George Ritchie experienced an NDE in 1943. He was one of the first to testify to it, as early as the 1950s. Here are some short extracts from his book Return from Tomorrow.
I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m just telling you what I’ve seen. And I have no idea what the next life will be like. What I saw was only from the doorway, so to speak. But it was enough to totally convince me of two things from that moment on:
Firstly, our consciousness does not end with physical death – in fact, it becomes sharper and more aware than ever;
Secondly, the way we spend our time on earth, the kind of relationships we build, is infinitely more important than we think.
A Being of Light
I then saw that it wasn’t light but a man who had entered the room. Or rather a man made of light, even if that seemed impossible. I stood up and felt the astonishing certainty that you were in the presence of the Son of God. Once again, the concept seemed to form in me, but not as a thought or speculation. It was a kind of knowledge, immediate and complete. This person was power itself. Above all, with that same mysterious inner certainty, I knew that this man loved me.
Unconditional love
Even more than power, what emanated from this Presence was unconditional love. An astonishing love. A love that surpassed anything I could have imagined. This love knew everything that was unlovable about me: the quarrels with my mother-in-law, my explosive temper, the sexual thoughts I could never control, every mean, selfish thought and action since the day I was born. Yet he accepted and loved me in the same way.
When I say that He knew everything about me, it was simply an observable fact. Indeed, in this room, along with His radiant presence, had entered all the episodes of my life. Everything that had ever happened to me was simply there, in plain sight, all seemingly unfolding at that very moment.
Every detail of twenty years of life was there to be seen. The good, the bad, the highlights, the highs and the lows. With this global vision came a question. It was implicit in every scene and, like the scenes themselves, seemed to come from the living Light at my side.
What have you done with your life?
What have you done with your life? This was obviously not a question in the sense that he was looking for information. For what I had done with my life was clearly visible. In any case, this total, detailed and perfect recall came from Him, not from me. I couldn’t have remembered a tenth of what was there before He showed it to me.
What have you done with your life? This question seemed to be about values, not facts. What did you do with the precious time you had? With this question as a backdrop, the ordinary events of a fairly typical childhood seemed not just unexciting, but trivial. Had I done nothing lasting, nothing important? Desperately, I looked around for something that might have seemed worthwhile in the light of this blazing Reality. There were no spectacular sins, just the sexual complexes and secretiveness of most teenagers. But if there were no horrible depths, there were no peaks either. There was only an endless, short-sighted preoccupation with myself. Had I never gone beyond my immediate interests, done anything that others would recognize as worthwhile?
Only I judge myself
I realized that it was I who judged the events around us so harshly. I was the one who considered them insignificant, egocentric, unimportant. The Light shining around me was not condemning me in this way. It wasn’t blaming me or reproaching me. It simply loved me.
He was waiting for my answer to the question that hung in the dazzling air. What have you done with your life to show me? I already understood that in my first frantic efforts to come up with an impressive answer, I had completely missed the mark. He wasn’t asking about achievements and rewards.
The only question is love
The question, like everything that comes from Him, had to do with love. How much have you loved in your life? Have you loved others as I love you? Totally? Unconditionally? When I heard this question, I realized that it made no sense to try to find an answer in the scenes around us. I didn’t know such love was possible.
Someone should have told me, I thought indignantly! This is a good time to discover what life is all about! Like when you arrive at a final exam and discover you’re going to be tested on a subject you’ve never studied. If that was the point of everything, why wasn’t I told?
But though these thoughts were born of self-pity and personal apology, the answer contained no rebuke, only that hint of heavenly laughter behind the words, I told you so. But how? I still wanted to justify myself. How could he have told me without my hearing? I told you by the life I’ve lived. I told you through my death. And if you keep your eyes on me, you’ll see even more.
And suddenly I realized that there was a common denominator to all these scenes so far. It is the inability to see Jesus. Whether it was physical appetite, earthly preoccupation, self-absorption – anything that stood in the way of His Light was separating me from Him.
