That was always kind of an unspoken question for me...I always figured there was some sort of spiritual life, some sort of after life. I even had some very real indications that I had actually lived before, in a different time and a very different place. From an early age I started to think and feel like I had lived on this earth before. As I grew older those feelings became even more clear and specific: I had live and died a violent death as a soldier, in a forlorn shell-hole torn place called Beaumont Hamel on the Great war Battlefield of the Somme. This British Soldier that was I, was left to die in No-Mans land on the first day of the great British Offensive on the Somme: 1 July, 1916...machined gunned down before hardly being able to get out of the trench.
There were over 60,000 British (Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders, etc.) casualties that day...and I have felt and believed since I was a wee lad that I had been one of them...(The picture at the bottom of this post is a still from a movie taken at Beaumont Hamel on 1 July, 1916 just 30 minutes or so before the attack went in. Most if not all of the men in the picture were dead or wounded just a mere 60 minutes after this picture was taken...they were from the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, the unit I later came to believe I served with...The picture below is the same location, The Sunken Road at Beaumont Hamel taken today)
I had been dreaming about being in battle since I was a very young boy, waking up in a cold sweat, screaming...In my dream I was living underground, chasing away rats, the shell fire a constant, terrifying companion. I never knew what to make of it other then I figured I had a very active imagination. But that was the way it always was...I dreamed it and it seemed so very real to me...I could close my eyes and here the gunfire, the screaming shells, the horrible screams of the wounded. I would physically begin to shake...In my minds eye I could see the carnage, corpses as far as the eye could see and the smell of rotting flesh was almost overwhelming. The grotesque was norm: headless bodies, arms, legs missing, a red mass of goo covered in lice that was once a human being...war in all it's horrifying reality existed in the very confined space between my ears...I lived it every day and night as a small boy. And I still do...
So early in life, I had some testing done because I was having these nightmares...I did sort of mention this to my shrink, I don't recall that he gave me any real kind of an answer...I believe I was in high school before the connection was made to reincarnation. By then, I found that scenario quite easy to believe. Those beliefs were reinforced when I went to the Somme for a Great War Battlefield tour in 2002 and actually stood on that very ground. I nearly had an emotional breakdown the emotions were so profound...I KNEW that I had been there before...
Today as a FOLLOWER of the Lord, I obviously believe in an afterlife...Eternal Life in Heaven. Yet I am still very conflicted about those visions and memories from my past and present because I still feel them to a certain degree. I know of no where in Scripture that accepts the notion of reincarnation so I have chosen to just let that lie for now. I feel in my heart that this will work itself out and I am not going to agonize over it but it is somewhat troubling because I have felt and believed in reincarnation almost all of my life. I have these very real memories yet what I believe today is in complete conflict with what I experienced...
I know, it sounds like total Looney Tunes Stuff but hey, that was my experience. So I'll close for now...still wondering why I have such a powerful connection to that desolate place in Northern France, that barren Chalk-Lands near the British strong-point called The White City and a huge crater that is all that now remains from a giant mine explosion that morning, that actually started the battle on it's northern flank. Who knows...but even as I sit here at my desk in southern lower Michigan, I still feel the pull of that place, the siren call of battle, the smell of cordite, the grinning stinking corpses and poisen gas...My HOME.
