Selections from Seminary

In the last several articles, I have written about the soul after death. Please do not just read what I have written. These are the sources I used, many of which you can read online. I can all but assure you that you will receive spiritual edification by reading any of these. Life of Venerable Theodora of Constantinople  - This is probably the best source, the most edifying, eye-opening, and likely to bring about the good fruit of repentance and prayer. Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation  - Read sections XII, XIII, and XIV. St. Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks  - Look for "Death of the holy bishop Salvius" (which is book 7, chapter 1). You will save time if you search the page for that phrase or maybe just "Salvius". On Earth We're Just Learning How to Live  by Archpriest Valentin Biryukov. Our family loves this book. We have used it as our lenten reading at least twice. Easy read, yet packed full of stories that will b...

Not too many years ago a book, Heaven Is for Real, came out about a three-year-old boy dying, going to heaven, and coming back to life. It certainly generated quite a lot of interest and has been widely read (and viewed, after being adapted into a movie). The story, retold by the boy’s father from what he gathered in conversations with his son, has received mixed reception. From my own perspective, it seems most folks are ready to receive it as a genuine experience, especially with some excellent proofs, like the boy seeing his mother and father in separate hospital rooms as he was dying on the surgical table, talking to a miscarried sister that his parents had never told him about, and recognizing a mid-life photo of his grandfather. (The soul looking on the situation of its own body immediately after death, is a very common thread...even in the story of a friend of my own.) A few folks, however, are quite vocal about their denouncements of the boy’s experience in heaven, mainly based...

Now...finally...we make it to one of the best examples to help bring clarity to our questions about what happens after we die. I have shared several warnings: warnings about those who were not dead for long and have limited knowledge of life after death, warnings that our preconceptions can cloud our reasoning in these matters, and warnings that we should not try to over-simplify such matters. All of those warnings still apply. We must be careful not to over-analyze any of these experiences. With that said, the experience related in the Life of Venerable Theodora of Constantinople is particularly useful to us. For one, she died (and stayed dead), her soul left her body, she traversed everything between here and place of her soul’s repose till the last day. The obvious question is how we know this story: she appeared to another spiritual child of her own spiritual father, who recorded it for our benefit. The second reason her particular experience is so useful, and why the Lord would ...

One of the first aspects of these after-death experiences that jumps out to the reader is how different they are from each other. How could they all be true, if they are so different? I am going to assume that all of those experiences passed down to us by saints are trustworthy, and yet, even among those, there are many differences. I find one point enlightening when it comes to these differences: St. Bede passes down three such stories to us , and those three are far from identical experiences. Bede is ok with the differences, and I would think that means we, too, can be ok with these differences. The validity of these experiences does not lie in their similarity, nor were they passed down with such an intention. The differences in St. Bede’s stories seem to be the main reason he recorded them. We need to keep something in mind, something similar to the angel’s response to one of the individuals in St. Bede’s accounts: “I began to think that this perhaps might be hell, of whose intol...