The Question the Old Man Was Asking

He had three minutes. Or the monitors said three minutes. From the inside — and he has never found language adequate to describe this, which is part of why he has told almost no one — there was no three minutes. There was no duration at all in the ordinary sense. There was presence. There was a quality of being known that was more complete than any experience of being known he had had inside ordinary time. There was something he can only describe as the present tense made total — not extended forward or backward, just fully, completely, actually now.

He came back to the monitors and the room and the people and the ordinary sequential structure of his own consciousness, and he has been living inside that structure for thirty more years, and the thing he brought back with him is not information about the geography of heaven. It is a datum about the nature of now. The present moment, the one he is in this morning in the folding chair in the Florida heat with the flag and the names and the narrowing arithmetic — this moment is not thin. It is not a knife-edge squeezed between the past and the future. It is the mode of existence that Augustine described as the eternal present, and it is available to the soul in Christ in every ordinary moment, and it is what waits on the other side of the boundary in its fullness.

The three minutes did not tell him how long the intermediate state lasts. They told him that the question of how long is the wrong question. The right question is what is there. And what is there is the one who is the eternal present — the I AM who is not before or after but simply and completely is, and in whose presence the soul that was made in His image discovers what it was made to be.

He can go home now. The ceremony is over. The afternoon is what Memorial Day becomes. And he is, in whatever way an eighty-one-year-old man in a folding chair can be said to be unafraid of what is coming, unafraid.

In the next chapter we go to Holy Saturday. We go to the main event.