Categories of Faith
I have identified five categories of people, regarding their faith. These categories are not specifically religion based. It does not matter whether an individual person identifies as a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddha, or any of another hundred religions, or even nothing at all.
My identified categories are as follows:
- These are people who have faith. They practice what they preach. (C1)
- These are people who claim they have faith. They go through the motions of what is expected by their identified religion. They proclaim their faith, yet their actions do not support that claim. They believe themselves to be ‘good people’ in the eyes of their religion. (C2)
- These are people who do not have faith. They are searching for faith but have not yet found it. They are probably as apt to slide back to C4 as they are to advance to C2. (C3)
- These are people who do not have faith. They are content with their lack of faith. They are not searching for it. (C4)
- These are people who do not have faith. They do not want faith. They will disparage anybody who professes to have faith. They will tell everyone about their lack of faith and wear it like a badge of honor. (C5)
C1s are a community. Their participation in the community enhances and strengthens the community. They help each other when necessary. A C1 will give you the shirt off their back to help their fellow humans – even if it is their last shirt.
C2s are more self-absorbed. They follow the community because it gives them power. They cherry-pick from the teachings and follow the ones that fit with their own lives. They will give you a shirt from their stack of shirts that they decided to donate because they no longer fit, and because the donation will make them look good in the eyes of the community. You definitely cannot have the shirt off their backs and you definitely cannot have one unless it is an extra.
C3s are a middle ground between C2s and C4s. They might be former C2s who lost their way when their going-through-the-motions activities no longer held meaning. Or they might be former C4s, people like me, who for one reason or another were motivated to look for faith. For me, I listened to first-hand witness statements and how the Lord has changed their lives, from intelligent people that I respected. I found it difficult to recognize people’s intelligence and my respect for them and their opinions, while still maintaining that their belief in God and Heaven was silly. It pushed me into a search. These people are agnostics.
C4s are people who live among us. They are not searching. They do not tell you about their lack of faith. Many of them, like my father tell people if they ask, which religion they practice. My father would proclaim himself to be a Christian. But he was a C4. These people self-identify as atheists.
C5s are atheists. Period. These people go out of their way to proclaim religion and spirituality as silly to anybody who will listen. They actively try to convince others that there is no Supreme Being, no heaven, and no hell. They have no purpose in my story. This is all I will say about them.
Summary
In the Beginning…
My early years, growing up in Michigan and Illinois, I was content with being in a C4. I took a lot of heat from my classmates in junior high school and high school because of my lack of belief. I was an outsider. I was not accepted. People did not like me because I was different. That led to a lot of bullying with me as the victim.
Fast forward 40 years, I have come to realize that I was trying to discuss a topic with the other children (K-12) that neither they nor I really knew enough about to debate. We were all just repeating what our parents, teachers, and other peers told us. It was all about who had the most children on their side. I was alone on my side. It was not until we all reached college or moved out of our childhood homes that we would begin to really think for ourselves.
Do not judge, and you will not be judged….
As a young college student everything changed for me. I found acceptance. I was not judged by others because of my beliefs. I had a lot of fun defending my position with my C1 friends. I believe it was here that my spiritual journey began. I met people, who were strong in their faith, that were willing and able to debate the topic with me. Some of my arguments, which were clearly Dad’s arguments that had been taught to me as a child, had a hollow ring to them when I used them to defend my position. In the end, I was not swayed to change my position, and neither were they. But I did move from C4 to C3. I was no longer content with my lack of faith. If there was something there, I felt the need to find it.
After college, working for a living and living on my own 200 miles from the homestead, I met other C1s. I joined a bible study to learn about God. Now it was time for me to build my own arguments for or against belief. Ultimately, between the constant disparaging from my father and my own perceptions of the bible and how it did not fit with the things I could see and touch, I fell back to C4.
However, I can tell you that I envied those C1s with their faith; further I despised those C2s, who presumably have faith, but did not follow the teachings of what they preached.
Ultimately, my early searches ended with me returning to a C4. My C1 friends told me to pray. Pray to God. He knows your heart. Ask Him to help you find the way.
“God, you know my heart. You know what it will take for me to find faith. Please help me to find faith. Please help me to know you.”
I did. And then I left it like that. I put it out of my mind, and I did not really think about it again for 25 years.
Can dogs see beyond the barrier of death?
I have witnessed my dogs stare at a blank wall and bark, wag their tails, and smile more times than I can count. I have even seen the dog crouch with its front legs, keeping its tail and butt up in the air like they do when they are playing with another dog – all while staring at a blank wall, or another previous favorite spot of a deceased dog.
