Trumpeter

My father, Reverend Sherman W. “Trumpeter” Swan, died twelve years ago, July 9, 2018. I felt we hadn’t finished an important conversation we were having. When my niece called and told me the news I fell into a big emptiness.

I last saw you in March of that year at a rehab center in Sebring, Florida, where you were recovering from hip replacement surgery and dying of cancer.

You shouldn’t be out when it’s like this, you said.

When it’s like what?

It is very dangerous out there. I heard someone in the next room saying, maybe it was on TV, terrible things are happening outside.

No, I was outside and everything is normal. And I wanted to see you again before we leave.

You were in the hospital bed, passing in and out of consciousness and in and out of coherence. You didn’t know if you were hallucinating or dreaming. Your roommate told me that the morphine had this effect on you, talking out of your head like this, and fearful.

I thought your visions of tribulation were projections of some spiritual conflict you were undergoing as you approached death. Your confusions and delusions drew from your apocalyptic orientation. Tribulation in the last days. Heaven and Earth will pass away and Jesus will return and take the throne. Some of us may be taken up before then, in the Rapture.

I told you that the drugs they had given you were causing you to hallucinate and that these things you were talking about were creations of your nervous system and projections of your fears, like bad dreams.

How could I have helped you with your fear? How can I reassure you about death without lying but without you dying afraid of my unbelief. How can I believe what you want me to believe? How can I show you I love you?

I didn’t know what to say to you. What did you want me to believe? What did it mean or matter?  We prayed together and I gave you a back rub. I could do that.

My father and I would often talk about the Bible. We could talk from our shared love of scripture, if not always a shared experience or understanding. My way of reading scripture comes from literature and philosophy. You and Mom read scripture every day and prayed often and tried to live righteous biblical lives. 

God is love and we are to love God and to love one another and to love our neighbor and this is how you tried to live.

Both of you believed that holy scripture is absolutely true in every sense. What the Bible says happened really happened and what the Bible says will happen will really happen and now I am thinking about how to talk to you about what the Bible says about death and resurrection and what do I really think about that?

I thought you would die any moment and this was a holy time, so we prayed and I read scripture to you.

Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, chapter 12:

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows.  And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.

I tell you my opinion that the mystical experience Paul described was an altered state of consciousness. He is being taken up, in or out of the body, maybe a dream body, like in Tibetan dream yoga, a spirit body, taken up into the third heaven where he heard things he is unable to put into words, but he is transformed by whatever happened to him. I think Paul’s revolutionary mysticism began with an episode like this in which he believed he encountered the resurrected Jesus, called Messiah.

I read 2 Corinthians, chapter 15. I always read that at funerals, you said.

Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

My idea was that when Paul was caught up into Paradise he was “raptured” — he had an ecstatic experience — a state of unitive consciousness that eludes the nets of language and logic, into the Infinite, and beyond life and death.

Have you ever had such an experience? you asked.

Twelve years later, I still work on my reply.