A Divine Relationship? What I Learned About Love And The Afterlife During My Date With A Nobel Laureate

Have you ever talked with a loved one after their death? I have, and it changed the course of my spiritual life. Find out how a Nobel Laureate views my experience as we explored the issue of love and the afterlife during our first date.

Our meeting was a lovely coincidence. We had chatted on a cross-country flight, exchanged business cards, and agreed to meet for dinner in our destination city.

An hour before dinner, I googled my date. That’s how I learned of his nobel prize win. The fact that he hadn’t mentioned it was endearing.

How many of us get the chance to talk with a modern-day Einstein over dinner? I planned to ask him my most burning questions about the universe that night. He kept guiding the conversation back to me and what made me tick.

When he asked me to tell him about a big turning point of my life, I mentioned the first thing that came to mind. I told him how I woke up in my freezing dorm room one night, a few decades earlier, and I saw my grandmother sitting in her rocking chair, smiling at me. She was the first person I’d loved and lost. I was deeply grieving her death when she appeared in my dorm room.

Startled yet delighted, I’d asked her the first question that came to mind. “Is there a God?”

“God is the spirit of perfection inside each of us,” she said softly.

I told my date that this was shocking news from a devout Catholic woman who had attended mass each morning of her adult life. I got out of my bed to give her a hug. And she vanished.

“How did you feel about it?” my date asked.

“Comforted. Inspired. She changed the course of my spiritual life that night,” I said.

“That’s why you conjured her,” he said, his weighty insight floating on the light wings of his voice and smile.

I balked at the idea. I told him that I didn’t know how to conjure her. At age 20, I’d never even heard the notion of the divine spark being present in each of us. I’d been trained as a Catholic to see God as out there, instead of inside each of us. This was a revolutionary idea I knew nothing about. So how could I conjure her to say this, unless it came from our collective consciousness?

He said he was glad I knew about the collective consciousness.

I said that because of my recent study of the Native American culture in New Mexico, I’d started to wonder if god were a shape shifter who had come to me in the shape of my beloved grandmother to ease my grief over her death. And open my eyes to a new way of seeing love and the afterlife.

“That’s why you conjured her,” he said with tender persistence.

I asked if he meant that energy can’t be created or destroyed, it only changes form? And we can summon the loving energy that survives our physical death, even without knowing we have the power to do so?

He gave me a bashful smile and the same reply.

So that’s what I learned about love and the afterlife on our first date. Will there be a second date? That depends if we’re ever in the same city again. Will that be determined by the dating gods, or by whether one of us decides to make a call to meet again?