AstralResearch.Org: Reasons-My Dad's Angel

Reasons

My Dad's Angel

My father died of an extended illness, holding some fears of the unknown right up until his last peaceful exhalation. In the final months, he listened to some to my tales for what it's like to be lifted out of the body and enter glorious new worlds. I gave an inspired eulogy at his funeral that spoke openly from my beliefs and experiences of continuing life, for my father's sake and to boost his journey, and many were moved to tears and thanked me afterward profusely, including my own family. Thank goodness, because I so wanted to lay the groundwork of encouragement for more experience, discussion, and awareness of the astral realms, at a time and a place where it mattered most.

My inspired insights and astral confidence are not so much due to extraordinary skill as from openness to noticing what happens frequently. As you read the eulogy, consider this: the dream to which I will refer was astral, I was out of body and I knew it at the time. Everyone voyages beyond their bodies nightly, and the experiences so gathered patienty await our integration into uses of the heart for our worldly lives. My dream recall is enhanced from years of dream journaling, that's all; I still can't just lay myself down and consciously separate from my body without sleeping first.

My voyages are often unimpressive and less than fully controlled, but the chapters of life to which I may contribute by them are profound and first rate. By my own self-accumulated convictions and receptivity, I become available to participate in plans that can only be called divine and serving of heavenly love. Such are the reasons to travel astrally, for they are the reasons of the heart to travel any world at All. The number of people who came up to me after the eulogy to say "I believe in what you're doing" or "I've been there myself", and "keep going, don't stop", was truly amazing.

[When you explore the worlds of creation to your heart's content, it is your heart that will remind you to notice the love, to care, and to be willing to feel the joy of joining in.]

service june 20, 2000

Background for the eulogy: my dad immigrated as a young man from post-war Germany with Viking heritage, and settled easily in rural New York state to practice his family's trade of upholstery and to marry my mother, a local schoolteacher. He was a generous, tolerant, engineering-minded man who quickly became involved in most of the community's service organizations, hence his wake and funeral turned out most of the town to honor his passing.

Dad's eulogy, 6/20/00, Tuesday morning

Thank you all for being here. I know it took courage, and strength of heart. We have one very special thing in common today, and that is our love and admiration for my late great father Carl August Schroeder, who is now in spirit. We each know and treasure different sides of this one good man, and he did request that we share our memories of him with each other at the reception that will follow the burial service. It has already been such a joy and a privelege for me to see so many of you at the wake yesterday. My aunt Susan remarked that it was like a town reunion, and truly it was. We realize that all human beings are so very good deep inside, when one beloved person such as my Dad can bring out the good in so very many people all in one time and place. My dad wanted us to celebrate our relationships, because he didn't want us to only be sad, though sad we will be as well. We must each begin a new chapter in our lives now, one in which he will not be with us in the same way that he was before.

Through a difficult illness, we all admired how much my Dad maintained his dignity, his alertness, and his sense of humor. His last significant words to me at the hospital Friday were son, don't hide your feelings in public... oh but I don't think you do anyway. And that is true, I do not hide my feeling. And he said, son, above all in life, just be yourself. So that's what I'm doing now, I'm being myself.

Most of you don't know me too well, you just think I'm spooky because I look so much like my Dad. Actually my Dad inherited his good looks from me. And you can't prove me wrong, because modern physics has discovered that time works as well backwards as forwards in all the equations. My Dad and I both liked science and science fiction, so as he would say, that's very interesting. This means that there is no absolute past or future, there is only the now and what we feel for each other. And right now my Dad is beyond science and beyond science fiction, and what he is feeling we can only imagine. My Dad is with the angels, and what that means, most of us cannoth fathom. We can only hope that it means something wonderful, and we pray that he is happy whereever he is. He could be standing right beside us, and we wouldn't even know. How would we know.

The night that Dad died, I awoke around 4am, and I lay in my bed and I thought. I tried to express to myself what had happened to my father. I said to myself, it's okay, my dear old dad has just lost the use of his body. At that a voice, like a loud thought that I hadn't been thinking, jumped into my head. The voice said, son, I have everything now. He has everything now, I thought. So I felt better and I went back to sleep.

As strange as it may seem, most of us have nothing to lose around death but the fear of it. What happens to us when we die is, I expect, both more ordinary and more wonderful than most of us have ever dared to expect. Death is the ultimate healer, and those who were in prison become free. My Dad passed away the day before Father's day, and I believe that he did so to receive the best Father's day gift he was needing this year. He was released from his pain, he is free and at peace and we ought to fare him well in his new life. Only we who are not ready to die feel the losses of Earth. We are the ones who still have the needs to cry and be healed.

I am a very spiritual man. I believe in God, and I believe in angels. I believe in the beings of love and light who guide us through our lives and receive us when we die. My father's passing has become an important part of my spiritual life, and I am very grateful for this, it is a gift to me. I wish to share with you how I came to be at peace with my father's death. Several weeks ago, before he came home from the hospital, the angel who was to take my father came to me in a dream. This angel was an amazing glorified being of love and light in a long flowing blue gown, drifting toward me on a Viking ship in a beautiful valley. When I awoke that morning I was filled with such joy and love, that I wanted to know if this angel was for me. I drove to see my Dad at Sharon hospital, and lo and behold the valley of the hospital was the valley in the dream, and my Dad's new hospital window was looking out to where the angel had come to the shore. In my dream, I had called to this angel, to take me to God right then and there, so grand and magnificent was she, but she only smiled sadly and looked beyond me, up the hill to where now the hospital lay. And so now I knew that she would be the one who would be taking my Dad, and that he would be in good hands.

