Sharon Prentice. Becoming Starlight. Cardiff CA: Waterside P, 2018. Print.

Over the years I have read a few books about near death experiences. A couple of the more popular ones have been made into film. I also personally know one man who has had one, which I mentioned briefly in one of my reviews. (In his case, he was going to hell and knew it.) I know two other people whose testimonies made it clear to me that they had been taken out of this world to heaven or to God’s presence. In all three of these cases I have known the people for many years. None have boasted about it, and I find no reason why they would lie about it.

Becoming Starlight is called a shared death experience (SDE). Mrs. Prentice’s testimony is similar to those who have briefly gone to heaven, except that it occurred at a time in which someone close to her was dying. As is true of other books about such experiences, her actual experience only takes up a few pages of the book, but reading the whole book gets the reader into the author’s mind. Literally.

While Becoming Starlight is a narrative, it reads more like stream of consciousness. Indeed, it is difficult to tell how much time has lapsed. She begins with an account of how she met the man who would become her husband, their courtship, and their relationship. He was in the American Navy and was transferred from place to place as most career military people are. The best I can figure is that they were married somewhere between eight and eleven years. Details of that kind are vague. What the reader gets is what the author was thinking and feeling.

The shared death experience the author has is with her husband who died of pancreatic cancer, probably brought on by too much exposure to radiation from the nuclear reactors he worked with in the Navy. But before that, Mrs. Prentice had a miscarriage. From that time on she was bitter and angry at God. Basically she felt either that God did not exist or that He was indifferent at best or evil at worst.

Even after they had a healthy baby boy a few years later, she continued to carry that sorrow and rage.

She apparently bore this anger from between six and nine years until her husband was dying. Her anger increased because she was losing him as well. He was only thirty-three years old and she was thirty. God did meet her, though, and answered her. Her life has not been the same since.

While she admits having trouble describing exactly what happened, she calls her experience “becoming starlight.” She said she was lifted among the stars and saw her husband with a calm, loving expression on his face. She knew she could not go with him, but she had a sense that everything was all right.

What is perhaps most striking about her experience is that she was given a sense of eternity. There was no past or future, as she puts it in describing her husband, “He just was.” She also was aware that God was the creator and that He had created her and loved her. She was just what He made her to be. She repeats the concept that God is love.

The Scripture that seemed to speak to her the most was this:

In my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would not have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. (John 14:2 NKJV)

To her, then, there was a sense that God indeed had a place for her–as well as for her husband and her daughter who had died in the premature childbirth. That truly can bring comfort to anyone who accepts the idea. God has a place for each of us.

In her case, she did not even think of that as a viable idea until she had that SDE. Sometimes she admits being criticized by religious people of all stripes because her experience does not seem especially orthodox. All I can say is that even in her anger, she was looking for God, looking for an answer from Him. It took a long time, apparently five to seven years, but He did answer her, and for that she is grateful.

Truly, the Scripture itself says little about what those “mansions” are like. She does not even know herself whether she was in the heavenly city as described in Revelation or where she was, but it was eternal and she was aware of God as creator and lover. At one point she acknowledges that Christ is God.

She also quotes part of I Corinthians 2:9:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared… (cf. Isaiah 64:4)

Her story also confirms another Scripture:

And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13 KJV)

She may have been hurting and angry, but she was seeking—and as the reader can tell from the way she tells the story, she was doing it with all her heart. She was not casual. It was no “whatever” for her. She would be satisfied with nothing less than the truth.

But she received more than truth: She got a glimpse of eternity.

One piece of this book that adds gravitas to Becoming Starlight if not validity is that the preface is written by Raymond Moody, the medical doctor whose own observations of people near death resulted in books and studies by him. He is the resident expert on the subject. If he takes Mrs. Prentice’s testimony seriously, it probably is worth looking at.

Because of the mental-emotional stream of consciousness approach, even if we do not have physical descriptions or an accurate time line of her story, Becoming Starlight is honest and visceral. Mrs. Prentice tells us that she used to write poetry and participated in poetry readings. The book’s style is more like poetry than prose in that sense.

On an emotional level, her story is not unlike George Herbert’s great poem “The Collar.” In it, the poet pounds his fist on the table and says, “No more!” He is tired of following God, feeling his life is “all wasted.” He does not understand why God is treating him so, and his anger is growing:

I raved and grew more fierce and wild.

Just like Mrs. Prentice.

But God knows and God cares. So Herbert’s poem ends very succinctly, but expressing the same heart that Mrs. Prentice shares:

Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.

Isn’t that the truth?