CHRISTCHURCH, NZ — Russ Woolcock did not believe in God or an afterlife, and had no time for Christians or the Church. So when this Christchurch businessman “died”, he got a huge shock to discover that that was not the end.
Russ Woolcock was not brought up in a Christian family. He saw religion as a delusion.
“If you asked”, he says, “I could explain very clearly how people create religious beliefs, and create God in a leap of faith. All power to them, but it doesn’t make it true.
“I believed that religion was a pack of twaddle. Life is, I thought, a difficult process – it’s like walking through a foggy valley, miry underfoot. You can come under artillery barrages at any moment, the ground can give way under your feet, it’s a vale of tears, it’s hard.
“Our existence is purely random, I thought. I know that religious people make up some guff about a reward that you get after you’re dead, which can’t proved one way or the other, but blatantly that can’t be true, there’s no sense in any of that.
“Essentially, we don’t know why we’re here. All we can do is try to make it palatable.
“For me, there were two things that made life delightful. The first is human love. If you love and you are loved, a light shines in the darkness, your feet are lifted out of the mire. I am such a lucky man. I am a happy, happy loved man.
“The other thing is the truth. I was wedded to the truth. I was the little boy who proclaimed the emperor had no clothes on. I know what happens to little boys who tell people the emperor’s got no clothes, but it didn’t stop me. I made myself extremely unpopular often by pointing out the truth.”
Mr Woolcock says he believed these things for close on 50 years. Consequently, he expected that when he died, absolutely nothing would happen. That all changed 10 years ago, just a few weeks short of his 50th birthday.
Some major home renovations coincided with a slack period in his business, so he stayed home to help the builder.
“I was having some chest pains and ignored them. I got a bit behind with the work, so on the Monday morning I tore into things because I had a lot to get through. It was cold, and I did all the things you shouldn’t.”
The result was a heart attack, not particularly serious he thought. “But I was home alone, the phone was out of the wall, so it was a major battle to get help, and it used up more resources than I had. Before the help arrived, I died.
“I have been several states of non-consciousness in the past. I have been concussed, fainted, anaethetised, hypnotised, I was a master of transcendental meditation, I once had an injection of morphine in hospital so I know what a drug rush is like.
“But this was different. I was dead. There is a finality about death. It announces itself. There is no mistaking it. All my concentration was becoming focused on my breaths and heart beat. They were becoming less and less frequent, and the last one was identifiable.
“When it became clear to me what was happening, I was very angry. ‘It’s too early,’ I thought. I’ve got things to do and quite frankly this isn’t on my list’.
“But then I went inert. One of the nice things about dying – I don’t know whether it’s true for everybody – but you have no power over it. Whether you are frightened or angry is irrelevant.
“When the last heartbeat had gone, I was aware of a couple of things. First, I was aware that I was aware, which came as a shock. And that puzzled me, because I was expecting nothing. I wasn’t expecting any kind of existence. The other thing was that I had no body.
“I had never been particularly interested in near-death experiences, and never read any books. But I had heard about two things : one was seeing your body and the other was going down a tunnel, and neither of those happened to me.
“It’s hard to describe what happened after that because all our language is inadequate. It’s another world, and language just doesn’t go there.
“I was aware of being moved, or the environment changed around me. There was no sense of motion. I was aware of incredibly intense light, but unlike the sun it was not unpleasant to experience because there was no sight involved.
“I became aware I was in a different environment, but it was oddly familiar in some way. Concepts like time and space were totally different. Past, present and future were identical. Place was the same – specific and everywhere at the same time.
“It was a place with identity, but I have no idea what its name was. I’m not making any claims about it being heaven, I don’t know.
“But I wasn’t too interested in the place ; I was riveted by the people, because the people who met me were my family – my late parents and my late sister, and a host of other identities.
“All I knew about the latter was that they knew me intimately well, but who they were I don’t know. There was a strong sense of love from them.
“There was no conversation as such. No words were used, but meaning and intention were crystal clear.