How to integrate my experience: by loving in turn
[After his experience, George goes through a phase of depression, feeling empty and unhappy at no longer being in the presence of Jesus. He comes to wish he were dead, and is distressed that he remains alive while so many of his comrades are dying – we’re in the middle of a world war. He is assigned as a nurse in a field hospital and takes a liking to a wounded man named Jack].
I suddenly realized that there was no point in looking for him in the past, even if that past was only fifteen months old. I knew that afternoon that if I wanted to feel Christ’s closeness – and I wanted to above all else – I had to find it in the people He put in front of me every day. We had reached the castle grounds while these thoughts were swirling around in my head. We walked around the back; there was the tree stump on which I had sat, just over two weeks before, praying to be allowed to die. And suddenly I knew something else, on this day of new perspectives. That prayer had been answered.
Dying for a better life
In a way I’d never intended, I was well and truly dead. For the first time in many months, I had put aside my self-pity, my self-blame-all thoughts about myself-long enough to get involved with someone else. Jack’s injury and his recovery had been the only thing on my mind for the past two weeks. In caring for him, I’d lost sight of myself. And in losing myself, I’d discovered Christ. It was strange, I thought: I’d had to die, in Texas too, to see him. I wondered if we always had to die before we could see more of him.
Seeing Christ in everyone around me
It was then that I began to integrate my NDE into the rest of my life. I realized that the first step was to stop trying to find that vision of Jesus in another world, and start looking for him in the faces across the mess table. This wasn’t easy for a young soldier who had spent his whole life in a small town in the American South. Roman Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, I’d grown up thinking these people were not only different from me, they weren’t as good. So Jesus, in his mercy, placed me in this group of soldiers. He let me start with Jack because it was easy to see Christ in Jack.
But very quickly, I began to see Jesus in a Jew from New York, an Italian from Chicago, an African-American from Trenton. I discovered something else, which puzzled me at first. The more I learned to see Christ in others, the less upset I was by the death and suffering our unit was dealing with. You’d think it was the opposite: the more you discover love in people, the harder it is to see their pain. It was never easy, of course, but somehow it became bearable.
[George is then assigned to a unit that cares for survivors of a concentration camp. One of them attracts his attention because he appears to be in much better physical and psychological health than the others, even though he had entered the camp six years earlier. George asks him why. He tells the story].
Forgiving and loving to stay alive
He leaned back in his right chair and took a sip of his drink. We lived in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw,” he began slowly, the first words I heard him say about himself, “my wife, our two daughters and three little boys. When the Germans arrived on our street, they lined everyone up against a wall and opened fire with machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but as I spoke German, they put me in a work group. He pauses, perhaps seeing his wife and five children again.
I had to decide at that moment,” he continues, “whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done it. It was an easy decision. I was a lawyer. In my practice, I had seen too often what hatred could do to people’s minds and bodies.
Hate had just killed the six people in the world who meant the most to me. So I decided to spend the rest of my life – whether a few days or several years – loving every person I came into contact with.
Loving every person… that was the power that had kept one man healthy despite all hardship. It was the power I had first encountered during my NDE. I was gradually learning to recognize it wherever it chose to shine, whether the human vehicle was aware of it or not.
Our future is being built now
All I knew for sure, as I sat in the living room that evening, was that the time had come to start talking much more publicly than I had up to now about my encounter with Christ. If we really were entering the age of atomic power, without knowing the power that created it, then it was only a matter of decades before we destroyed ourselves and our earth.
It wasn’t enough for professional clergy to speak out. Everyone who had any experience of God, it seemed to me, had a responsibility. I, who could never string two words together, found myself speaking to youth groups, clubs, churches, anyone who would listen to the message that God is love, and everything else is hell.
God is busy building a race of men who know how to love. I believe that the fate of the earth itself depends on the progress we make, and that time is very short. As for what we’ll find in the next world, I believe that what we discover there will depend on our ability to love, here and now.
To find out more, visit the Wikipedia page on George Ritchie and watch a video about him.