Now as many of you know, my Dad was by medical science granted a reprieve, to come back to Pine Plains to be with us for several more weeks. So I was confused - would the angel be coming to our house from the hospital? Had she been mistaken about my Dad, would he die at home or not at all? But it turned out there had been no mistake, because my Dad was taken back to the hospital for a little more work on last Friday. And even when he felt better that evening, he insisted on staying the night, and he said he felt ready to die. So what room did they give him but the one next to the one he had before, so again he was now looking out to the beautiful valley where the angel had come ashore. My dad shared his final words with us that night. By next morning he could no longer talk, and he breathed his last breath within hours, peacefully, in his family's arms. About 10 minutes before he died I saw a light come in from the window out the corner of my eye, and I cried when he gave up the ghost. I cried because this was no meaningless death but a perfect death for the glory of heaven, and I cried because my Dad would be sorely missed by us all. But I can assure you, you could not have asked for a better angel, this one who took my dad home to God, this one who was the guardian of the soul of a Viking who had come to a new world to make his new home, in peace and in love.

I have everything now, son, that's what my father said to me on Father's day morning. My Dad is with the angels now, and I am as challenged as any of you, for how to balance the mourning for our loss with a joy for his gain. Somehow, he's so much better off than we are feeling here today, and yet we each belong here while he belongs there. We will see him again this I know, just as we will see again all of the loved ones we have ever lost the whereabouts of. Some call it heaven where our friends go, a place there with the God who is here with us as well, and some just call it home.

I will now conclude with some quotes from the late great theologian Emanuel Swedenborg on the nature of angels:

"Heavenly joy is so great as to be beyond description"

"The thoughts of angels are not limited and confined by ideas from time and space."

"The more we love what is good and what is true, the more angels love to be with us."

"Angels know no greater happiness than caring for and instructing those who arrive from the world."

"When after death people become angels, they are in inexpressible intelligence and wisdom compared to the intelligence and wisdom they had while they lived in the world."

and last but not least...

"People are born to become angels."

Thank you for being my father's friends....

me and dad

Epilogue: I am happy to report that the night after the funeral, back in my Boston bed, I closed my weary eyes and tried to picture my father directly in front of me. Suddenly in my mind's eye, but startling me to my left, my dad appeared vividly in his favorite armchair, and said "I saw it, son". The unexpected, sudden, and concise nature of this contact did mark it to me as a genuine spirit communication; personal imagination takes a while to warm up, while a spirit burst will fluster your mind so that you must either take a moment to integrate the event, or dismiss it as anomalous and move on as so many people sadly do. Thanks to my spiritual practice, I could recognize that my father was making clear to me his attendance at and approval of the funeral, for which my sister did also lovingly sing "Amazing Grace", beautifully and just as he had requested.

A day or so later my mom told me on the phone excitedly that the local teachers had received an amazingly synchronous greeting card on her behalf. The card had been selected by a dear friend of hers with whom I also feel a special connection, a very sweet woman who was my first guitar teacher and shares with me deep spiritual affinities. Judy had not attended the funeral, but even prior to it had decided upon a card for the teachers to receive as thanks from my mom for their baking and various help, and this card depicted red-haired angels on viking-like ship upon a lake beneath a mountain, which is hauntingly reminiscent of the dream I'd had of my father's angel. The teachers

who heard my eulogy got back to school only to see this card, and it gave them shivers they said, taking it as a further sign of my father's angel's validity. I myself recently discovered that Judy has lived for several years now up the road from the hospital where my father passed, and she drives through that magic valley nearly every day, so I'm convinced that she picked up on the same astral reality that I saw.

magical valley

i was digging for crystals in a small barn-like building, and i went through the wall to the outside. i found myself on a wide hill overlooking a beautiful valley, and i thought, i would live in such a place, i wonder if i could buy a house here. below me i saw a body of water at the foot of a mountain. i saw an amazing being coming across the water to the shore, and i ran with such joy to meet her. she had brilliant red hair and a flowing blue gown, and she was arriving on a small viking ship that needed no sails. i got as far as a small dock, and i held out my arms to greet her. i thought she would take me to heaven, for that is where she came from. but she floated up out of the vessel and hovered beyond my reach. she smiled sadly to me, and looked up the hill behind me, as if she had come for something else. i awoke filled with the joy of meeting an angel, but also confused. i then drove for hours to see my dad at the hospital, and looking out his window, i saw the valley again. i understood now what her sadness was for, but still i could not help but be glad as well, because this is what the light of heaven does for us all, it brings us so much hope of love.

This is the greeting card that Judy synchronously selected for my mom. It is "The Knight of the Holy Grail" painted 1912 by Frederick Judd Waugh (American, 1861-1914). The scene is hauntingly resonant with my true astral dream, including the entire setting and the angels' red hair and blue-tinted flowing gowns. One interesting exception to note is that the one angel I saw had no wings, and it seems to be the case that the perception of wings is an interpretation of energy fields which varies from person to person and culture to culture. Emanuel Swedenborg did not report wings during his extended trance states but saw fields of heavenly light, which is what I can relate to, whereas some waking clairvoyants have seen wings down to the detail of feathers. I do see outlines of wings in my mind's eye during meditations, but I have never seen wings on celestial beings during my night journeys out of the body. Perhaps wing perception is a phenomenon that happens when our consciousness is residing in physical brain functions.