I had started to consider the possibility that dogs could see beyond the life / death barrier two years before Mom died. At the time, I thought the notion was really silly. But I have seen it happen enough to realize that something that I cannot explain or understand was going on.
An Angel Visits
August 25th, one week – seven days – before Dad’s death. I stood at Mom’s grave and talked to her like she could hear me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a middle-aged man whom I could not see when I turned to talk with him.
We have all experienced an occurrence where we think we see something that is not really there. What we see is an optical illusion. It happens when we see something in the background of our visual field and our brain – our imagination really — fills in the details of whatever we could not see clearly. When you turn to look at it, your eyes clearly see those things that were interpreted as missing or fuzzy, and the optical illusion vanishes.
For that reason, it is easy to dismiss what I saw as optical illusions. This is one of the reasons why eye-witness testimony during a trial is not always reliable. We often see what we think we see, not necessarily what we actually saw.
When I visit Mom’s grave; when I am talking with her; I am usually pacing over an area of 250 square feet or so. I rarely stand still. I saw the same man, in roughly the same place, two additional times. I never saw him from the same vantage point twice. In other words, for all three sightings, I was in different places. I saw him twice in the periphery of my left eye, and once at the top of my vision of my right eye. The background of my visual field was different in all three instances. Yet, there he was. Until I looked and then he was not.
Where did all the people go?
Five days before Dad’s death, while Dad was still lucid, he saw a bunch of people sitting along the wall beside his bed. Who were they? Experts tell us that people hallucinate in the days leading up to their death. But that just means that the experts could not explain what the patient was seeing. It does not mean that it was not real. The experts tell us that previously deceased relatives often visit with people before they die. But Dad did not know who they were. But maybe he just could not see them well enough to recognize them. He was a lot more blind from his cataracts than he let on.
Leaving on a journey
Who or what was Dad seeing when he talked about “going that way and up”? A man who never once believed in an afterlife or God was talking about a journey that he was about to take when he could not even get out of bed. He was frantic when he thought they were leaving him behind — almost like a child waiting for Christmas morning. And he was lucid and actively talking with us at the time. They were right there, in the room with us. But neither my sister nor I could see anything. This man of science believed that he was looking at something real. And he was not dreaming. He was fully awake. And if this was just a hallucination, then who told him — a staunch non-believer who never studied death and dying — about this journey he was about to take, about the journey that other dying people talk about. A hallucination must have at its core, something known to the person having the hallucination else they will not be able to interpret it. A person cannot simply have the same hallucination that so many others have had at that point in their lives, without having first known about it. In other words, knowing Dad, and knowing what I knew about him, I knew that Dad would not have known that dying people frequently hallucinate about death as a journey. Therefore, I believe that he was actually watching people leaving on the journey, the same journey that he expected to be taking himself soon enough. Because he did not know about such a journey beforehand, and because he was adamant about going on that journey also, while he was lucid and talking with us, I believe what he was witnessing was real and not something conjured up by his starving, dying brain. I believe it was not a hallucination.
Pleading
From the time he went to sleep after talking about the journey he was about to embark on, until right before his death, Dad’s breathing was very fast and very shallow. I tried to match his breathing pattern and got so lightheaded that I had to sit down. He appeared to me, to be very anxious.
Ten minutes before his death, we held his hands. I could not detect that he squeezed my hand, but my sister reported that he squeezed her hand, but it was nearly imperceptible. His energy was gone.
Yet, as we started to leave the room, he suddenly had the strength to raise his arms above his horizontal body; one hand searched for the other like he could not tell where his hands were; when the fingers of one hand touched the other hand, he finger walked one hand up the other hand until he could put his palms together. Once his palms were pressed tightly together, he interlocked his fingers. With his arms fully extended towards the ceiling, and his hands tightly clasped together and his fingers interlocked, he twisted his head so he was gazing towards the ceiling and he pumped his hands and arms up and down about a dozen times, like he was pleading with somebody.
Moments later, he settled down. He put his hands with his fingers still interlocked but his palms apart, on his abdomen. Whomever he was pleading with, he appeared to get the answer he needed. He settled down and stopped panting within a couple of minutes.
Death
His breathing slowed. And a few minutes later, his breathing and his pulse stopped.
Dad had died.
From the time Dad was pleading until he was gone was no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
By this point, my sister and I were completely drained. It has been a very long Summer culminating with Dad’s death. I have had a spiritual awakening. We wanted to give Dad the opportunity to “pack his bags” and head out on his journey. The plan was to wait 10 minutes to call the ambulance.