“But then they became almost became secondary because I became aware of this father heart. I was just riveted by this, the overwhelming sense of love. This vibrant love was unbelievable.
“Because of its creative nature, it was clearly my Maker, and it was clear that this is what we refer to as God.
“I had no conversation with God, and I am not making any claim of being in God’s presence. What I can say is that I knew I was palpably in the presence of God, though not face to face.
“The thing I was most aware of was that at the very centre of creation is this overwhelming, overpowering, colossal, extravagant, amazing, radiating love.
“This might not be a shock to people of faith, but to someone of no faith it was a stunning surprise. There’s not nothing – there’s love. Not just any old love, love of a magnitude and a type way beyond our comprehension, beyond our imagining, way beyond my ability to describe, and certainly way beyond whatever we could have made up.
“This ran counter to everything I had believed. It was all novel to me. I had never died before. I was flabbergasted.
”About that stage it was decided I could return, because I had things to do. I didn’t have any part in the conversation, I didn’t express any opinion one way or the other. I was just slack-mouthed – it was very like being a baby again.
“I wanted to stay, but I had a strong sense of responsibility to my family. I didn’t want them to come home and find me dead on the floor. That was noted and respected.”
Mr Woolcock says it was a wrench coming back, not because of pain, but because he had seen the glory and it was not there any more.
“From the time I regained consciousness to the time the ambulance guys arrived there was a mix of relief and desolation. It was rather like Cinderella the morning after the ball but magnified.”
Despite the intensity of the experience, he never told anybody of it for some years, even his wife, thinking he would not be believed. It is only lately he has started speaking publicly about it.
But while he was relieved to be back with his family, inside he mourned. “In the presence of that love, you would never want to be out of that again. I wanted that every day – I wanted God in my life every day.”
He says he tried every philosophy and every religion, but none took him there. The one thing he did not try was the Christian faith, because he had not equated the experience particularly with Jesus.
“It was scriptural, I have since realised, but not recognisably Christian. There was no Jesus figure.
“I thought I could discount Christianity because I had tried that. It was about superficial, pompous, liturgical, theological backwaters, and too complex, too much tied up with power and politics.”
However, six years ago a friend noticed that Mr Woolcock was spiritually troubled, and started reading John’s Gospel to him.
“When he got to the verse, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’, it all just clicked into place. I opened my heart to the Lord Jesus, and that love was immediately back.
“It felt like a tongue of flame on the day of Pentecost. I was consumed by heat – I have never felt so hot.
“I had always regarded Jesus in the traditional humanist way, as a historical figure, a great guy, wise teacher and all that sort of stuff.
“But when I spotted his divinity, I knew it was true, that he is the bridge. There is no other way we could possibly approach God.”
Mr Woolcock says not everything about his experience lines up with traditional evangelical theology, which he finds a challenge - for instance, the fact that his parents were there, who to the best of his knowledge never professed any Christian beliefs.
However, he says he is not suggesting that people can live their lives without any consideration of God and then expect to enter heaven. “It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to be ready.
“When you accept a gift, a key part is to recognise the giver. The gift is available to us only through an unbelievable sacrifice. You have to acknowledge the giver and the sacrifice. If you don’t do that, if you deride that, ignore that, you can’t expect to get the gift.
“One thing I absolutely believe is that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. You would have to be a wilful idiot to turn your back on that.
“There are probably such people, but I can’t understand how anyone would prefer an eternity of misery rather than living basking in that love and returning it.
“Some of what I know is slightly challenging to theology, but nothing happened to me that’s not in the Bible, and that came as a great surprise and delight.
“The Bible was a totally closed book, a work of fiction, as far as I was concerned. But it’s not fiction – every word of it is inspired, every word has meaning and purpose. What an arrogant berk I was – I feel so repentant. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“What I learned was this : far from being a random organism swimming through an ocean of blind chance, it turned out I am the beloved child of the creator God who made me for his purpose.”
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