplate. I try sometimes, but I cannot quite get near it. The dear Esther I knew is gone, and so am I.

I have no memory at all from that day forward for two solid years, except the death of my infant brother in our home a few months later. It strikes me today that he may well have been a casualty of my mother’s trauma at the death of Esther. But I do not know because I cannot remember a thing from those two dark years of solid blackness in my mind and soul and world. That was a total and terrible end for Esther and for me. Esther was gone and I was lost in the blackness of some unconscious, unfeeling hell. Perhaps unfeeling is not the right word. My brother says that to his great exasperation, I cried all day every day for the first six weeks of school. Perhaps! I have no memory of any such thing. The person I had known myself to be was not there. I never found him back.

When I came out of that cloud of darkness two years later, it was sudden and dramatic. I had nothing to do with it. It just happened. It was another bright summer day. Out of the dimness of the horse stable I stepped through the barn door into the intense light of the mid-day sunshine and I was immediately embraced and infused with a translucent cocoon of light. It seemed to embrace me, elevate me, and illuminate every corpuscle of my body, mind, and spirit. I felt it throughout my entire self, as though I were caught up in an aura of light, different from and brighter than the summer sunlight all around. It seemed like a thing in itself, shining around me, shining within me, shining through me, an elevating and transcendent illumination. Its meaning was instantaneously completely transparent to me and utterly concrete. I was filled with the most joyful sense that my entire life from that moment on would overflow with the gratifying meaningfulness of caring for all those who seemed to be suffering so abjectly all around me. It was the Great Depression and children were constantly dying in our community.

To spend my life caring for the suffering was not a conclusion to which I came as a result of some revelation or insight that this ecstatic moment conveyed to me. It was not something I did or came to realize under the circumstances. It was a completely new sense of reality with which my whole being was thoroughly infused in that instant of illumination. It was as though an other-worldly light irradiated my whole being, infusing it with an entirely new sense of everything. I do not know how long this sense of being caught up in that elevated state lasted. However, my sense of destiny, realized in that experience, has persisted in a straight line from that moment to this minute. I have never felt inclined to second-guess it. I have pursued it with vigor and clarity. I have sought out the difficult places of human suffering as my place of vocation. I have never considered an alternative.

It is clear to me that my experience of this definitive life-changing event at age seven can not be accounted for in any other way than as a special intervention of God. It was a deliverance from two years of psycho-spiritual imprisonment of my deepest inner self, in such a place of utter hopelessness and helplessness as to have shut down all of my conscious mental and spiritual function. I can only say that during those two years I must have been getting on from one day to the next on automatic pilot. I must have functioned as an automaton.

When the divine spirit, which I now believe is the life-force that pervades every aspect of the universe, intervened to free me, that spirit also in that same moment, instantaneously filled me with a complete, and completely meaningful, clarity about my life’s purpose. God set me free and gave me a complete map of my destiny. It was such a comprehensive intimation of my vocation; and such a total illumination of my whole self that it formed me into a completely new person then and there. The entire package was in that moment present inside me. It empowered me as a healthy focused agent with an exceedingly pleasing sense of who I really now am. I also knew immediately that the manner and style in which I would pursue that destiny was as a preacher and pastor in spiritual and social ministry to those who would need me.

I have reflected frequently upon the fact that I knew in that moment that I would study to become a pastor and preacher. The Reverend John L. Shaver was the pastor who had baptized me and continued to serve our congregation until I was twelve. I honored him highly as a really good preacher and as a man of great dignity and presence to the people of our church. He seemed to be the only one in our community in those difficult days of the Great Depression who, in an important way, stood above all the trauma that afflicted all of us and was able to be of some useful help.

He had come from somewhere outside our congregation and community. He brought with him useful abilities uncommon to the rest of us. He was able to intervene for suffering people in ways that seemed to count. It seems to me now that it was a natural sense inside me, that this image of empowerment was the one ideal person of service and ministry in my world, for me to emulate.

As a pastor and psychotherapist, I have since wondered whether that immediate sense of vocation would have taken a different course had there been in our community a really proficient and beloved physician. Would I have perceived that event of illumination, that empowered me with a driving sense of destiny, as automatically taking the form of emulating the physician; serving the suffering in the field of medicine? I do not know the answer to that question. What I knew clearly then was that the path before me was in Christian ministry. I knew that immediately. It completely filled my consciousness. There has never been a moment in my life since then at which there has seemed to me to be an alternate option. Nothing ever entailed the sense of satisfaction and authenticity of purpose I have always felt in ministry, from that moment on.

My course seemed set and I went blithely forward, selecting the turns in the road of education that led to my formal study at Calvin College and Theological Seminary. One of the minor moments of reinforcement in my pursuit of this destiny was in my third year of high school. The Principal of Northern Michigan Christian High School asked me whether I really did intend to go into the ministry. He needed to know because in that case he would need to offer in the high school curriculum the two years of Latin, required for college preparation. I had to confirm on the spot what my intentions were. I told him I intended to become a minister. That was the first time that my sense of calling and intent became a public fact. Declaring myself then and there was the crossing of my Rubicon. The die was cast. That changed nothing inside of me, but it advanced the reshaping of my public world and set me on the academic road to ordination.

I enjoyed college and seminary, though having to work full time to support myself often left me feeling like I was not able to do it with the luxuriant freedom and elaborate achievement that I really desired. From my illumination at age seven onward I remained an unfortunately neurotic kid and an adolescent rather lacking in social confidence. I am sure this can be traced to whatever state I was in for the two years of hell following Esther’s death.

It was clear to me from high school on, in any case, that if I were to become a really good preacher and teacher I would need to overcome this serious deficit. By sheer force of will I set myself to take every course in rhetoric and public address offered at college and seminary until I felt like my role in the pulpit was second nature to me. It took a few years in pulpit ministry for me to get to the point at which I felt the appropriate confidence. I was always consoled by Cicero’s purported remark that if a person were not extremely anxious before making an important speech, he or she was not taking the situation seriously enough. Cicero often had to cancel speaking engagements because he was so overwhelmingly anxious that he could not deliver the address. He is said to have believed that a ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: How Abnormal is the Paranormal?
• Chapter 3: The Permeable Screen
• Chapter 4: The View from the Bridge
• Chapter 5: Sailing Close to the Wind
• Chapter 6: Appointments with God
• Chapter 7: A Voice in the Night, Truth Quests and Consolations
• Chapter 8: The Presence
• Chapter 9: Corollary Bible Stories
• Chapter 10: Mystical Spirituality
• Chapter 11: The Mystics and the Epitome of Mysticism
• Chapter 12: The Wisdom Book
• Conclusion
• Bibliography