His hearing aid was still in his ear. The batteries were fresh 5 hours earlier, so if there was any chance that he could still hear us I took the opportunity to tell Dad that he did this to himself; he starved himself; he refused all medical help; he was now dead because of his own arrogance and narcissism. He was now dead because he thought he knew more than everybody else around him, and he had just been proven wrong.
My sister thought I was being insensitive. But it was clearly my last chance – if any part of his brain was still functioning – to tell him that I was angry with him.
And then, my sister and I told him that we loved him. Repeatedly.
“911, What is Your Emergency?”
My sister and I discussed it. Who would call 911? I guess we decided it would be me. I know that we had planned to wait 10 minutes, but the time was going by so incredibly slowly. After 5 minutes, I could wait no longer.
I dialed 911.
“911 What is your emergency?”
“My father has just died. We need an ambulance. No need to hurry. He is dead. If they have somewhere else to go, they should go there first.”
“You should just call the coroner”
“Can you give me the number?”
“Never mind, we will send the coroner.”
I hung up. The 911 operator hung up. How odd, I thought.
The phone rang. It was the coroner.
“Hello?”
“This is Scott. I am the county coroner. I need to know who pronounced your father dead.”
Me: “Nobody. That is why I called 911.”
Coroner: “They should have sent an ambulance. But there was some confusion.”
I tried to explain. But it just kept muddying the waters more.
Coroner: “I will call 911 back and have them send an ambulance.”
Me: “Okay. I will open the front door for them.”
Scott hung up. I hung up.
Oh great. Now they think we are up to something. I had read on the Internet about what to do after a patient dies. It said, call 911. Tell them it is not an emergency. Tell them to send an ambulance. The patient has died.
I did that. But in small town America, it confused them. They assumed that I was the hospice worker calling to report the death. As a hospice worker, I would have known to call the coroner instead of 911. But Dad, who refused all medical care, was not under the care of hospice. I needed 911 to do what they usually do, but I was adamant that if there was another life that they could save, they go there first.
They misunderstood.
The ambulance with lights but no sirens pulled up on the street in front. They dragged their equipment and a gurney up Mom & Dad’s 150-foot gravel driveway.
The paramedic hooked Dad up to an EKG. They expected a flatline, but they got a nasty line instead. It was not a normal sinus rhythm. It was more like the final fibrillations as the heart settled down after death. The paramedic started checking the cabling. I got nervous that they would try to get Dad’s heart going again – that is their job. I am not happy that Dad died, but he does have a living will that indicates no resuscitation. I am beginning to think that I should have given Dad the full 10 minutes before I called 911.
Within a few minutes, the EKG showed a flatline.
While I was talking with the paramedic, the coroner walked in. We recognized him immediately. He was at Mom’s burial. It is a small town – less than 9000 residents. The coroner works for the funeral home that handled Mom’s visitation and funeral.
I started from the point at which Dad died. I explained in detail that I was just trying to be sure that if there was another life that could be saved, they take that call first. Small towns have limited ambulatory resources. An automobile accident on the highway would be enough to exhaust their ability to send an ambulance elsewhere. I wanted them to use their ambulatory resources for those people who could still be saved — who would have wanted to be saved — first.
The paramedic pronounced Dad dead. The coroner told us that they have a special phrase for the circumstances of Dad’s death: “Failure to thrive”. That fits it perfectly. When left to his own wishes, Dad failed to thrive.
The coroner called the funeral director, who by this time was already backed into the driveway. I knew the funeral director from Mom’s funeral and went out to talk with him. We duplicated Mom’s funeral for Dad, right down to the casket that he would be buried in.
A face above the bed
Fast forward 3 months: the whole family, minus a few cousins, met at Mom & Dad’s house for Christmas in early December. It would be my wife and I, my sister and her husband, Mom’s brother, his wife, and his daughter. My wife and I were the first to arrive. I had been working for the past three months on frequent trips to the house to clean it out. We hoped to get it on the market by early May 2020. (Fast forward to May 2020: Officially, the house clean-out and cleaning was completed on May 24th, 2020. On June 1st, 2020, we had an offer on the house.)
I walked through Mom & Dad’s bedroom. The bed was stripped, but there were a lot of things piled on top of it. Above the pile, I saw a face, seemingly floating in the air. It was just a face. It did not look like a disembodied person who was right there in front of me. Instead it was more like I was looking at it on TV. He had a round face and a bald head. It was not Dad. Dad never looked like that in his entire life. But I did not know who it was.
In hindsight, it did resemble the husband of a friend of Mom & Dad’s. The friend was at both of their funerals. We learned later that the husband of their friend had died a few days before I saw the face. I am not suggesting that it was him, only that the face I saw resembled him. But I did clearly see a face.