Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  The judge quickly grew impatient with Mr. Smith. “That’s all very good, Mr. Smith,” he said dismissively, “but you haven’t answered! What do you have to say in your favor?”

  Still, Mr. Smith was almost unable to speak for fear. “She’s just one of the nicest ladies I’ve met in my life,” he said.

  The judge made it clear he didn’t have time for this nonsense. “Mr. Smith,” he said sternly. “This is your last chance. What do you have to say in your favor?”

  But by this time, Mr. Smith was unable to say much at all. “Nothing,” he replied meekly, almost in tears. “Nothing . . .”

  In his great fear, he had obviously forgotten everything he had heard.

  Now Lily said a short prayer and then asked the judge if she could say something. Again, the judge sternly asked for her name, address, telephone number, and occupation. And then asked her: “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” She did.

  After this preamble, Lily told the judge the simple facts. She made it clear that Mr. Smith hadn’t asked her for money, that he was doing her a favor because he knew that she needed help with her luggage and he knew that other cabbies couldn’t be counted on to go to that trouble. She also made it clear that she had only paid him because she wanted to pay him for his time, not because he had been expected to be paid, and she said that she had only asked for the receipt since she would need to be reimbursed when she got to Ohio, since she had forgotten her credit card at home. That was all.

  After she was finished, the judge spoke. “Case dismissed,” he said. It was a stunning moment.

  The policeman was obviously very displeased with this verdict and left the room in disgust. As for Mr. Smith, he was moved almost to tears. He looked at Lily with tremendous adoration, incredulous that after eight agonizing months he had finally come through this fire unscathed. In a moment, he too left the room quietly. Lily knew that he was headed to the garage to get the car.

  Suddenly Lily was alone with the judge, and the judge spoke. “Von Hildebrand,” he said, “von Hildebrand . . . Are you in any way related to Dietrich von Hildebrand?”

  That this was tremendously surprising to hear in that context is obvious. “Yes, Your Honor,” Lily replied, amazed. “I am his widow.”

  The judge now stood up and came down from his bench to stand near her. “You are his widow,” he said, seeming to marvel at the coincidence. “You know, years ago—years and years ago—I used to attend his talks in his apartment in Manhattan, on Central Park West.” Lily would later realize this must have been way back in the early 1940s. For years, her husband gave political talks against Nazism and Communism, and he also gave religious talks about God and the Church, but he had stopped giving the religious talks in 1945. Lily took the judge to be Jewish, which he indeed was, so she assumed that he had attended her late husband’s political talks and not the religious ones, and she said so.

  “No,” the judge said, “it was his liturgical talks. In fact, I met my wife at his apartment.” And then, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the judge began sobbing.

  Lily said he was not weeping but sobbing—sobbing uncontrollably. He then put his arm over his face and continued to sob, standing there. Lily had no idea what to make of it. So she put her arm on his shoulder to comfort him, and said: “Your Honor, do you have any sad memories of my husband?”

  “No, no,” he said through the sobs, seemingly unable to speak another word.

  Lily knew that God was somehow at work in all of this. “Your Honor,” she continued, “for the last eight months I have been agonizing over this case. Because of my stupidity in not properly explaining things to the policeman I put this entirely innocent and good man in this terrible situation, endangering his livelihood. But now I see clearly that God’s providence has permitted this so that I would have the joy of meeting you. I would very much like to remain in touch. Would it be possible to have your name and address?”

  The judge, still sobbing, somehow assented and then quietly left the courtroom. Lily waited alone for about five minutes, after which the judge returned from his chambers no longer wearing his judge’s robes. He handed Lily his business card. And then he put his arm up against the wall and continued sobbing, his face buried in his arm.

  Mr. Smith’s was the last case of the day, so no one came into the courtroom as all of this was happening. But as the judge continued to sob into his arm, Lily thought she should perhaps take her leave, so she said good-bye and left.

