Let’s pause for a moment as I want to note that this was NOT a claimed near death experience, it was a dream. An important distinction I think. Anyway, let’s continue…Earlier this evening, I read a few more pages in the book by Reggie Anderson, written with Jennifer Schuchmann, that I mentioned here a couple of days ago. It’s entitled Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013).
Dr. Anderson grew up in a quite believing Baptist family in rural Alabama, and he himself was religious until a terrible family tragedy destroyed his faith. He describes at some length how, when he was very young, he was exceptionally close to his relatives Jerry and Jimmy Alday in Georgia, typically spending summers with them raising fruit and transporting it to market and helping them with their sales both. They were good men and devout Christians. The family tragedy is what he calls the “Alday Massacre” but what Wikipedia labels the “Alday family murders.”
Three convicts escaped from prison in Maryland in May 1973, picking up a fourth person on their eventually way to Florida. First, though, they killed a nineteen-year-old man in Pennsylvania in order to steal his car. Then they headed south. Near Donalson, Georgia, in Seminole County, they murdered six members of the Alday family – five men (Jerry, Ned, Jimmy, Chester, and Aubrey Alday) and one woman (Mary Alday), whom they raped repeatedly before killing her.
The young Reggie Anderson spent the next seven years not only rejecting the existence of a deity who could have prevented those appallingly brutal murders but didn’t, but also — paradoxically but, in psychological terms, understandably — feeling bitter anger toward God. During his first year of medical school, though, in (of all places!) his Gross Anatomy class, he began to dimly sense the remarkable complexity of the human body and, from that, to intuit the existence of a designer.
However, it’s an extraordinarily vivid dream that he has while camping in the woods during a break from his medical studies that really turns him around. He recounts the dream on pages 79-83:
I opened my eyes to the most fantastical countryside imaginable: everything was vivid and radiant. All of my senses were finely tuned, like I had awakened in some enhanced version of reality. In front of me, a picturesque meadow was filled with vibrantly colored wildflowers. Pops of yellow, orange, red, blue, and indigo swayed with the breeze like living rainbows. The green was the lushest green I’d ever laid eyes on; the hue so saturated, it seemed like a new color to me. The spender before me was stunning! . . .
I inhaled the most fragrant scent, so light and pleasing — like a mixture of citrus and lilac . . . (79)
Everything felt so real, more intense and tangible than my ordinary life. My senses seemed to awaken and open like a flower to the sun. I could see, hear, touch, smell, and feel things as never before. I didn’t feel like I was in a dream; I felt like this was the real life I’d always been searching for. This was more real than my life. (80; italics in the original)
Whoa! What? He met Jesus? Peterson goes on to explain. Or rather, he doesn’t. Peterson doesn’t go further. Why not? Intrigued I searched for what Reggie Anderson himself had to say on the matter.Those who are familiar with accounts of near-death experiences will be familiar with the reported hyper-reality of the dream and with the description of lush and even unfamiliar colors. And those who read the passage that I cited two days ago will now recognize the significance of his reference to “the familiar fragrance of lilac and citrus.”
More importantly, though, he says that he saw Jimmy, Jerry, Mary, Ned, Chester, and Aubrey Alday, who had been viciously murdered in Georgia in 1973. And they looked happy and unscarred. They belonged where they were, and they were joyful.
More importantly still, though, Dr. Anderson believes that he met Jesus. And he when he emerged from his dream, he was a Christian.
I found this interview transcript
Why did Peterson stop short of explaining the details of Reggie Anderson’s first vision where Jesus appeared to him? Does Peterson believe that Reggie Anderson actually saw Jesus in a vision, just like Joseph claims (retrospectively) to have done? If not, why not? In what way or ways is Reggie Anderson’s account less valid than Joseph’s? How can a non Priesthood holder meet with Jesus? The dilemma is, that if you discount Reggie Anderson’s visitation with Jesus you just then discount the rest of it as merely a dream. And if that is merely a dream, then the marked parallel of its content to NDE’s places the latter in the realm of dreams rather than experiences.After a day of hiking, he did some reading and fell into a deep sleep, finding himself in a dream like no other. His senses took on the kind of otherworldly qualities you hear about in near-death encounters, like ultrasaturated colors and aromatic scents. Suddenly the family that had been killed appeared to him. “They didn’t speak with words,” Anderson says, but they somehow communicated to him they were in a world of paradise and had no regrets.
And then came the ultimate healing. Like a father welcoming his prodigal son into his arms, Jesus appeared as a brilliant presence with an ageless and raceless form. Everything about Him radiated love and warmth. Without speaking, He beckoned Anderson near and told him about his future.
At dawn, Anderson was still laying on the ground next to the campfire.
“I woke up, and I was completely different,” he says.
He felt humbled. The mysterious dream not only sealed his faith, but it also cleansed him of his anger and made him desire more of God.
“Dreams don’t always change your life,” he says. “[But] this was a Damascus Road event. It actually changed the chemistry of my spirit.”
I would suggest that this is a stronger witness of Jesus than anything any modern LDS Apostle has ever tried to muster. Reggie was bold and declared his personal witness of Jesus in unequivocal terms, and used a direct experience with Jesus. He’s either closer to Jesus than Oaks & Co. or he’s mistaken about what happened and it was just a dream. Either way it’s bad news for LDS apologetics.Yet over the years, the sensations Anderson experienced in his dream have come back in his medical practice, particularly as patients cross the veil between life and death. Sights, aromas, temperature changes—“each time is different,” he says.
The first time Anderson attended a patient who died, he says he felt a warm sensation move through the cold hospital room as the man took his last breath. Then he noticed a momentary soft glow above and to the right of the man’s body, and he felt a “deep sense of peace and an embracing comfort,” he says.
Since then, Anderson has felt that warm presence many times with dying patients.
