God and Old People

February 18, 2013 By 6 Comments

Belief in God increases with age.

That is the finding of a longitudinal study by researchers at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The Center conducted three surveys on religious faith, questioning people of different age groups in 30 different countries. The surveys—conducted in 1991, 1998, and again in 2008—explored the range of faith experiences in these countries:

Australia, Austria, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.

The research showed a statistically significant difference:  Some 43% of people in the over-68 age group were convinced that God exists. In contrast, among people aged 27 and younger, only 23% were firm believers in God.

But here is where the researchers make an interpretive leap:  They conclude that belief in God grows as mortality nears.

Researcher Tom Smith interprets the findings.  “This suggests,” Smith says, “that belief in God is essentially likely to increase among the oldest groups, perhaps in response to the increasing anticipation of mortality.”

The causative relationship, in Smith’s paradigm, is:

Increased Age = Fear of Death = Increased Faith

But wait a minute! Isn’t it possible that there are other factors influencing one’s faith? How about, for example, experience and wisdom?

Isn’t it possible that as people pass through the years of their lives, they see more and more evidence of a loving Creator, as they gaze on God’s handiwork—in the birth of a child, an answered prayer, a spouse’s unyielding love, a new opportunity?  What of God’s grandeur as displayed in vacation wonderlands, in crimson sunsets and storms subsiding, in starry nights and wooly caterpillars and litters of puppies?  Isn’t faith enriched and nurtured by great art, music, architecture?  By the steadfast witness of a mother’s love?

What I’m proposing, then, is a new paradigm that looks more like this:

Increased Age = Experience = Wisdom = Increased Faith

In my own lived experience, I faced college years when God seemed like an intellectual construct. As life hit me in the face, He became a larger and larger figure, until now, it seems absurd to consider the cosmos, or even a microcosm like my weedy old backyard, existing except by the will of an infinitely creative Mind.

Being afraid to die—sensing impending mortality—has nothing to do with it.

But tell me: What do YOU think?

Filed Under: Cemeteries, Death and Dying, Faith, Psychology 6 Comments

An Atheist in Heaven: Eben Alexander’s Venture Into Eternity

February 12, 2013 By 15 Comments

I adored th[e] simplicity—the absolute honesty and cleanness of science.  I respected that it left no room for fantasy or for sloppy thinking.  If a fact could be established as tangible and trustworthy, it was accepted.  If not, then it was rejected.

This approach left very little room for the soul and the spirit, for the continuing existence of a personality after the brain that supported it stopped functioning.  It left even less room for those words I’d heard in church again and again:  “life everlasting.”

Dr. Eben Alexander was an atheist.  After 25 years as a respected academic neurosurgeon, Dr. Alexander could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul.  He had heard of near-death experiences, but they seemed implausible and, therefore, uninteresting.

Then his own brain was attacked by an E. coli bacterial infection, a rare form of meningitis which is fatal in more than 90% of cases.  For seven days, he lie comatose in Lynchburg General Hospital, brain activity reduced to pure physical impulses.  The part of the brain which is the locus of higher functions such as memory and intentional decision-making or logic was completely inactive.

Doctors, certain that his death was inevitable, wanted to discontinue treatment with antibiotics, and encouraged his wife to prepare for a final goodbye.  But Eben Alexander didn’t die; defying medical predictions and confounding his doctors, Dr. Alexander awoke.  Even more surprising, his cognitive function returned rapidly.  The doctors’ dire predictions of serious brain injury were quickly disproven, as language and memory and emotion returned.

Before his illness, Dr. Alexander’s rational approach had led him to believe that the universe had evolved by happenstance without the aid of a Creator.  During his coma, though, he had seen for himself that heaven was real.  He had entered a new realm, a spiritual realm, where music and light combined in unimaginable beauty.

Something had appeared in the darkness.

Turning slowly, it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart.

Then I heard a new sound, a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard.  Growing in volume as a pure white light descended, it obliterated the monotonous mechanical pounding that, seemingly for eons, had been my only company up until then.

…Then, at the very center of the light, something else appeared.  I focused my awareness, hard, trying to figure out what it was.

An opening.  I was no longer looking at the slowly spinning light at all, but through it….

I recall that Eben Alexander’s dramatic story elicited a small firestorm of television and radio interviews when it was released in 2012.  Myself, though, I stumbled across it in the airport bookstore when, having packed hastily, I forgot to bring a book to read on my flight from Detroit to Phoenix.  For the next five hours, I lived in its pages—smiling at Eben’s memory of life in the afterworld, warmed by his recollections of vibrant colors and rich music, of beauty, and of the Creator whom he called simply “Om”.

