Mark Hitchcock - Visits to Heaven and Back: Are They Real?

Dear God,

What is it like when a person dies? Nobody will tell me. I just want to know, I dont want to do it.

Your friend,

Mike

A CHILDS LETTER TO GOD

V ISITS TO HEAVEN and back are where its at today. Some of the runaway bestsellers in the last few years are tales of heavenly tourism. Interest in near-death experiences (NDEs) has exploded. The fascination over what happens after death has reached critical mass. Heaven is hot. In just the last decade, dozens of heavenly memoirs have piled into bookstores and online retailers. They fill and even top the bestseller lists. Book sales for this new genre are stratospheric.

The stories of heaven come from people of every age and all walks of life: young children, teenagers, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, pastors, orthopedists, neurosurgeons the list goes on and on. Most of these stories are born out of terrible tragedies horrific car accidents, drowning, electrocution, grave illness, or serious surgery. The stories of life-and-death struggles in these books are captivating by themselves. Each story is unique and filled with page-turning details. They pack a powerful emotional punch. They tug strongly on the heartstrings. But adding the dimension of traveling to heaven and back puts them over the top literally. The craving for these books is insatiable. The world in general, and Christians in particular, seem to be obsessed with travels to heaven and back.

Why the soaring success? Clearly these books have tapped into the universal human longing to peer behind the veil of death to get a sneak preview of the afterlife. As Douglas Jacoby says, The afterlife is a subject that interests everyone, because it is about the one thing that happens to us all. Ultimately, nothing could be more relevant. Hes right. What happens after death is a timeless topic. Dealing with death is not optional. Everyone wants to know what happens after we exhale our last breath.

C. S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, wrote poignantly of the inconsolable secret that resides in each of us. He spoke of how all of us remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. Lewis said that we possess a longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality... to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside. We yearn, he says, What could meet this universal need and be marketed with greater success than heavenly stories that make us feel like we know what life after death holds for us stories that speak intimately of God, Jesus, angels, and departed loved ones and a glorious destiny that awaits us all?

People everywhere are searching for a preview, a sneak peek behind the curtain to get a jump on the afterlife. The yearning to know just a little more, the urge for any insight, no matter how trivial, is irrepressible. Fresh stories about visits to heaven and back hold out the hope that our longing to know more can be satisfied. For many who have gone through tragedy themselves or who have lost a dear friend or loved one, these books are consulted for comfort, hope, and reassurance about life after death. Grieving hearts grasping for meaning and answers are particularly drawn to these stories. After all, theres a yearning to believe that our deceased friends or loved ones are happy and satisfied in the hereafter.

Stories about visits to heaven and back are a fairly recent phenomenon. The brief history of this sensation can be captured in three waves. The first wave of interest in afterlife experiences hit in the 1970s when reports of NDEs were first publicized. Raymond Moodys Life After Life, published in 1975, investigated the experiences of more than one hundred people who were clinically dead but then resuscitated. Moody discovered that virtually all of his subjects shared a common, positive, enlightening experience during their near-death condition. Moodys second book, Reflections on Life After Life (1977), drew on more NDEs and discovered more common, recurring elements in these experiences. The world was hooked. People have been gripped with back-from-the-dead stories of NDEs ever since. Pandoras box has been opened.

In the 1990s, the second wave rolled in with the accounts of Betty Eadie (Embraced by the Light, 1992) and Dannion Brinkley (Saved by the Light, 1994). These books hit the New York Times Best Sellers List. Both of them contain mystical, New Age, and ultimately unbiblical teachings. (Well talk about Betty Eadies book in more detail in chapter 3.) Writing in the mid-1990s about the second wave of heaven-and-back books, Tal Brooke said, What is different about the second wave is that the public seems ready to accept these reports at face value. And this includes a large cross section of Christians who have broken rank, crossing over into the realm of the occult without even knowing it.