kerygma, or preaching, from the very beginning, and was one of the many reasons for the rapid growth of the Christian movement from the start. In its negative aspect, the development of the teaching that the Church alone held the keys to a pleasant afterlife, as well as the power to condemn one to everlasting fires of hell for heresy and a whole range of other lesser offences, gave this religion as it quickly expanded an incredibly potent hold on the human souls within its vast reach. Millions of people today are still in great mental and spiritual bondage to guilt and dread because of this unseemly grab for power and control. The major theme of the many hundreds of grateful letters received in response to The Pagan Christ has been the great sense of liberation from fear and guilt on the part of former fundamentalists, including pastors.
It is not my intention to expatiate further here upon the message of the earlier book, Life After Death; it speaks for itself. (A highly revised edition in light of the latest thinking on the subject and of changes in my own views entitled There Is Life After Death is being published simultaneously with this book.) But it is, I think, relevant to say that my exploration confirmed for me beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only the Church’s interpretation of what its original documents set forth but its further explication of them in its preaching and teaching down the centuries are at times virtual caricatures of what was meant to be communicated at the outset. Just one small example will suffice. It shouldn’t be surprising that the concept of eternal life has little or no appeal once you take the trouble to really think about it. It’s actually a frightening thought: life going on forever, and ever, and ever . . . But in the Greek words of the New Testament that are regularly translated as “eternal life,” a quite different meaning is contained. Zoe aionios, the Greek says. That means “the life of the age to come.” In other words, eternal life is not about a never-ending, virtually inconceivable length of time. It’s not a temporal matter at all. It’s a qualitative idea. What is being announced is a life that is qualitatively different, a kind only possible in another dimension of being altogether, where time itself is no more. This is much closer to the Eastern concept of nirvana than to the phrase “eternal life.”
The book Life After Death concludes, therefore, among many other things, that the Church has failed miserably to speak meaningfully today to its followers and outsiders alike about what is believed to happen when we die. No question could be more urgent, more universally relevant, more existential than this. Yet preachers and priests continue to mumble ancient shibboleths at funerals and elsewhere. Where, for example, has the Church made plain its response to or understanding of the now universally known near-death experience? The NDE is today familiar to everyone. Scientists debate its significance. TV programs herald its pros and cons. But from religion itself comes a deafening silence. The result is that a leading opportunity to speak to people where they are in terms they can understand is still being wholly missed. I would like to be wrong on this, but my suspicion is that churchly authorities realize that if the NDE is a real glimpse of a life beyond the grave, then there goes all that centuries-long power to say who goes where and when at the last call. Think of it: a future life may be infinitely more democratic than we supposed.
Life After Death was made into a twelve-part documentary for VisionTV and was later adapted for the Learning Channel in the U.S.A. Overall the book met with such success that the editors at McClelland & Stewart were quite keen to follow it with another similar exploration. I at once proposed a volume exploring the theme of spiritual healing in particular and alternative medicine in general. While continuing to write weekly columns (McClelland & Stewart published a collection of them under the title God Help Us in 1992) I travelled to Britain and the U.S. as well as other major centres in Canada to interview researchers and healers of all kinds and practices. I was committed to the belief that if religion has any part to play in contemporary life, it must become what it was originally intended to be—a source of healing of the whole person and of society itself. The language of healing was there—salvation means “being made whole”—but the reality too often was not. It was a fascinating task for the nearly three years it took to investigate and then write. The result was The Uncommon Touch: An Investigation of Spiritual Healing (1994). It too became a ten-part VisionTV series of the same name. Interestingly, in the same week of 2010 that this last sentence was written, the Toronto Star ran a review of a new book by an American sociologist, William Bengston, Ph.D., called Chasing the Cure. The book describes Bengston’s own career as a hands-on healer. His many lab experiments with mice, the results of which were published in peer-reviewed journals, together with documentation of positive results with human ailments ranging from several forms of cancer to diabetes, are cited as reasons to undertake wider scientific studies to examine the whole phenomenon of “energy healing.” Therapeutic Touch is now widely practised as an adjunct to regular medicine.
Other books followed quickly, as somehow the creative juices were truly flowing. There was Would You Believe? Finding God Without Losing Your Mind (1996), which aimed to set forth a reasonable framework for believing in God in an often chaotic world. Then came Prayer: The Hidden Fire in 1998, in which I explored among other things my own scary encounter with heart disease and the amazing self-healing powers of the body in creating a non-surgical bypass for a totally blocked main coronary artery. Thankfully, with appropriate medical care, the “miracle” has been fully sustained.
In 1998, having become keenly aware that the city was increasingly invading our semi-rural retreat at Wilcox Lake, we decided to make a move to the “real” country. Before long we had moved to a stone cottage–type farmhouse overlooking the sparkling waters of Georgian Bay. I continued writing the column, keeping up with major trends in religion and working on another book with Susan’s help—she has excellent editorial skills and an amazing ability to organize, which I never possessed—while together we gardened our vegetables and roses, gently updated our home and settled into a slightly quieter style of living. Bluebirds make their home around our apple trees and split-rail fencing, and the wrens in the birdhouses near our windows sing their morning matins and evening vespers. John Muir, the famous American environmentalist, once spent a year in the region near our forty-odd acres, and in a letter now in the Meaford museum he pronounced it one of the loveliest parts of North America he had visited during a lifetime of travel. We loved the peace and the feeling of freedom flowing from the wide vistas on every side. This tranquility contributed a great deal to my 2000 book, Finding the Still Point: A Spiritual Response to Stress, but it was about to be disturbed suddenly and on a major scale.
The whole thing began with the arrival one day of a letter from a Toronto clergyman in which the Reverend Larry Marshall introduced himself as a faithful reader with something he felt an urgent need to share. He wrote that during a recent long, serious illness which involved a lengthy confinement he had been surfing the Internet when one day he stumbled across the extensive work of an American author and lecturer named Alvin Boyd Kuhn. He said that from following the development of my thinking through my books and columns over the years, he felt “led” to bring Kuhn’s work to my attention. Would I mind very much, he inquired, if he were to forward copies of a few of Kuhn’s monographs on a variety of themes to me for “a quick scan”? Since one thing is certain when you are writing regularly in a newspaper—that everybody with a question, a suggestion or a criticism on your topic of choice will one day or another write to you—I was naturally somewhat cautious. I sent a note saying I was inundated with similar requests weekly, if not daily. But he didn’t let it go and so one day the inevitable brown envelope arrived with Rev. L. Marshall on the return address. It was thrown on top of a heap of mail of a similarly unwanted kind on a shelf in the study and lay there for some time.
One day, however, while tidying up, I took it down and began to glance at the contents. There were three or four papers by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D., including one on ancient sun gods. The subject was new to me and I began to read the article with growing fascination. If what Kuhn was saying was true, the parallels and affinities between the Jesus Story and the accounts of the sun deities of the ancient Middle East and of the Vedic lore of India were not only numerous but extremely close as well. I was both surprised and intrigued. Marshall and I began an email correspondence and before long more monographs arrived.
