Journey between heaven and hell: a "near-death experience" (1971)

Summary:

One evening in July 1971, Anne-Marie Le Goff, a teacher, mother and pregnant with her sixth child, was driving along the road leading from Rennes (France, Ille-et-Vilaine), where she lives with her husband Yves and their five children, to Plougrescant (France, Côtes-d'Armor), where the couple have a vacation home. Yves followed her in a van carrying two of the children, their suitcases and the equipment they would need for the four-week holiday.

Just outside Paimpol (France, Côtes-d'Armor), a terrible thunderstorm broke out. Hailstones "as big as pigeon eggs" crashed onto the soggy, slippery ground. Anne-Marie couldn't see twenty metres ahead. She could no longer control her car. Behind her, her husband was also panicking. Suddenly, Anne-Marie's car swerved to avoid an obstacle: the passengers felt the impact. The expectant mother felt a pain inside. Yves, who had come to the rescue, told her not to give up hope and that they had to leave at all costs, otherwise the car would be submerged. They arrived at their house in the middle of the night. It had taken them more than four hours to cover less than two hundred kilometres.

The following night, Anne-Marie suffered a small haemorrhage, which worried her in her condition. After unloading the equipment, Yves returned to Rennes where his job awaited him. His wife knew that she would have to stay there for three weeks. She called a doctor, who assured her that everything was fine and that her unborn baby was doing wonderfully.

The following August 14, late in the afternoon, Anne-Marie nearly fainted with a strong and extremely serious loss of blood. She barely had the strength to call her children for help. These managed to call a doctor, who immediately sent her to the hospital in Tréguier (France, Côtes-d'Armor).

Her husband was immediately alerted and rushed to the hospital, but it was already too late. Anne-Marie, lying on the operating table, had just been declared "dead" by the anaesthetist. This was the beginning of an incredible experience for her, the main stages of which are described below:

Anne-Marie reviewed her entire life. This is a phenomenon that has been perfectly identified in the context of NDEs. This life review isn't just a recalling of the major events of her life, but the totality of the facts, both material and moral, that had marked her life from birth to 1971: each of them was "judged", not by human justice, but by an incredible love.

While the vast majority of NDEs consist of a form of spiritual elevation, through a "tunnel of light", a very dark phase began for Anne-Marie. Seized by a "dreadful dizziness" she was literally sucked downwards, into a terrible, "icy cold ", "mineral" place where all life had disappeared. At the same time - and this is an important detail for the authenticity of the phenomenon - she was experiencing increasing moral pain as she fell into the "abyss". A practising believer, she began to doubt her faith in an "intolerable" way. It seemed to her that nothing existed beyond this earthly life. This was a form of dereliction, a "spiritual night" that Christian mystics have always known about. Plunged into a terrifying half-light, she felt as if she was shivering and, above all, that this state would last forever.

Suddenly, the darkness let in a little pale light, like the rays of the moon through thick fog. She looked up and there, a few dozen metres away, Anne-Marie saw Christ on the Cross. The shock was indescribable. At the foot of the Cross, she noticed a young man and a woman she could not recognise. Next to them stood another woman whose identity she also did not know.

Suddenly, she heard this message inside her, "as if it were being whispered to me" she said: "God took on this human life of yours to build a bridge between himself and mankind. He took on this human life in his Son Jesus [...] Jesus took on a body in the body of a woman, a woman who had nothing divine about her, who was entirely human." Then Jesus, from the Cross, said: "Mother, this is your daughter; Anne-Marie, this is your mother!"At that moment, the woman who had just been declared dead by the medical team, understood that the second unknown woman at the foot of the cross, next to Mary and John, was herself.

The third phase began with the lightening of the darkness. Anne-Marie didn't know how she moved: with her body (but which body, since she was dead?), or mentally? "I knew I was like on a cart", she herself said. She now has the impression of "climbing", of physically rising. As during the descent into the abyss, during which she had felt intense inner suffering, she now felt an indefinable peace invade her being, and the cold disappear as she rose: "the anxiety gradually left me". It was the equivalent of going through the luminous tunnel described by other people who experienced a NDE.

Anne-Marie reached a sort of "half-arched door, quite narrow ", beyond which an " impalpable curtain hides a space the colour of fire and rainbows ". At that moment, she felt perfectly at ease, penetrated by a gentle warmth that was both material and spiritual. A moment later, a kind of mist emerged from the curtain, and a silhouette slowly took shape in it, revealing the light, like "a photo negative". She added a detail that demolishes the theory of an hallucination or dream activity: "The further I went, the closer she got, and the more I could make out her outline: a small woman". Such an observation of the laws of optics - involuntary for Anne-Marie - destroys the idea of a cerebral cause for the NDE, because hallucinations and dreams twist, transform and modify reality, removing all logic from the phenomena perceived and confusing, for the most part, cause and effect.

