my testimony

"The Lord himself... will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them... (1 Thessalonians 4:17-17)

"... the trump will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed..."

"I will go on the visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ, who fourteen years ago -- In the body? I do not know. Out of the body? I do not know. God knows (that I am not lying). -- such an one snatched away as far as the Third Heaven. And I know such an one -- In the body or without any body? I do not know. God knows (that I am not lying). -- snatched away into Paradise." (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)

A great spiritual gift has been given to me, a special revelation. And in my weakness, I feel called to testify to what I have learned through offering a fresh interpretation of St. Paul's revelation of "a man in Christ... snatched away into Paradise." I know this will sound like an astonishing claim, but for the sake of clarity, I will say it as directly and simply as I am able: I think I know the type of revelatory experience Paul was speaking of because I think I have been given one like it.

I offer my testimony as a kind of "wisdom, secret and hidden" (1 Cor. 2:6) as it relates to of St. Paul's teaching on "death" and "resurrection." Let us begin with "death." In Paul's words, the body that dies, the "perishable" body is characterized by "dishonor," and "weakness." (1 Cor. 15:42) The body that dies is "the image of the man of dust" (15:49). As "flesh and blood," the body that dies "cannot inherit the Kingdom of God." Paul writes, "...in this tent we groan... we groan under our burden, because we do not wish to be unclothed" (2 Cor 5:2,4). As a thirty-three year old student of the New Testament, I thought I had some sense of the meaning of mortality as St. Paul understood it, but in the moment before the experience of being "snatched away," my mortal condition was "unclothed" as never before, and what I felt was not a feeling I would have wished for, that is an understatement -- it was sheer horror being at the point of unveiled awareness of the "death" that stings (1 Cor. 15:55), "in the body" undoubtedly and painfully "away from the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:6). I felt like groaning as never before, but I was unable to breathe -- my pneuma, my wind, breath, spirit, was knocked out of me.

As I lay in bed, flat on my back in the night, breathless and in horror, the change came. It came so suddenly that in the first moment it gave me a feeling of sheer, distilled terror -- it felt like my body was literally being levitated up from the bed by some terrible force. The word Paul uses for being "snatched away" is harpazo. The Septuagint, (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that Paul used), employed the word harpazo to refer to what thieves do -- they "snatch" things away, against the will of their owners. That connotation of unwilling terrifying abduction by a thief at the moment of being "snatched away" (1 Thes. 4:17) comes through in a saying that Paul repeats: "...the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." (1 Thes. 5:2). Similarly, he compares the change to a "destruction" that comes like sudden labor pains, and from which "there will be no escape" (1 Thes. 5:3). My immediate reflexive body reaction was to struggle with every bit of strength in me to flail my arms and to sit up in order to escape. The effort was useless.

In the next fraction of a second, recognizing my utter weakness in the face of this overwhelming power, I surrendered. In the moment of surrender, hellish terror turned to heavenly bliss. In his account of his revelation of being "snatched away," Paul points to this sense of being taken bodily -- "In the body? I do not know." The unmistakable feeling within was of being taken "in the body." When it comes to legends of levitation, and myths of bodily ascension, I was and still am a modernist, I do not take the stories literally, but in that moment, the inner bodily felt sense was so convincing, it made even me wonder.

My eyes were blinded by a bright light. My ears were deafened by a rushing sound like wind. My skin was made insensible to the sheets that would have somewhat impeded a literal ascent, made insensible by what seemed like a vibrating explosion of powerful light like fire -- "fire" was my first thought -- like blazing bonfire in force and brightness, but without the searing heat. The "fire" came from within but seemed to extend beyond my skin.

Like Paul who asked, "In the body?" I felt like I was being snatched away "in the body" and I wondered what was actually happening. Also with Paul, who said "I do not know," I did not know what was happening. I was not in a position to assess with my outer senses what was actually happening from an objective point of view. While I was in that phase, I was reminded of the biblical story of the bodily translation of Elijah into heaven. As the story goes, Elijah was taken in a in a chariot of fire and horses of fire and he ascended "in a whirlwind" into heaven (2 Kings 2:11). Likewise, my experience gave the sense of "fire," the sound of "wind," the feeling of ascending, and the sense of it being heavenly and it gave an account of a bodily disappearance.

Whatever was happening, I was convinced that I was departing life as I had known it. I wanted to say some parting words to my wife. Since I still felt like I was "in the body" I tried to cry out with my physical voice. No sound came out, but in terms of evidence of still being "in the body" I was successful in one small aspect: I felt my physical jaw go slack.

However, in the instant of my jaw going slack, there was a distinct inner sensation of floating up and away from the physicality of my body. There was a feeling of weightlessness. My inner senses were telling me quite clearly that I was "out of the body." But Like Paul who asked, "Out of the body?" and then said, "I do not know," I too had an I-do-not-know puzzlement. The inner sensation was unmistakably of being "out of the body," but my critical mind was not decided about what was actually happening.

