Civilization: Why I believe in God

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- In the winter of 1969-70, when I was 26, I lived in my parents' house in Buffalo, N.Y. I had gotten out of the service the previous September, was going to graduate school and working part time.

One evening I was putting on my coat in the entrance hall before going out. My 16-year-old brother was passing through the foyer. Suddenly, clear and near, a familiar voice said: "Hello, Lou."

I can still see the expression on my brother's face.

"Did you hear that?" I asked.

"Yes."

"What did you hear?"

"Somebody just said hello to you."

We looked high and low, inside and outside, but we both knew the voice had been in the foyer with us.

In fact, I recognized it as that of George M., a man with whom I had served in Vietnam. We were friendly, but not especially close. He was older and militarily senior to me. He was a career officer, and I was a reservist on active duty for three years. On his third Vietnam tour, the helicopter in which he was a passenger went down near Danang. Another man I knew also was killed in the crash.

Here's where my story breaks down. For the life of me, I can't remember whether I already knew of George's death or learned of it later. I should have marked the date and time, but didn't. My brother's presence, however, makes this less important.

It's not uncommon for people to imagine they hear the voices of the deceased. If my brother hadn't been there, I would have dismissed the incident as an auditory hallucination. But it was real.

I've told very few people about this -- partly because of unpleasant reactions that included (to me) unaccountable irritation. "You ask me to believe this on the grounds your brother heard it too," one man said with annoyance. "I don't even know if you have a brother." In fact I have two, and six sisters.

Another man -- a professor who prided himself on his scientific outlook -- was dismissive, suggesting that I had been the victim of a hoax, perhaps by my brother himself, as if a teenage boy could duplicate the voice of a 33-year-old man he had never met and didn't know existed.

The responses of believers have been similarly negative, perhaps because the story bolsters no orthodoxy. Religionists willing to accept a whole corpus of doctrine on the basis of no experience cite the problematic nature of "experiential faith" untested against Scripture or other authority. They even warn darkly that the source of such a phenomenon might not be divine but diabolical.

To each his own. But in the end, every person must search for meaning in his own life's experiences. No one can do it for him. Others may disagree with my conclusions, which are subjective by definition.

Over the years, I've asked myself what the greeting signified. For a long time I assumed that I was tasked with some special mission, probably having to do with the vindication of my fellow Vietnam veterans, who were so shamefully reviled by America's elites. Now that I'm in my 60th year, I believe there's a simpler meaning.

I am by nature skeptical, with a rationalist-materialist mind-set. It would have been all too easy to become an atheist who believes that death extinguishes all there ever was of a person. God in his unfathomable mercy spared me that. He showed me that there is life after death and, by inference, that he exists.

It's time to share this good news with others who are inclined to take my testimony seriously and interpret it in a similar fashion.