  Downstairs she found Mr. Smith waiting in his battered car. The relief he felt over this long-awaited verdict was visible. As she got into the car, he said: “Lady, I pray for you every single day, but you know, you know . . . you should have become a lawyer!”

  When Lily arrived home that afternoon she got her mail and saw a letter from the nuns. Their letter said that on the day of the appearance before the judge they would all be on their knees praying. Lily then went into the bedroom and spoke to the photograph of her late husband. “Now I know,” she said, passionately and emphatically, “I know, that you still love me and protect me!” She knew that her husband’s immortal soul had somehow acted on her behalf. She knew that he was alive, and not just alive in some vague sense, but alive and able to hear her, as himself. He was not “one with the cosmos,” as some religions maintain, but rather he was Dietrich von Hildebrand himself, alive in glory, and now part of that “great cloud of witnesses” of which Paul speaks, who cheer us on from their heavenly station. It was an extremely moving experience for her. Lily said that “something amazing happened. I had been a widow for fourteen years. But now in some mysterious way that I cannot explain, I no longer felt like one.”

  When she shared this story with different people immediately afterward, some refused to believe that a judge would sob like that in his own chambers. It was so out of order as to be completely unthinkable. But most who heard the story believed it and urged Lily to get in touch with the judge. They felt, as she did, that there must be some higher purpose to all that had happened. So about a week after the court date, Lily called the phone number on the card. A woman answered. “Who are you?” she asked, in a voice that was not very friendly. Lily explained and in a few moments the judge came to the phone. But he was quite reserved and ill at ease. He made it clear from his curt responses that he wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation. After some weeks, Lily called again. She would soon be giving a talk in NYC and thought that this might be another chance for her and the judge to meet. But again he was cold, simply saying that he was not available. Lily remembered calling a third and final time, with no results.

  But then a friend of hers suggested how she might get the judge to talk with her and perhaps reveal what was at the root of the tremendous sorrow he had expressed as he had sobbed and sobbed that afternoon in his empty courtroom. Lily was writing a book about her husband, and would be soliciting thoughts and reminiscences from people who had known him over the years. So she wrote a letter to the judge, explaining this. But she never heard back.

  USS WASHINGTON, JUNE 1940

  The last time Dame Alice von Hildebrand was my guest at Socrates in the City was in November 2013, at the Union League Club. Afterward we had our usual Patrons’ Dinner in the gorgeous wood-paneled Lincoln Library of the club. There Lily shared an extraordinary story. It happened to her in 1940, when she was seventeen, on board the ocean liner Washington, which was crossing the Atlantic for America.

  Lily grew up in Belgium, to devoutly Catholic parents. In 1940, Hitler’s armies were approaching from the east, so knowing that their two daughters’ lives were in danger, Lily’s parents arranged for their passage to America, where a relative had agreed to take them in. It was June 8 when Lily and her sister, Marie-Helene, boarded the Washington at Le Verdon. The ship first crossed the tempestuous Gulf of Gascogne and Lily became terribly seasick. On the tenth they arr
ived in Lisbon and all that day were anchored off Lisbon’s coast as scores of people were ferried aboard, all escaping the war.

  Lily told me that the ship typically held a thousand people, but because of the dire emergency of getting so many out of war-torn Europe, they took on two thousand. She recalled that the ship’s ballrooms were converted to dormitories.

  One night, Lily was awakened from sleep by loud noises and cries. It was 4:45 A.M. She got out of bed and opened her door to the corridor to see what was going on and saw people chaotically running about, wearing life preservers. She quickly woke Marie-Helene and the two others in their cabin. (It was a first-class, two-person cabin, but because of the need for space, it now held four passengers.) They dressed in a mad haste. Lily remembered that she wore a cotton dress covered with polka dots. She grabbed only her purse and then out into the chaos and din of the corridor they went. They were making their way to the deck, where the lifeboats were, but Lily was terrified she might lose her sister in the endlessly jostling crowds, so she linked arms with her tightly and did not let go. With her pronounced ability for recall, Alice told Marie-Helene that the lifeboat assigned to them was lifeboat number 10. She even remembered where it was. But as they arrived there amid the tremendous chaos, they saw that it was already filled to capacity. No one else was allowed aboard.

