![\"It's](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2020\/09\/earth-from-space.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03c2 \u0391\u03bd\u03ad\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To put it in Roman letters, Christos Anesti!<\/em>\u00a0is the traditional greeting given by Greek Christians, and by other Christians in the Greek or Orthodox tradition, on Easter morning.\u00a0 \u201cChrist is risen!\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03ce\u03c2 \u03b1\u03bd\u03ad\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Alithos Anesti!<\/em> (\u201cTruly, he is risen!\u201d) is the traditional response.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I offer the same greeting to anybody and everybody who reads this blog entry.\u00a0 Christ is<\/em> risen.\u00a0 That is the most wonderful news imaginable.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In the Greek Orthodox Church, this hymn is sung on Easter morning and for forty days thereafter:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f00\u03bd\u03ad\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7 \u1f10\u03ba \u03bd\u03b5\u03ba\u03c1\u1ff6\u03bd<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u03b8\u03b1\u03bd\u03ac\u03c4\u1ff3 \u03b8\u03ac\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u03b1\u03c4\u03ae\u03c3\u03b1\u03c2<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bd\u03ae\u03bc\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u03b6\u03c9\u1f74\u03bd \u03c7\u03b1\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03ac\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Christos anesti ek nekron<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Thanato Thanaton patiras<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Kai tis en tis mnimasi<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Zoin charisamenos.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Chist is risen\u00a0<\/span><\/em>from the dead,<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n and by his death h<\/span><\/em>e has trampled down death.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n and to those in the tomb<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n he gave eternal life.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A friend of my wife wrote an Easter-relevant poem quite a few years ago.\u00a0 She says that\u201d it still needs work,\u201d but, with her kind permission, I share it here:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Tree of Life<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n That other,<\/strong><\/span> (Jean Marshall, 5\u00a0April 2003)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And now, in the spirit of Easter, I offer some additional material from\u00a0Bruce Greyson,\u00a0After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>(New York:\u00a0<\/span>St. Martin\u2019s Essentials, 2021).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Greyson is one of the foremost living authorities on near-death experiences.\u00a0 He is also Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, having previously taught at the medical schools of the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut.\u00a0 A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he reports that he was not brought up in a religious family, and it isn\u2019t at all clear from what he has written that he is religious, at least in a conventional sense, even now.\u00a0 So the experience that he reports in the opening pages (1-8) of his book \u2014 an experience that launched his decades of research into near-death experiences \u2014 is perhaps even more striking than it would otherwise have been:<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Fifty years ago, a woman who had just tried to kill herself told me something that challenged what I thought I knew about the mind and the brain, and about who we really are.\u00a0 (1)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n He recalls that he was eating spaghetti in the hospital when his pager went off.\u00a0 It startled him.\u00a0 He was just a few months out of medical school, and he had been deeply immersed in a handbook on emergency psychiatry.\u00a0 In his surprise, he splashed tomato sauce on both his book and his tie.\u00a0 As a new doctor, he was trying to look professional, and this wasn\u2019t the look that he wanted.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The pager was summoning him with regard to a patient in the emergency room who had taken a drug overdose.\u00a0 Holly \u2014 that\u2019s the name he assigns to her \u2014 was a first-year college student, and she had been brought to the hospital by her roommate.\u00a0 The roommate wanted to talk with him, too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Greyson threw on a white lab coat and buttoned it up in order to hide the embarrassing tomato sauce stain on his tie.\u00a0 He went to the emergency room (ER) first, to check on Holly.\u00a0 She was in stable condition but was unconscious.\u00a0 A \u201csitter\u201d was there, watching her.