Fr. Rolheiser writes about the growing body of literature that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for some time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. The movie “Miracles from Heaven” portrays the true story of a young Texas girl who was clinically dead, medically revived, and shares what she experienced in the afterlife. Hundreds of stories like this are gathered through dozens of years, published, or shared with loved ones. What’s interesting (and consoling) is that virtually all these stories are wonderfully positive, irrespective of the person’s faith or religious background. In virtually every case, their experience, while partially indescribable, was one in which they felt a warm, personal, overwhelming sense of love, light, and welcome, and not a few of them found themselves meeting relatives of theirs that had passed on before them, sometimes even relatives that they didn’t know they had. In virtually every case, they did not want to return to life here but wanted to stay there like Peter on the Mountain of the Transfiguration. As Christians, we believe that God is infinite and ineffable. This means that while we can know God, we can never imagine God. Given that truth, it makes it even harder for us to imagine that the infinite Creator and Sustainer of all things is intimately and personally present inside us, worrying with, sharing our heartaches, and knowing our most guarded feelings. How can God be as close to us as we are to ourselves? Partly this is a mystery, and wisdom bids us befriend mystery because anything we can understand is not very deep! The mystery of God’s intimate, personal presence inside us is beyond our imaginations. But everything within our faith tradition and most everything in the testimony of hundreds of people who have experienced the afterlife assure us that, while God may be infinite and ineffable, God is very close to us, closer than we imagine.