Tennyson’s bar

Aunt Esther was dying. Breast cancer had taken her down to a shadow, and for nearly two weeks, she’d lain in her San Diego home in a hospice bed, neither eating nor drinking. I sat at Esther’s bedside with my mother-in-law, Hazel.

Esther was Hazel’s aunt, and Hazel prayed and talked with her, remembering old times. But Esther had lapsed into silence a few days before, and she lay completely unresponsive.

Then, suddenly, her breathing changed. “Cheyne-Stokes respiration,” doctors call it—faster, deeper breaths, then shallow ones, or none at all. Cheyne-Stokes is an indication of active dying. It was almost time, in Tennyson’s maritime metaphor, for Esther to “cross the bar.”

Sunset and evening star,
 And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea …

I had brought my Bible, and something—Someone?—prompted me to begin reading from Revelation 21: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

We weren’t worried about Esther’s soul: At 71, she’d long been a strong believer. Now, the Bible’s most detailed description of heaven streamed forth into a supernatural quiet, a heralding hush at the holy threshold just this side of the Veil. I believe that’s where Aunt Esther was in those moments, her spirit hovering between dimensions.

That day in 1997 was one of the many times I’ve felt I could simply stretch out my hand and touch the Veil. That if I did, faint capillary waves might ripple out, as if I’d tossed a small stone into a still pond. On this side, shadows and copies. On the other, a far green country I desperately want to see, but can’t.

Have you ever felt that way? C.S. Lewis called this our great longing. Trapped in earthly tents, our souls pine “to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality.”

The only time I ever told anyone I feel so close to the Veil, it was by phone, and when I finished, I heard two too many beats of silence on the other end of the line. I filled the gap with embarrassed laughter and reassurances about the state of my mental health.

I’m not embarrassed anymore. Like an ice bath thrown in my face, Charlie Kirk’s death reminded me there is no such thing as “this life” and “the next.” It is, in fact, all one life with just that threshold—Tennyson’s bar—where we shed our battered tents and acquire sudden, brilliant, vivid sight.

Of course, such sight will for many produce instant horror, and the realization that those annoying Christians were right all along. But for those on the narrow path, that sight will bring fireworks of unimaginable joy. We will see Christ, dazzling, like “the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1); people we recognize, with resurrection bodies, imperishable and glorious (Matthew 17; 1 Corinthians 15); and flowing from the throne of the Father and Son, “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal … also, on either side of the river, the tree of life … [its] leaves for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22).

We evangelize meagerly, I think, when we promise an unbeliever they’ll “go to heaven” in exchange for a profession of faith. It’s like Michael Behe’s conception of the living cell as “Darwin’s black box.” Darwin was wrong about the origins of life because he lacked the technology to see inside the cell. Similarly, heaven is a plain cardboard box of a word if the unbeliever can’t see the glories inside. We must do better. We must tell them.

Aunt Esther already knew. I continued reading: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more … for the former things have passed away.”

I looked up from the page and saw Esther’s tears. She, who’d gone silent days before, was hearing God’s Word! Though she’d had no water for nearly two weeks, droplets on her cheeks sparkled with joy!

A few minutes later, Aunt Esther crossed over to meet her Savior:

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
 The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.