Perhaps one reason why Paul does not elaborate the feelings is that the sensation was notably, and perhaps for him, embarrassingly like the pleasure of sexual union and orgasm. The fact that there was no sensation of skin was in no way in impediment to this pleasure, indeed, the absence of skin felt like a liberation, enabling a surpassing experience of the essence of such pleasure without any of the awkwardness of physicality. Surely this is one aspect of what it means to call the ascent heavenly. There was a feeling of reward or compensation so dramatically more wonderful than ever before, just a moment in time seemed like a compensation for a lifetime of waiting. There was no need to have any thought of the future for this was "it." It was, in the language of a benediction in Ephesians, "infinitely more than all we can ask or imagine."

When Paul discusses the contrast between earthly bodies and heavenly bodies in relation to the body of death and the resurrection body, he distinguishes three types of heavenly bodies: "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars..."

That sequence fits with the "glory" of the ascent. The first stage, the "In the body?" stage, was the brightest, most fiery, most physically blinding "glory," like an inner "sun." The second stage, The "Out of body?" stage, was a softer brightness, and less fiery glory, like an inner moon.

And then there was a third phase that had no perceptible brightness or light, but also no sense of absence that the word darkness sometimes suggests. It was a heavenly darkness of sheer bliss. The third phase, the phase of darkness, was also different from the first two in that there was no more pleasure harkening back to the pleasure of bodily orgasm. But as with the absence of light being in no way a deprivation, the passing of orgasmic pleasure was likewise in now way a loss. Every moment was its own reward, and there was no loss, nothing to hope for.

Paul's language suggests that the "Third Heaven" was the upper limit of the ascent: "I know a man snatched AS FAR AS the Third Heaven." So it was with me, there were three distinct heavenly stages, the brightness of sun, and the feeling of being snatched bodily, the brightness of moon, and the feeling of being snatched out of the body, and then the third phase of heavenly darkness and release from pleasure. In that phase there was still a sense of ascending upward, a sense of motion, but that third phase is "as far as" the sense of motion persisted. After that third heavenly phase, there was consumate stillness that I take to be what Paul calls "Paradise" the resting place, the "sleep" of the blessed dead.

Experientially, the transition from the third heavenly phase ascent to the phase of ultimate stillness was going from alert consciousness, and lucid thought, to something like deep sleep. But it was different from deep sleep not only in how it was entered (it was the climax of a three step heavenly ascent) but also it was different from deep sleep in how it felt "awakening" -- there was no groggy phase.

The first perception of awakening completes Paul's sequence of there analogous heavenly bodies, indeed, it was the most remarkably apt analogous sensation -- the first perception was "in the twinkling of an eye" (Cor. 15:52) seeing a point of light in a field of darkness up above. The point of light splayed out in to several streams of light on the black background. The light was like a star, and like shooting stars. The analogy came to mind early in my interpretive process, long before I linked it to Paul's discussion of heavenly bodies.

The next sensation after "seeing the star" was of being "in the body" -- the obviously same physical body I had before being snatched away, and it was in the same place as before, in my case, I was in bed, positioned on my back. The sheets were just as before, confirming the modernist assumption that there had been no literal bodily levitation. But the body awareness that accompanied this return was in stark contrast to the awareness of death that preceded being snatched away. This body awareness was indeed glorious -- there was an inwardly perceptible luminosity, and a sparkliness, as if the field of light in and around the body were made of thousands of starry sparks. There was a sense of floating, but without any feeling of defying gravity. It was just that the skin and flesh did not seem weighted down. Instead of a feeling deprived of pneuma (breath/spirit), breathing was effortless and with no sense of lacking anything. While on one had, it was the same body, on the other hand, given that the last sensation was of entering paradisiacal deep sleep by way of a three tiered ascent, there was a sense of being beamed down from the star above -- indeed, it was like having become a star-like heavenly body on earth. The mind felt empowered for discenment, but was, in that first awakening, utterly free of content. There was a remarkable absence of any sense of desire.

Paul writes; "...we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee." Coming out of Paradise sleep into a kind of personal paradise of earth fits with the notion of being "further clothed." It was the same body but with none of that horrible sense of being stripped naked before one's own mortal limitations. There was a feeling of being given a whole new life, a life enveloped in spirit, indeed given a "pneumatic body" -- powerful, honorable and being starlike, imperishable. But it was not a body stripped of "flesh and blood." Here the mixed language fits: "...this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

On the other hand, what if Paul and I had not come back from our ascents to our previous mortal bodies? Then we would have been with the dead, and in Paradise sleep. The logic of Paul using second person, and boasting about "a man in Christ" as distinct from himself, treats the man in Christ as a dead man who retired after death blessed rest in Paradise. That is why the third person language stops in Paradise without reference to the "perishable body" putting on "imperishability." Afterward Paul does speak of his own body as "power made perfect in weakness." But he emphasis is on the weakness side because the power side is a spiritual discernment made clear in "signs and wonders" and in the perception of those who no longer judge "according to the flesh."