  As they stood there on the deck near the full lifeboat, they could hear the captain speaking, but neither of them knew enough English to understand. A nearby man who knew French helpfully translated what the captain had just said. It seemed that the ship had been stopped by a German submarine. The Germans had informed the captain that the passengers had precisely one hour to get into the lifeboats and abandon ship, after which the Germans would torpedo it. Huge passenger ships like this one could eventually be used by the Allies for the war effort, so the Germans planned to destroy as many as possible. Everyone must immediately get off the ship or go down with it. But lifeboat number 10 was already full.

  It stood to reason that an ocean liner built for one thousand passengers had lifeboats for roughly that number. So there was no way all two thousand could be accommodated now, at least not without endangering the lives of the people already on the lifeboats. Lily and her sister were simply too late. In that moment, Lily said, she realized there was no escape for them; they were doomed. She was quite convinced that she was now facing death. As this grimmest reality settled into her mind, Lily remembers that she turned to face the sea. And as she looked out over the vast Atlantic Ocean, she experienced something transcendent and miraculous. “In one-hundredth of a second,” she told me, emphatically and precisely, “I saw my whole life pass before me!” What evidently has happened to innumerable souls—and what one so often hears spoken as a cliché—was literally happening to Lily in that moment. It was a proverbial eternal moment. Time was suddenly utterly transcended and for an infinitesimally thin sliver of time she stepped into the timeless eternity outside time. Somehow in that moment she saw her entire life pass before her in the smallest detail. She said she somehow saw every single thing she had done and everything she had failed to do; she saw what she should not have done, and she saw all that she had wished for. Then it was over. But when it was over, she says, she knew that in passing over that moment she had been transported from youth to maturity. A moment ago she was a girl and now she was a woman—and it had all taken place in that tiniest fraction of a second. Lily stood there on the ship overwhelmed and speechless. The experience was so extraordinary and so absolutely sacred that she stood there and said nothing. Indeed, she was to share it with a soul for many years. It was a profound and holy secret, she said to me, one that she must ponder in her heart.*

  But as she stood on that ship’s deck for that most anguishing of hours, prepared to step forever into eternity, Lily relived the extraordinary vision in her mind, over and over. God himself had revealed something to her and had changed her forever. But at the end of that terrible hour, Lily and all the others learned that somehow the Germans had changed their mind. The Washington would not take them to the bottom of the Atlantic, and Lily would live beyond her seventeenth year after all. After this unspeakably good news it took the ship a very long time to begin moving again, but eventually it did resume its journey, taking her to New York, where she has lived these last seventy-four years. She said that the experience convinced her that at the end of people’s lives there might be hope for those who had not yet made their peace with God—and that just as he had given her that vision of her life, he might in his mercy give others this final opportunity to see the totality of their lives and to repent, to turn at last to him and to say: “Forgive me.”

  • • •

  One final thought: Lily’s story reminded me of the apostle Paul’s words in his second letter to the church in Corinth. He says that he will now discuss some “visions and revelations of the Lord” and then refers to someone he knows who fourteen years earlier had actually visited Heaven, where he “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” It’s often thought Paul was modestly referring to an experience he himself had. Whether that is the case matters not. What matters is the idea that some things are so sacred, that they cannot bear unveiling. Because we live in a culture where mystery has lost its value, where to hide something is often thought of as merely repressive, we don’t understand this idea of “the sacred.” We seem to have accepted the fashionable idea that all things once thought sacred and mysterious—sexuality most notably—must be freed from their mystery and “sanctity.” But in most cultures throughout history the opposite has been true. Most cultures have a pronounced reverence for the sacred, which they veil out of deepest reverence and respect.

