I was sitting near an elderly woman as she bled out her confession: she had lived with a man without a proper wedding for several years before his death. She had married her first husband while still in her teens and he had been a “mistake.” Now that both had died, she could live in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it was obvious that she still held a considerable amount of shame about her earlier relationships. So obvious, in fact, that I felt compelled to help deliver her from her self-condemnation.
 
            That was easy to do. As a child who came of age in the 70’s, I am no stranger to all sorts of intimate relationships, and really, the only thing I feel bad about now is how I may have treated some women as temporary commodities. The official status of the relationships and levels of intimacy I had with them does not haunt me, and as such, her feelings of remorse seem overblown and easy to dismiss. Even more, I had just heard the book, “7 Lessons from Heaven,” on CD and learned from this that everyone who wants to, goes to heaven. Nice and easy, huh?  
 
            The big religions tell us otherwise, reminding us that we are all too imperfect to stand before God or to be set free into Nirvana. The logic is strong – I know that I do not have the moral purity to stand before the one and only Truth of everything – but then again, God is Love, so much so that his love for us is deeper than anything we can imagine. So would not the one and only maker of the rules bend them so that we might live in ecstasy beside him despite our flaws? Wouldn’t we do that for our own wayward but beloved children?
 
            That is what we learn from the author of said book, Dr. Mary C. Neal, a specialist in spinal surgery and no fool. Her story is exceptionally compelling and can be seen in the mini-series Surviving Death on Netflix. There, she tells us that she and her husband had taken a great adventure with some friends to kayak a river that ran from the Andean Mts. in Chile. The river was fast and brimming with white water, but they had studied the route that ran through the near-virgin terrain and felt confident that they knew how to survive the major rapids and falls. So it was that Dr. Mary was not surprised or worried when she heard the rush of a large falls ahead. She knew that she had to take the right-hand route to avoid the much rougher falls to the left, but when she got there, she found that one of her companion’s kayak had gotten stuck and blocked the route. Deciding what to do in a fraction of a second, she headed for the larger falls and prepared for the crash. She had, after all, done this several times before and had come out ruffled and a little bruised, her ego suffering more than her body. This time, however, the tip of her kayak got stuck in a boulder beneath the falls, and her body was held ten feet below the surface by the pounding falls. She felt her legs being broken as the force of the water pushed her towards the front of the kayak, and then she was gone.
 
            Her body was still stuck below water (for 30 minutes, it turned out), but her consciousness had risen from her body to somewhere else. She saw the light and felt the ecstasy, went through the Life Review, and then found herself in Heaven. You can read the book or watch the series for more detail, but the upshot is that she believed from the ecstatic love that she received, as well as from an embrace by Jesus, that she had indeed made it to Heaven. During the Life Review, she experienced all sides to all of her actions on Earth, an experience she said was about learning, not chastisement. During this time, her inner voice told her that all who wanted to go to Heaven would. From that she ascertained that some might choose NOT to go, but she could not understand why. It was, after all, a completion and fulfillment of all her, and by extension our, needs forever.
 
            She follows up with wonderful advice, her “7 Lessons,” and goes through a detailed explanation of why Near Death Experiences cannot be phantoms of a physical brain. What lingered with me, however, was the ‘everyone can go to Heaven’ bit.  After reading and hearing all my life from all major religions and most tribal ones that getting into Heaven is really, really hard to do, this insight inspired optimism and hope as well as unwanted doubt.  Ahead are my thoughts about both, and a sort-of conclusion:

1. We all get into Heaven if we choose

 
            Yes, it sounds too good to be true, even though Christians (at least) are told that God is pure love. However, there is some scriptural and psychological backing for this. For the latter, I bring forth Julian Jaynes’ ground-breaking book The Origins of Consciousness (1976). Here, he lays the groundwork through ancient texts for the proposition that a fundamental change in consciousness occurred sometime around the beginning of the “Current Era (CE), or what was more correctly called “A.D.” Through this research he believes that at one time, our ancestors (and current era primitives) actually saw and talked to gods because the left and right hemispheres of the brain had not been fully separated. In this we find that they had a greater intuitive knowledge, i.e., a “one-ness with nature,” due to their inability to separate the dreaming mind (the right hemisphere of the brain) from the mind of the concrete (the left hemisphere). With this, humans also saw ghosts and talked to gods who, to us, would only appear as vague images perceived by the sleeping mind. The upshot being, for our purposes here, that the West went through a fundamental change in consciousness between the Homeric Age (700 BC) and the propagation of Christian teachings. This consciousness followed the West as its influence travelled throughout the world. We, then, are not the same people as we were just a few thousand years ago.
 
            For some, such as the Indians I lived with 40 years ago in Venezuela, the time for this change still had not come. For those in Europe, the change came primarily with the Roman conquest and the introduction of Christianity. With the former came logic, but with the later came the development of a super-conscience which, I believe, further removed us from our impulsive behaviors. This made us less intuitive, but I believe this also opened the door to the Holy Spirit. According to my reading of Scripture, the Holy Spirit enabled us to become consciously moral (among other things) through seeing others as ourselves. According to Christians, this spirit did not come until Pentecost, 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus, and it was clearly meant to change everything.  How might we best describe this “everything” in broad terms?
 
