Panagore - Heaven Is Beautiful : How Dying Taught Me That Death Is Just the Beginning

Copyright 2015 by Peter Baldwin Panagore

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Hampton Roads Publishing, Inc. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Cover art Exactostock-1557

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ISBN: 978-1-57174-734-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request

Printed in the United States of America

M&G

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mom and Dad

Lower Weeping Wall on Cirrus Mountain, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, where the author died, crossed over, and then came back to life. Photograph by Peter Valchev.

We are not human beings having a
spiritual experience; we are spiritual
beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the Lord. And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.

Isaiah 55:8 (NLT)

This is the story of how I died, why I came back, and what has become of me since.

Dying changed my life forever. I am not the same person I was before that transformative night. There are a hundred times that I wish and pray it had never happened. But it did, on March 20, 1980. I was stuck on a mountain, stranded in the wilderness, in the bitter cold, with no way down. Only by the grace of God am I here today.

The first time I told my story was five years after my accident, in 1985, to my bride-to-be on the night before our wedding. Better late than never, I thought. I had struggled with telling her but finally decided she needed to know what she was getting into before she married me. After that, I never told another personuntil my friend Bryan witnessed an incident in my presence.

I was the only trained responder at the scene of a bad car wreck, and I prayed over one of the men whose injuries were internal, which meant that the only thing I could do was to treat him for shock and pray. Suddenly a bolt of electricity surged through me repeatedly and into the man I was caring for. I did not know what was happening, only that somehow I was a conduit for the power of God.

Once we were back in our car driving south again, all of a sudden all the pain suffered by the accident victim was inexplicably transferred to me. I writhed and screamed in agony and screamed for many minutes, much to my friend's disconcertion and fear, until I felt and saw a cross that was atop a steeple by the side of the highway leap at me and somehow strike me. Just as suddenly, the pain vanished.

I know how kooky this sounds and looked to my friend. This happened when we were in divinity school together in 1986, and afterward, I felt I had to explain myself; so I told him my tale.

It wasn't until a Sunday in 2001 that I spoke of my near-death experience (NDE) again. I was the minister of the Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and our community was going through great hardship. We had suffered through ten years of embezzlement by a church member and incredible fallout due to it. The people of the church were stressed, anxious, and exhausted. On one Sunday morning, just before church, a parishioner asked me how my faith had endured unshakably through a decade of church turmoil. His question made me stop in my tracks. He asked about my faith, and for the first time I understood the profound shift within myself. My faith? What near-death experiencer has need of faith when he knows God is Real? I realized it was time to finally tell my congregants the truth about who I was. Right then and there I scrapped the sermon I'd spent half a week on and stood in the pulpit, ready to share my story and why I would say I have no faith.

Alarming words to read, I know, especially coming from the mouth of a Christian minister. But that is the plain truth. My faith in God did not sustain me in the pulpit through the dark times in our church. I was sustained by something else, by something that I had learned when I died: I know that I am known by God and I know that God is Real.

In the same way that I don't believe in snow or birds or trees because I can see them and experience them with my all of my senses, knowing they're real, I do not have to believe in God, because God is Real. God is as real to me as snow or birds or trees. Truly, God is more Real to me than any of those things. God is the only Real there isand that is what this story is all about.

Since finally sharing my NDE story from the pulpit that Sunday morning to a surprised and appreciative congregation, I stopped holding it in. It was time to be honest about my newfound understanding of the Realness of God. My church and I had suffered greatly during that decade of embezzlement; yet through that dark time God was always with me, and is with me now inescapablynot because of who I am, but because of who God is. I told my story publicly that first time to help my congregation begin the healing process.

Since then, I have told my story to audiences large and small, to individuals over coffee, to the terminally ill, to the grieving, and from coast to coast. I am thankful to God that in my ministry, my death and return to life have turned me into something of a reverse midwife. Instead of catching babies as they enter this world, I've eased the passage of the dying into the next and much more beautiful world.

I tell my story not to ease the dying process, for dying, I have seen so many times, can be terribly painful, or quietly peaceful, or shockingly sudden. I tell my story here for the reasons that I always tell it: to give hope that is stronger than death, to give courage to the fearful, to give faith to the wavering and faithless, to take the sting from death, to ease grief, to teach that love is eternal and that beauty beyond words awaits us all on the other side. And, I also tell it to help those like me who have had a near-death experience to find their voice, to speak their truth, and to know what I did not, and could not, know for decades: You are not alone. There are many like us. More and more of us return each day through the miracles of modern medicine.

Let me add that like all NDEers, there has always been a volcano in my soul to speak about this, and there still is. The strange thing is that the more I've thought about that experience in the wilderness over the decades, the more details I remember. To date, this is the clearest account. There is a saying attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that captures my inner space, the center of my experience where I live today and have lived since that day in March of 1980: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. I am proof of that.

Fear not. God is with us, intimately and personally, immanent and transcendent, and God will catch each of us because God loves each of us as if we are God's only beloved. God will catch us when the door of death opens to swallow us whole, and wholly, and we depart this shell of flesh and bone and find ourselves in the inexplicable beauty and love of God's eternal Home prepared for us.