My Out-of-Body Experience

The author - 1982

In the spring of 1982, I was in my second year of university, majoring in Religion, and living off-campus in a cottage owned by the Catholic Church.  I’d lucked into this rental, after flatting with two graduate students both of whom seemed incapable of finishing anything, let alone a thesis.  I’d learned of the vacancy from a couple I met through friends; it was ramshackle, bordering on dilapidated, but conveniently located on the river bank a quarter of a mile from the college’s main quadrangle.  The rent was nominal – 12 pounds a week – but preference was usually given to Catholics. 

I was not Catholic but, figuring I had nothing to lose, I submitted an application and, a few days later, the realtor who managed the property called me in for an interview.  His office, tucked under the eaves of a community center on the High Street, doubled as the local Right to Life headquarters and I arrived to find them running off newsletters on a mimeograph machine.  Adding to my consternation, the reception area was wall-papered with posters, one of which I still remember from the space of 4 decades: a collage of teddy bears, homeless because of abortion. 

The realtor himself was a lovely man, a father of 12, who greeted me warmly, giving no sign of the fanaticism his posters suggested.  We talked books: Willa Cather’s ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’, Rumer Godden’s ‘In This House of Brede’, I produced references from my current landlord, and the cottage was mine.

Over the next two years I dropped by the office once a month to pay rent, and the realtor came by occasionally to supervise repairs.  Everything about me screamed opposition to his conservatism, and yet he remained unfailingly kind and respectful, and never pushed his agenda. But even his restraint worried me; here was a fundamentalist who was neither combative nor obnoxious.  I couldn’t make him out, and didn’t know how I would respond if he ever did raise the abortion issue.  I mean, what could I say?  That I was militant about animal rights, but indifferent to children?

Indeed, my own darling cat had settled in well at the cottage.  She had previously had only a moldy courtyard for her outside activities, and took an immediate interest in the river.  As I left for class in the morning, she was already hovering on the bank watching for signs of eels she couldn’t catch without risk of drowning.   But, as the warmer weather arrived, the lower water level revealed a concrete ford, which she used to grab a straggler, dragging it through a tiny ventilation window in the middle of the night, and ripping it apart with a loud crunching noise as I cowered in my bed.

This was, of course, a different era when cats did as they pleased and dogs were always off leash.  It was normal practice to go back and forth to campus, often after midnight to drop off assignments or return library books before the 9 am. deadline, and my cat became a fixture on these jaunts, running ahead of me along the river bank, both of us oblivious to any hint of danger.   

She also kept me company in the garden.  Fronting the house was a third of an acre of lawn, where an earlier tenant had built raised beds.  And, as spring turned to summer, I dug in potatoes on one side and green vegetables on the other.  The potatoes came through like gangbusters, but the rest either failed to thrive or were eaten by rabbits and slugs.  However, it was during the planting of the green vegetables that I had an out-of-body experience.

I was, at that time, having a crisis of faith, questioning why bad things happened to good people.  My moral philosophy professor had recommended ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as extra reading, primarily for the Rebellion chapter in which Ivan tells Alyosha he has no use for a God who allows suffering in a child.  And it was on this I was pondering as I pressed a Brussels sprout plant into a hole with my right hand, and reached over to stroke the cat with my left.  

I recognized that we had formed a trinity.  I was on my knees, the cat was rolling lazily in the dirt, and the Brussels sprout plant was burrowing in for its brief earthly sojourn, when I rose from my body and went somewhere else.  I can’t be more specific than that.  There was no light at the end of a tunnel, no reunion with dead relatives, just a warm blackness, total well-being, a telepathic Voice, and the heavenly version of an orientation video.

In this video I was shown the workings of an old-fashioned pocket watch, with the Voice focusing on how the cogs meshed smoothly together into a gear train that kept it ticking.  It then drew my attention to the size of the cogs, large, medium and small.  I assumed I was the large cog, my cat the medium cog, and the Brussels sprout the tiny cog.  However, the Voice emphasized that we were equally important.  Without any one of us, the watch didn’t work.  ‘We are all interconnected’, it said, waiting a second for that to sink in before doubling down.  ‘Everything is interconnected.’

I accepted this immediately and completely.  Indeed, I gave myself a mental head slap thinking, ‘Well, duh?’ and launched into a barrage of questions. Suggestions were made, guidance offered until I was told the portal was closing and I had to go.  As I re-entered my body, my physical voice returned and, aware that I was already forgetting the instructions, I called out.  ‘Can you make this easier to remember!’   At which, a smiling face leaned through the dimensional barrier, and shouted, ‘The Beatles got it right!  All you need is love!’