\u00a0 (This was a routine precaution for psychiatric patients in the ER.). She had been \u201cout\u201d the whole time, said the sitter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n After examining her for a short while, Dr. Greyson headed down the hall to the family lounge where the roommate was waiting.\u00a0 The room was hot and stuffy, and he soon moved the fan a bit closer and unbuttoned his lab coat.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n They spoke for some time, including specific information about drugs and medicines in their apartment, but she had to get home to work on a paper.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t know Holly well.\u00a0 When she left, Dr. Greyson buttoned his lab coat up again, so that nobody in the ER would see the tomato stain on his tie.\u00a0 He went back to check on Holly.\u00a0 The sitter was still there, she was still out cold, and, the sitter reported, there had been no change.\u00a0 Dr. Greyson went home.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n He returned the next morning at 8 AM and found that Holly was newly awake, though still drowsy.\u00a0 He headed off to check on her.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n He introduced himself to her.\u00a0 She said that wasn\u2019t necessary; she recognized him, she said, from the previous evening.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n He wondered how that was even remotely possible.\u00a0 She replied that she had seen him in the family lounge, talking with her roommate.\u00a0 \u201cYou were wearing a striped tie that had a red stain on it,\u201d she told him.\u00a0 She was able to relate his conversation with the roommate in great detail, and even recalled his moving the fan.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Concerned about his status as a newly-minted physician, he spoke to nobody about what had happened, and did not include it in his report.\u00a0 \u201cI just wanted it to go away\u201d (8)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As desperately as I wanted to erase from my memory my entire encounter with Holly, I was by then enough of a scientist to know I couldn\u2019t just ignore it.\u00a0 Pretending something didn\u2019t happen just because we can\u2019t explain it is the exact opposite of science.\u00a0 My quest to find a logical explanation for the riddle of the spaghetti stain led me into a half century of research.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t answer all my questions, but it did lead me to question some of my answers.\u00a0 And it would soon take me into territory I never could have imagined.\u00a0 (13)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As psychologist Bob Van de Castle put it, if you get hit by a truck, y0u know<\/em> that you were hit by a truck, and no amount of skepticism from others will ever convince you that the truck was only imaginary.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t yet been hit by a truck, but I was hit almost a half century ago by Holly\u2019s insistence that she had seen the stain on my tie while she was unconscious in another room.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know how to make sense of that event, but I couldn\u2019t pretend it never happened, and I couldn\u2019t dismiss it as a misperception or the product of my imagination.\u00a0 (93)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03c2 \u0391\u03bd\u03ad\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7! \u00a0 To put it in Roman letters, Christos Anesti!\u00a0is the traditional greeting given by Greek Christians, and by other Christians in the Greek or Orthodox tradition, on Easter morning.\u00a0 \u201cChrist is risen!\u201d \u00a0 A\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03ce\u03c2 \u03b1\u03bd\u03ad\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7! \u00a0 Alithos Anesti! (\u201cTruly, he is risen!\u201d) is the traditional response. \u00a0 I offer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21893,1809,1363,21896,2905,1812,1815,788,55,1667,900,9392,903,9916,1366],"class_list":["post-90737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bruce-greyson","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-easter","tag-greyson","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-lds","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-nde","tag-ndes","tag-near-death-experience","tag-near-death-experiences","tag-resurrection"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nthat untouched tree <\/strong><\/span>
\nin the garden,<\/strong><\/span>
\nheavy with fruit,<\/strong><\/span>
\nshimmers<\/strong><\/span>
\nthrough centuries<\/strong><\/span>
\nand reappears,<\/strong><\/span>
\nthe branches now two beams crossed<\/strong><\/span>
\nto intersect at the meridian of time,<\/strong><\/span>
\nand the fruits merge<\/strong><\/span>
\nforming \u00a0a twisted figure<\/strong><\/span>
\nhanging there<\/strong><\/span>
\nin the darkness.<\/strong><\/span>
\nThen on the morning<\/strong><\/span>
\nof the third day<\/strong><\/span>
\nat last and forever<\/strong><\/span>
\nHe steps forward<\/strong><\/span>
\nfrom the open tomb<\/strong><\/span>
\nand stands<\/strong><\/span>
\narms outstretched<\/strong><\/span>
\nopening wide.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n