  BEYOND DEATH

  There have recently been a spate of books about people going to Heaven, people who have seemingly slipped the bonds of Earth and flown to that other world—and then returned to tell us about it. It’s an astounding claim, but these accounts don’t come across as fanciful fictions. What are we to make of them? One of these accounts, in the book Heaven is for Real, was even produced as a major motion picture, about a four-year-old boy who seems to have visited Heaven. In the months following he tells his parents many extraordinary things they know to be true and that he couldn’t possibly have made up. Oddly enough, the three accounts besides this one that leap to mind on this subject are all stories told by medical doctors. One, titled To Heaven and Back, tells the story of an orthopedic surgeon who dies in a terrible kayaking accident. Another, titled Proof of Heaven, tells the story of a brain surgeon who dies and returns. And finally, Raising the Dead: A Doctor Encounters the Miraculous tells of a Palm Beach heart surgeon whose prayer over a corpse raised the man back to life.

  Actually visiting Heaven is the sort of miracle that makes things like healings seem almost pedestrian. As I thought about writing this book, I recalled the miracle stories I had heard from so many friends, but I knew of no one who claimed to have visited Heaven. But while I was writing this book I took a trip to Grand Rapids, and there, at a gathering in my friend Sharon’s home, I met a man who had indeed visited Heaven. His name is Andrew DeVries, and he is a regional gift officer at Calvin College, though at the time of his story he was a professor there. In talking to him I realized that I already knew his wife, Kay. She and I first connected on a Bonhoeffer tour I led in Berlin two years ago, when she and Sharon and some other friends went around Berlin with me, to all of the Bonhoeffer sites. Of course Kay had mentioned her husband to me, but she had not mentioned his amazing story. But now here I was hearing it from the man himself.

  I should say that like nearly everyone in Grand Rapids—or so it seems to me—Andy is Dutch, and like all Dutch men, he is tall and fair-haired. But unlike all others I’ve ever met, he has visited Heaven and returned to tell us about it. I don’t remember how it came up in our conversation, but as soon as he started telling me the story I knew it had to be in this book.

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bsp; The story begins with a horrific motorcycle accident. In 2002, Andy was taking a motorcycle trip with a friend of his, Jene Vredevoogd, who is, of course, Dutch. They were traveling through Holland, Michigan—which is even more Dutch than Grand Rapids—driving east on Thirty-Second Street, when an eighty-four-year-old woman ran a red light on Highway 31. Her bumper crushed Andy’s leg against the motorcycle’s engine, almost pulverizing the leg. It was broken in more than forty places and the car struck with such force that almost all the flesh was separated from the bone. It was ghastly. If Andy survived—and this was indeed a big if—he would probably lose the leg.

  Before the accident, Andy had been an accomplished athlete. He played many sports well, but he played volleyball so especially well that he was part of a team that won the USA Open Volleyball Championship in 2000. This led him to try out for a team representing the states of Michigan and Indiana in the Masters Olympics of 2002. In fact, the tryout for that took place just two weeks before this accident.

  Andy recalled the moments following the horrific crash. He said that he was flying through the air, seemingly suspended in time. Time seemed to stop and he felt peaceful—and then everything sped up as his right shoulder smashed through the car’s windshield. He then bounced off the hood and onto the highway, where the car then ran over his other leg. His friend Jene, thinking quickly, immediately positioned his motorcycle to block traffic and called 911. The ambulance arrived fairly soon, but as the emergency workers prepared to carry Andy into the ambulance, Jene objected. Fearing his friend had suffered a head injury, he insisted they use a backboard to transport him. They did, and Andy now believes this may have saved his life.

  When they got to the Holland hospital, the doctors were simply unprepared to deal with Andy’s extensive and life-threatening injuries, so he was immediately airlifted to Spectrum Hospital in Grand Rapids. There, one of the finest orthopedic surgeons was waiting. It would take a superb surgeon to deal with the situation. Most of the ligaments around Andy’s knee had been severed, so his kneecap was literally up near his hip. In the emergency room that evening they reconstructed his knee and pulled ligaments down from his groin to reattach it. A titanium rod was then inserted to keep everything in place.