Anne-Marie asked the stranger to reveal her name. It was Mary, the Mother of the Lord. The apparition said to her: "Look! Listen! You will tell others about it, you will share".At that moment, she felt herself thrown into the light, beyond the door that had stopped her movements. The "bliss" that invaded her was unlike anything she'd experienced here on earth. In the distance, more and more distinctly, she heard "wonderful" music. It was an invisible orchestra and choirs, but in their midst she thought she recognised her daughter Elisabeth, aged seven, playing the harp. At the time, however, the child did not play any instrument. Anne-Marie had no idea why she thought she had identified her daughter. In any case, she was very surprised when, four years later, Elisabeth told her "out of the blue" that she was going to study the harp. Anne-Marie never told her children about her adventure until they were adults.

Another striking detail: Anne-Marie recognised her mother's voice in the heavenly choir without any possible mistake. This person was alive at the time. But she died some time later.

Fourth moment: she entered "a kind of immense sun" the centre of which she could not look at. Gradually she was able to see a "great silhouette, gigantic, black, because it was too luminous and bright". She wanted to touch this figure, thinking of the woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, who is cured by Jesus in the Gospel, by his cloak... The Virgin Mary said: "No! Not now. The time has not come."

In a flash she was on the other side of the door. This time, Mary was no longer a silhouette, but a young woman of indescribable beauty, with "large, dark brown almond-shaped eyes" and her hair "clearly visible". It was above all the "the depth of her gaze that penetrated me with infinite love." "You're going back and you're going to start!" she told her, promising to look after her. At these words, Anne-Marie realised that her feet were resting on "a kind of cloud suspended in space" and that, far away, she could see the operating table and her own body lying on it. "I could see a body lying on it, with nuns and nurses all around, crowding round and talking to the body in question..." She added an unimaginable experience: she felt the feelings and emotions of the people trying to save her: "I could feel their anxiety, their agitation." She noticed one of the sisters bending over her. The next thing she knew, she was back in her physical body. "And then! It was as if I closed my eyes and then opened them again! And I saw in my gaze the two eyes of the nun who was bending over me... I could hear her saying, as if in a fog: "She's here! She's come back!""

Anne-Marie felt pain in her limbs. When she saw the blood bag attached to her arm, the medical equipment and the oxygen mask being handed to her, she remembered the moments of bliss she had just experienced. On a psychological level, this experience was the catalyst for a profound and lasting conversion. Over and above the sadness caused by the loss of her baby, Anne-Marie rediscovered an incredible joy of living. She now spends more and more time in prayer, Bible reading and meditation, and her love of others has grown steadily. Her detachment from material things impresses all who know her.

What's even more incredible is that her natural gifts and human qualities have blossomed to a great extent. She became a poet, wrote songs for handicapped children, and gave musical and catechetical training sessions. She recorded an album in 1981, with the Petits chanteurs d'Aubervilliers and the support of Father Francis Méhaignerie, parish priest of Saint-Augustin in Rennes. Archbishop Paul Gouyon of Rennes, to whom Anne-Marie had sent the lyrics of her songs, sent her a letter of congratulations on April 22, 1981.

Above all, Anne-Marie founded a prayer group called Aïn Kariem, designed to spread "faith, joy and mad hope" by praying to God for childless couples and mothers separated from their infants. In 2000, Anne-Marie was reunited with Mother Cécile, an Augustinian nun who had surrounded her with affection in the operating room in 1971. During a telephone conversation, this sister, now very old, who had once been close to Mother Yvonne-Aimée de Malestroit, whose beatification process had begun, explained to Anne-Marie that she owed her life to the intercession of their foundress, whom all the nuns present had asked to intercede with God.

Beyond reasons to believe:

Near-death experiences (NDEs) of people considered clinically dead, who unexpectedly come back to life, are currently multiplying everywhere, in every culture and on every continent, because resuscitation methods are much more effective today. It is interesting to note that the description of death and glimpses into the next life are in line with Christian teaching on the Four Last Things.

Going further:

Anne-Marie Le Goff, D'un monde à l'autre, Paris, F.-X. de Guibert, 2008.

More information:

• Near-Death Experiences Examined: Medical Findings and Testimonies from Lourdes by Patrick Theillier M.D., PublishDrive (February 1, 2017)

• Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You by John Burke and Don Piper, Baker Books; Illustrated edition (October 20, 2015)

• The general article in 1000 raisons de croire (1000 reasons to believe), which presents the cases of NDEs and the associated video