Dr. Peter Cummings is a neuropathologist from Maine — a brain guy — who didn’t believe in God.

Unfortunately, that’s a trait of all too many scientific types.

They get blinded by physicality, what the Church, in its wisdom, calls “materialism.”

It isn’t just money (though that plays a big part). It’s the total preoccupation with the material world: on only what can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, and nothing beyond that.

One would think being a scientist, and especially a doctor — immersed in the intricacies and wonders of the human body, not to mention the countless other creatures and plants of Creation — would make one know that all of that intricacy could not possibly be the result of chance events (what Darwin called natural selection and evolution). However, this is often not the case. For instance, when faced with a woman’s experience during surgery (whereby she had left her body and could describe everything that went on during the operation), her doctor became enraged and stormed out of the room.

Anyway, Dr. Cummings was likewise a non-believer who put everything in the brain, when in fact, as another brain expert named Dr. Wilder Penfield once said, “All of the brain is in the mind, but not all of the mind is in the brain.”

Cummings had been almost wildly successful as a neuropathologist. “My career was really taking off and was the major focus of my life,” he explains. He was “hypercompetitive.” Work, work, work, work. “Philosophically, I was an atheist. You couldn’t  convince me otherwise. I could cut open a brain and show you where thoughts came from. Where was the soul? It didn’t exist.”

To cut to the chase: Dr. Cummings was making a lot of money as a doctor and had no problem taking a trip with his family to Costa Rica, where, with wife and son, he went whitewater rafting. During that excursion, the raft tipped over and he found himself trapped underwater — at the bottom of the river — and then headed for a rock.

“I knew I was drowning,” he says. “This is it. This is the end. Shouldn’t I be more scared of this?”

Yet — and this was the first perplexity — he felt total peace. And he could see everything around him — 360 degrees — at once.

It was like he was out of his body.

It was like he was both a participant and a spectator of his accident.

There was a light that broke through the darkness and bubbles of the water, that appeared before the rock. It was as if time had slowed or stopped — “outside the human experience.”

“There was this incredible overwhelming feeling of love, and this voice came that said, ‘You’re going to be okay.’ I was in the moment with this beauty.”

Finally another raft had reached him, and the voice told Dr. Cummings to grab the paddle extended by the person on the raft or he wouldn’t be returning to earthly life.

 

The return to the world immediately was “something very different,” he told a group that studies near-death experiences.

“I became uncomfortable with my career pursuits,” he says, “and I couldn’t identify with that anymore, and this intense Boston malignant academic environment. It made me physically ill. I just couldn’t be there anymore.  I’d written a couple of very bad novels and those things weren’t important to me. I had been like a piece of paper.”

This is critical, and a very consistent feeling from those who “die” and come back: that collecting things, becoming well known, surpassing others all suddenly seem like a waste of time.

The saints have long taught the same thing.

If anything, wealth is often, even most frequently, a trap, if we don’t use it in the right way; if we are too focused in it, if we have pride and ego.

In a flash, one learns more on the other side than one could in any education (including specialty medicine).

His experience should be a learning one 1) for atheists (he is no longer one) and 2) for fellow members of the medical profession.

A great opportunity, is that profession — a great opportunity to be selfless and help others, if we have that as a pure intention. Wasn’t Jesus’s birth in a manger all about this — the irrelevance of money?

“We ended up moving to Maine and living in the woods where we are now and having a great life. But the aftereffects were very difficult and I didn’t have a way to deal with it. I started noticing these time things.  I’d run into someone in the hall on the way to class and thirty minutes would go by.”

Having had a glimpse of the eternal, he had felt the transcendence of time.

Past, present, and future were suddenly all just one.

We can’t wrap our brains around that concept, while in the confines of the material world.

God is eternal, and the fact that He has no beginning nor an end finally makes sense to us on the other side, as does our own eternal existence.

 

[resources: What You Take To Heaven and An Army in Heaven]