            Could it be this: that with the resurrection of Christ and the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, we have all become eligible for Heaven? Could this ability to genuinely have compassion for others ‘as ourselves’ make us all capable of receiving post-mortem divine teaching? And could “purgatory” be the Life Review, the “appearance as if in a mirror” that Paul and James spoke of in the Gospels? Could Hell only be for those who knowingly reject the Holy Spirit, this holy love that is offered them? Could then our Dr. Mary be right? Might all of us who are open to this Holy Spirit, either in life or immediately after death, also be welcome in eternal paradise?

1. The passage to Heaven is a Narrow Gate

 
            Most of us were brought up with this second vision, because Christ himself told us this very thing. We are imperfect, so much so that we must be refined in the furnace of the Lord before we can pass unto Him. For some, the imperfections are such that they will simply burn forever. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the rich man seems to be stuck in a sweltering hell, not because of something he did, but because he wasn’t generous enough for those in need. The list of those condemned to Hell in the New Testament can go on, but I think this is enough. We have been told that we may be cast into eternal torment for not dropping a dollop of bread or a coin into a beggar’s hat. That is one heck of a narrow gate.
 
Conclusion, kind of:
 
            Technically, the Holy Spirit did not come upon Man until after the death of Christ, and so the dire warnings of Christ would have been to a more ‘primitive’ people. Maybe. Considering all things together, our options are: one, we are damned to Hell unless we are nearly perfect OR have complete faith in Christ, as did the thief on the cross next to Jesus; two, there is no heaven or hell, as these are just remnants of the primitive conscious; and three, that the life and death of Christ did unleash the Holy Spirit on Mankind – even to those of other faiths - which fundamentally altered us. With this, we are now able to understand the education we receive through the Life Review given us at death, so that we may then pass into some realm of Heaven.
 
            I can’t really tell anyone for sure which of the three options is true. However, research done by Jaynes, as well as the mounting evidence for the reality of the NDE, strongly hint that the best is option #three. That makes of our life journey more of a hard learning lesson than a punishment for Original Sin, which softens the contradiction that our loving God is a vengeful god. That still does not take away from our having to live with the consequences of our actions here on Earth. In that, the moral admonitions given to us in the holy books are well worth paying attention to. But it might well be that if we can put aside our foolish pride after death and allow ourselves to be taught “as children,” we might find that God is truly pure love, a force who will fully embrace all of us who wish this. Who among us would reject this great love for the pettiness of the selfish little ego?

 
          I am still getting over the long trip to Earling, Iowa. It is a seven hour drive from home including a couple of pit stops, being only 30 miles from the Nebraska border, but it is not the long drive that now affects me. Rather, it is the speaker we went to see, and unlike road weariness, I don’t want to get over what I was given, ever.
           
            Nothing was propitious about the drive. There were severe weather warnings and tornado sightings all along our route. The wind ripped across the highway and raindrops the size of jelly beans pelted the car like slushy hail. The dust guard under the car came lose and flapped with a “pop- pop-pop” the entire drive. Worst of all, the Blue Tooth on the driver’s car would not accept my audio book, so I would have to sit with four women – one my wife – in a cramped space for seven hours each way with nothing to distract. I have never been left unscathed when outnumbered by women in such a situation for that long a time. I would not be this time, either, but it was all worth it, every wind-pounded, rain-drenched moment of the long trek through endless fields of freshly manured corn stubble. It was all worth it because of the speaker we went to see, Immaculee Ilibagiza from Rwanda.
 
            I had heard of her more than ten years before as the lady who had witnessed the miracles and apparitions of Mary and then who had survived the terrible genocidal slaughter in her native country of Rwanda. The miracles had started to happen in 1981. Immaculee was then a grammar school student in a typical village that was a three hour drive from Kibeho, the site of the apparitions, but still she would get a ride and be present at them as often as possible. The apparitions followed their course in a way that has become usual since at least the 1800’s: in some village or town, suddenly several children start dropping to their knees before something unseen and then go into deep rapture, so deep that touching their eyes with needles or surprising them with bright lights does not make them flinch. After returning from their trance, they then tell others that they have talked to the Virgen Mary. In Kibeho, Mary (as usual) told them of God’s infinite love, and implored them and everyone to be more faithful in both religious practice and in loving and forgiving their neighbors. Again, as usual, miracle healings occurred throughout, strange lights and other odd weather phenomena were observed, and many came to have their faith deeply renewed or even begun from scratch.
 