I did notice that Dr. Alexander, while he wrote of attending an Episcopal church and gratefully received the Eucharist, said nothing about meeting Christ during his adventure outside of the bounds of time.  I was not troubled by that.  He had not actually entered into full union with God and with the saints—only with the messenger who turned out to be the sister whom he’d never met.  And much of what he discovered regarding one’s relationship with God was consistent with Catholic teaching.

The book will surely be a comfort to those who are facing the loss of a loved one, or who can only watch as a friend or relative slips from this life into coma and into eternity.  It will be a strong witness to those in the medical community who, like Dr. Alexander before his illness, imagine that they know better than their patients.  And it will be a joyful read to the rest.  I am happy to recommend it.

 

Filed Under: Books, Death and Dying, Spirituality 15 Comments

Hi. I’m Art Buchwald, and I Just Died.

October 20, 2012 By 4 Comments

A year after Steve Jobs’ untimely death in October 2011, and as the feast of All Souls nears, I’ve been thinking about How We Die.

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You remember Art Buchwald:  He was an American political satirist and commentator best known for his long-running syndicated column, which originated at The Washington Post.  In 1982 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary, and in 1986 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Buchwald was a crusty guy who dropped out of high school, ran away from home, then lied about his age to enter the Marine Corps during World War II—bribing a drunk with half a pint of whiskey to sign as his legal guardian.  After the war he attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, becoming managing editor of the campus magazine Wampus and writing a column for the school newspaper, the Daily Trojan; but the college, on learning that he’d never graduated from high school, refused to award him a degree.  Buchwald’s hijinks, at home and abroad in Paris, continued to earn him a spotlight; and his column was nationally syndicated in 1962.

Buchwald suffered a stroke in 2000, at the age of 74, and was hospitalized for over two months.  Then in February 2006, he had a leg amputated below the knee due to poor circulation.  Shortly after that, he revealed his decision to discontinue hemodialysis, which was made necessary by renal failure due to diabetes.  “If you have to go, the way you go is a big deal,” he explained, indulging his penchant for McDonald’s hamburgers over health foods.

Buchwald seemed to have cheated death once again.  He said, in an interview with Diane Rehm, that his kidney had begun working again.  “I bless him every morning,” he said.  “Some people bless their hearts; I bless my kidney.”  But the reprieve was short-lived; Buchwald died on January 17, 2007.  The next day, the New York Times posted a video obituary on their website in which Buchwald himself declared:  “Hi. I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

*   *   *   *   *

In reading about Buchwald’s passing, I couldn’t help but chuckle at his wry approach to what would be his Last Days; but it was sad, too—Buchwald’s closing of the book of his life, the inference by absence.  Nothing in the news reports, in his radio and television interviews, in the syndicated columns which continued until his death, pointed to any sort of faith in God, or in an after-life.  In Buchwald’s mind, it appeared, death was a robber that would end all the fun, all the shenanigans, all of everything.

*   *   *   *   *

So along came Steve Jobs, who died on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56 after an eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer.  In his official biography, built on long conversations between Jobs and the author, Walter Isaacson, Jobs said that there is “about a 50-50 chance” that God exists.  He abandoned Christianity when he was only 13, after seeing a photo of starving children on the cover of Life magazine.  “Do you think God knows what will happen to them?” he asked his Sunday school teacher. Perceiving a heartless God that did not intervene to help the needy, Jobs never went back to church.

Later in life, Jobs studied Zen Buddhism, and he and his wife were married in a Buddhist ceremony.  But the profuse praise Jobs received from commentators and executives focused, as Jobs himself did, on his success in the world of computers and technology.

The creator and innovator who held 342 patents had apparently never returned to a confident faith in a Creator and Innovator Who willed the universe into being.

*   *   *   *   *

These two life stories, especially their prosaic endings, leave me saddened.  I felt the same way when an old college professor of mine, a Unitarian Universalist and a secular humanist, died of a heart attack.

Just what happens, I’ve wondered, when a person with no faith meets the Person he’s ignored throughout his lifetime?  Does a merciful God say, “Hi! I’m God! Let me show you around!”  Or has the deceased person really ignored countless opportunities to encounter Him during life, and is that poor soul now relegated to an eternity outside the gates of glory?  I don’t know.

When I die—and I hope am permitted to know when that day is coming—I pray that I have the grace to do it differently.  I hope that I am able to speak from the heart to the people I love, to atone for my many mistakes, to assure them of my constant love, to promise them my continued prayers.

I hope that I will have the grace to refocus my attention, which is frequently diverted by one futile project or another, to God and to the things that matter most.  I hope I can spend my last days in prayer, in meditation, in preparation to take the next exciting step.  I hope that I have the sense to leave my work behind, to face eternity unencumbered, and to step freely into the arms of a loving God.

Filed Under: Art Buchwald, Death and Dying, Faith, Steve Jobs 4 Comments