Initially I was as high as a kite, and yet I had no one to share it with.  Raymond Moody’s ‘Life After Life’ had been published in 1975, but I feared being mocked, or written off as crazy.   I finally broached the subject with my Baha’i neighbors who were big on spiritual unity, and they responded enthusiastically.  This encouraged me to confide in a Quaker friend who, amazingly, had experienced something similar when she was 14.  She was shown an enormous jigsaw puzzle, so large it was impossible to stand back far enough to see the whole picture.  In her case the message was to do her own part of the interconnecting puzzle, and to trust that everybody else was doing theirs.   These people aside, I was left to muddle through alone.

A few months later my realtor’s youngest daughter died in a freak accident.  She fell off the playground equipment in a local park and never recovered consciousness.  I read about it in the paper, but we didn’t meet again until my annual property inspection.  We stood on my porch afterwards and I mumbled my condolences, but was otherwise struck dumb.

For here was ‘The ‘Brothers Karamazov’ dilemma in real time.  God had made some sort of point at the expense of a child but, worse than that, he’d targeted a man who worked tirelessly to save children.   The irony was not lost on me and, in face of his grief, I was consumed by rage and despair. What good was a God who allowed such things, who perhaps even planned them?  And, what good was Jesus in all this?  Sure, he’d suffer alongside you, but anybody could do that.  And on a personal level, if the best I had to offer in this situation was a damnation of God, why was I seeking ordination?

On the surface, life continued as normal.  I went to work, I went to class, but when I closed the front door behind me at night, I leaned back against it and slid to the floor, where I sat – sometimes for hours - weeping.  Fittingly, my studies were focused on the Book of Job, and I found myself channeling my inner Ivan Karamazov in tutorials, questioning a capricious God who played fast and loose with people’s misery.  That, apart, I gave no sign of the massive shift in my thinking.  Privately, however, I was in hell, struggling to reconcile my belief system with my growing doubts.

The following year, my religion course moved on to Rudolf Otto and The Numinous Experience, which Google describes as ‘a profound, non-rational encounter with a wholly other spiritual reality’ and I finally had a name for what happened to me.  Our first assignment was to present examples from our own lives but, in my group of 12 students, everyone else had drawn a blank and it was down to me. I called my paper, ‘Everything is Everything’ after the Donny Hathaway song and, as soon as I read the title, my professor laughed and clapped, then waved me on.  Turns out, my OBE checked all of Otto’s boxes and was a gift from God.  A gift that left my life in disarray. 

Because, in the immediate aftermath, the Brussels sprout plant got eaten by rabbits, my Baha’i neighbors descended into a very messy divorce, a girl was raped on the river bank a hundred yards from my door, and the cottage was bulldozed.  I just looked it up on Google Maps and it’s now a factory, the green space a parking lot for its workers. Sad to say, but the only one of us to come through unscathed was the cat.  She remained a psychopath, killing anything small and helpless that crossed her path, and lived to be 16. 

My religious perspective, however, had taken a massive hit, and I was rudderless for a decade. I never used my degree, and my attempts to put love first came to nothing but frustration and heartbreak.  I gave it my best shot, unarmored and unprotected, but it was an exercise in futility, with an added burden of failure on top.  My Quaker friend had been given a tiny part of a giant jigsaw puzzle – a reasonable assignment in my view - while I exhausted myself on a bunch of yahoos who exploited my openness.  I took a break to lick my wounds, during which I met my husband, got married, and had a baby in quick succession, after which everything finally slotted into place. 

In fact, motherhood was a breeze.  I had no tolerance for my own nonsense - let alone God’s - and I just got on with what was directly in front of me.  My life had shrunk to the size of a house, and yet I couldn’t have been happier.  I woke up with a great attitude, did what had to be done, and went to bed content.  And, as we moved into the playgroup era, I found a more measured way back to love and interconnection with the mothers and babies we met there. I learned to slow my pace, and to pick and choose more wisely.  I was able to function again in the wider world, and eventually returned to The Path.  And, when my son started kindergarten, I applied for a job at another school, working with special needs kids.  This was something I could pour myself into with love and enthusiasm; I made a difference every day, and was there until I retired. 

So where does that leave me now?  It’s a mixed bag.  God and I are cordial although, since the death of the realtor’s child, we both know I don’t trust Him as far as I can throw Him.  But Jesus and I are good, despite me not going to church or having a denomination.  A neighbor told me recently that I’m going to Hell for that, but I paid her no mind.  She has her path and I have mine, and what it comes down to is that some days I’m Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, others a bitchy, complaining, worry wort.  But I try hard not to be part of the problem, and I’m still working on my small section of the jigsaw puzzle.