by R.P. Burnham
Harold's long life of rebirth began after he died. It happened like this: he was swimming in the cold Atlantic on a steamy August day when a boat driven by a drunken teenager came too close to shore and struck him in the head. The blow caused him to lose consciousness and sink below the waves where he drowned. Nobody noticed him because for several minutes the beach was in chaos. People scattered, mothers gathered their children together, another man who was slightly injured by the boat was attended to, the teenager got into a yelling match with a man whose child had almost been hit. It was only after things settled down a bit that Harold's absence was noticed. The lifeguard, who had been in the process of bandaging the wounded man, stopped what he was doing, screamed at the woman who had informed him of Harold's absence, and dove into the water. The waves had already washed Harold's body in toward shore, so the lifeguard found him quickly. Frantically he hauled him up unto the beach and began trying to restart the heart with blows to the chest and administering mouth to mouth resuscitation. Twice the heart fluttered then died before a pulse, at first weak and then stronger, began. The crowd of hundreds of people, gathered round in a tight circle to watch, cheered the lifeguard when Harold began breathing on his own.
All during this time, from the point where the boat had struck him until the point where his eyes flickered open, Harold was absent, having gone on the most extraordinary journey of his life. After a moment of confusion he experienced a strangely liberating floating sensation, and yet he could feel that he was going immensely fast, speeding as if in a tunnel of billowy and many-colored clouds through billions of miles of time and space. During this time, which was not time in any earthly sense, he relived and recollected every single experience of his life. He remembered every kind deed he had done, every happy event in his life, and equally every act where he found himself wanting, where he knew he could have done better, and on the whole he felt his life was incomplete and unsatisfactory. Before he could feel any regret for the wine spilled in the lost times, he found himself in the presence of a stupendously bright light, brighter than ten million suns, and yet it did not hurt to look at it. On the contrary, the light radiated the most wondrously warm and energetic love. Never had Harold felt so much at peace and so abundantly drenched in overpowering security. He felt he had come home to his ultimate home, for no love and no warmth and no peace on earth could be anything but a remote shadow of this love, this warmth, this peace. Harold knew he was in the presence of Love itself, the mighty creator of the universe, and though in life he had never been a religious man at all, this knowledge did not surprise him. Of course, he thought to himself. Of course it should be so. More slowly he became aware of other beings in the periphery of Love, and slower still he recognized some of them as people he had known who were on earth dead and gone. Nobody spoke and yet communication was perfect and unfettered. His father told him he was not ready yet, that his work was incomplete. Harold resisted this message even though he felt it to be true, but looking for permission from the Being of Light to stay forever, he learned that here the truth could not be hidden. Before he could even struggle to remain, he felt weight sinking him down, he felt pain and began coughing and gagging, he opened his eyes to see the lifeguard crouching by his side with an intense look of relief on his face, he knew he was back in the land of the living and he felt sad.
This happened during a company picnic which Harold's wife and children had been unable to attend. So intensely private was the experience, so vivid and overwhelming, that Harold chose not to share it with any of his workmates, but as soon as he saw his wife after his hospital examination he told her everything. She was a religious person and had often tried to get Harold to go to church with her. "It was Jesus," she said confidently."The light was Jesus."
Harold thought not. He felt that while Jesus may have come from the Being of Light, something told him the light and love was universal and God of all religions. He didn't have to go to church, he knew, to be reborn. He already was reborn. If the most telling immediate effect of the experience was the certain knowledge that never again would he fear death, still it was inaccurate to say any particular thing changed more than another in Harold's life, for in truth everything had changed and changed completely. No longer existed the old tentative Harold groping after belief and wondering, when he could rise above his problems enough to wonder, what the point of his life was. He became a Gott betrunkener Mensch, searching for God everywhere. The leaves would rustle, revealing their pale olive green undersides, and Harold would look there for God. The sunlight would catch his child's brown hair and make it radiate gold, and for a moment Harold would see again the light of Love. He would listen to his favorite music and in the sonorities of a sweet violin or the soaring voice of a soprano he would catch the sound of God. But why enumerate examples when everything he did and everywhere he went reminded him of God? During the year that followed his death Harold read everything he could get his hands on on after-death experience. He found that in every important detail his experience fit the universal one of all who had traveled to the land of death and returned. And though he did not need such confirmation, this knowledge pleased him very much.
If there was any dark underside to his continual joy, it was a vague, unarticulated dissatisfaction with the imperfect earth. His work, for example, now seemed trivial and unimportant to him, and yet before his death and return he had channeled all his energy into ambition. Now a job was simply the means of procuring daily bread. And there was something else. He loved his wife and children just as much as before, perhaps even more, but the love he bore them and the love they returned was such a pale shadow of the love he'd felt in the presence of the cosmos that he couldn't hide from himself a detachment and indifference to the earth. Perhaps he even forgot what his father had told him while he was enthralled by the light of Love-- that his work on earth was incomplete.
And so he lived, and so all his thoughts abided deep in the faraway cosmos, and so the world where people strove to live a human life and struggled to find joy seemed unreal to him.
III.
Harold and Elroy (The Synthesis)
