I was visiting Marieta in her cozy cabin on an island off the coast of Maine. We were huddled by the fire, drinking a cup of ginger tea and discussing our relationship with the church. I told him that ten years earlier he had been ordained in the United Church of Christ. I worked in refugee resettlement and tried a year of interim ministry. I even submitted my profile and interviewed at various churches, but felt conflicted about my call to ministry. As much as he loved the church, he wasn’t sure he believed in some of its most basic principles. And as a former high school history teacher, she was painfully aware of the abuses he had inflicted over the centuries.
Marieta listened carefully until I finished and replied, “I feel like your problems with the church are older than just this lifetime.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I think an unhealed past life is staining your relationship with the church,” she replied. “I know a wise therapist here in Maine who will do past life regressions if she thinks it’s necessary. You should call her.”
My head began to spin. I couldn’t see how reincarnation and unhealed past lives could fit into my Christian theology, but his words are true. Both my love for the church and my agonizing conflicts with its theology somehow seemed older than me.
When I shared my doubts, Marieta gave me a book to read, Other lives, other selves by Roger Woolger. I went home and devoured it. Woolger was a Jungian psychiatrist who reluctantly concluded that several of his clients carried heavy burdens that had no known origin in this life. He discovered that even when clients did not believe in reincarnation, through hypnosis they could recall past lives and traumas in amazing detail and, by remembering, experience profound healing.
I called the wise therapist and made an appointment. After only ten minutes, she concluded that a past life regression might be helpful. I reclined in a zero gravity chair and we did some deep breathing. With just a short guided meditation, I saw a girl lying on a beach where many bearded soldiers were raping her. Her village was on fire and her disemboweled little brother lay next to her. When the men finished, one of them strangled her and left her for dead. An elderly villager who had survived the attack found the girl and took her to a local monastery.
I called this girl Ella. For the next six weeks I explored her life through the process of keeping a mandala journal. I drew a sacred circle, asked to know more about Ella’s story, pondered, drew what came to mind, and then wrote the picture in a journal. I got to know a medieval Celtic girl who had been deeply wounded and sought salvation in the church. What she found instead was emotional and sexual abuse. Her faith withered and she died a bitter old woman.
Over the next year, Ella was often on my mind and heart. I especially felt her presence in the church. She sat next to me as I prayed and her voice joined mine as we sang at the Taizé services. I dared to believe that her longing for God might be finding a safe haven, and my own discomfort with the church also began to resolve.
For a while I was obsessed with Ella. Where had her story come from? How would I know if it was really a past life or if she had made it up for me? I finally came to the conclusion that origins didn’t matter. Roger Woolger had suggested three possible explanations for the phenomenon of past life experience. One is that experience is a projection of our own psyche, taken from images we have seen or read about. Another is that it taps into the vast collective unconscious, the blueprint described by psychologist Carl Jung through which we are connected to each other and all that is. And the last possibility is that reincarnation actually happens, that we go through many earthly lifetimes on our way to God. Whatever the origin, my experience had been one of profound healing. The Buddha held a “Noble Silence” on matters related to the afterlife and Jesus promised that in our Father’s house there are many rooms. I don’t need to know more than this.