            This went on for several years in Kibeho until the early nineties when Mary startled the children visionaries with warnings of blood and mayhem. The poor children were subjected to visions of blood and corpses piled as high as grain bins. They were told that everyone must forgive and love as God does before this horrible vision became a reality. All this is well documented. Then, just as has happened so many times before – read about the apparitional warnings of Fatima and Medjugorje – the truly awful came to pass.  Just as it was warned, it happened precisely because of a lack of forgiveness and love. In 1994, in a span of just three months, nearly one million ethnic Tutsis were killed by the Hutu majority. When I looked it up, that amounted to 77% of the entire Tutsi population.
 
            Immaculee is Tutsi, but she was saved by a courageous Hutu neighbor who agreed to hide her and seven others in a spare three foot by four foot bathroom. There they had to stay for 91 days in silence and fear. It was there that Immaculee was transformed, where she was made into the author and remarkable person she is today.
 
            Read her books, the first being Our Lady of Kibeho. You will not only learn of the genocide and her terrifying ordeal, but also of the miracles that occurred, both in healings and prophecy and in soul healing through the Holy Spirit. You will read that two of her brothers and both her parents were slaughtered by the machete-wielding Hutus. You will also learn how she came to forgive and even physically embrace the very Hutu man from her village who killed her father. In this you will learn of her very special grace.
 
            The day of the meeting:
           
            My wife and I had slept like crap the night before in a hotel in a small town near the church where Immaculee would talk, the only hotel we knew of in the middle of this wide-open rural area. We drove to the church where she would give her presentation and were shocked by the number of people that were attending. ‘400’ they later told us, more people than now lived in the dwindling town of Earling. We sat huddled in a crowd probably many times larger than any church service conducted there in the past year, and then she appeared as if she were a solo singing act and began to speak. She was very dark brown, much darker than the average “black” American, and she was beautiful, her skin as smooth and creamy as gourmet dark chocolate. But as she talked of love and the beauty of Our Lady, I struggled to fight sleep. I remained upright through sheer will as I yawned and yawned until my eyes watered.
 
            After over three hours of sitting on the hard wood of the pew, I wished for it all to end. We took a long lunch break and returned. Then something happened. I don’t know how, but suddenly I perked up and everything she said took on deep meaning. She talked of her trials in the genocide, of her childhood, of her later marriage and life in the USA, of her pilgrimages back to Kibeho and to Fatima and to Lourdes and to other apparition sites. The topics she spoke of seemed more interesting than before, but something else was going on.
 
            What that was became much clearer in the hours and few days since. She had talked to us of the great powers channeled through her from Our Lady, and told us to ask for whatever we wished, and then write it down to check and see what became of that wish (or wished) in a month or two.  Many miracles, she told us, had happened that way in the recent past. A day later I remembered what she had said (a miracle in itself) and I wrote my wishes down with genuine seriousness. This was not due to a sudden rush of childish hope, but because of what Our Lady had already given both my wife and me in the hours since the retreat: grace; a beautiful, wonderful, interior grace.
 
            Yes, I know it will dissipate, for my feet are fully made of clay, but still it lingers and still I can speak of it. It is the grace of faith, of the certainty of the love of God, of His promises of heaven made to us through Jesus. It is the feeling of connection, of knowing that life is meaningful and beautiful regardless of what happens, even - though we would never want it - through horrible periods of war and genocide. Yes, even then. It is a knowledge that we are never alone and are guided, that whatever terrible decisions are made by us or by others, good will come from it eventually through the infinite love and power of God. It is the firm inner-knowledge that all fits, that everything is assumed into the plan, that all is connected, and that all of us are infinite, cosmic and blessed beings. 
 
            Pretty big stuff, but like the wind that is the Holy Spirit, it worked its way into me quietly. It rose slowly as a background feeling of happiness, of health, and of excitement over what was next to come in life. These feelings remained the entire drive back, which went off flawlessly in perfect weather, and they have stayed to this day - fading yes, but still present enough to give understand and, most importantly, to believe. So much so, that when my brother called the other night, I did not want to talk about the “sad state of affairs” as we usually do, but rather about this special gift that had been given us. This desire was felt so strongly that when the latest episode of political vengeance came on the news, I did not curse the perceived villains, but rather thought of what Immaculee had told us: forgive and pray for those who have offended us, and for those in power so that they might do the right thing. That is what she had done for the man who had killed her father, and that is the practiced wisdom she left for us so that we may live in truth and beauty rather than in anger and resentment.
 
            Immaculee is a Catholic, and Mary is primarily honored by Catholics. Still, if I had to bet, I would bet that every one of every faith, and even those without any faith, can come to receive and cherish the grace she radiates. Ultimately, her life has shown the world that the very best can come from the very worst. This is the truth given to her by the divine power. From this we learn that the whole is infinitely greater than the sum; that evil can show us the way to our own redemption; and that suffering is not only our lot, but can be our privilege and great teacher if we allow it to be. This truth tells us that God makes all things perfect in time, and that we are called to be like God; that is, to make all things in our lives into something blessed by the Lord. In this, we will walk with the wind of the Holy Spirit at our backs towards a horizon where all is folded into beauty.