phone calls from heaven
Mitch Albom, a well-known sportswriter based in Detroit, Michigan, has
become even more famous for books dealing with faith.
It started with Tuesdays with Morrie, a poignant memoir of weekly
conversations about life and dying with a much-loved college professor and
mentor stricken with ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease.
There have been five more books over the last decade or so – all best sellers
– including The Five People You Meet in Heaven and my own favorite, Have a
Little Faith. The latest is The First Phone Call From Heaven.
This is the story of the little town of Coldwater, Michigan, where people
start getting phone calls from loved ones who have died. The calls seem entirely
authentic and convincing to the favored few. The story quickly becomes a
media sensation – “proof of an afterlife.”
The book is all about hope – wanting to believe and wanting others to
believe, so that everyone’s lives will be better. It is a flawed book, especially
from a New Church perspective, but is thought-provoking, readable, popular
and has a positive message.
I won’t spoil the outcome for anyone who wants to read it, but it is a
potentially useful book, along with all the other books and movies professing
to “prove” the existence of heaven. Hopefully they are all sowing seeds for
acceptance of true revelation.
Albom is something of an anomaly – a sportswriter also fascinated by faith
– and he lives his faith. He has founded seven charities, including the first-ever
full-time medical clinic for homeless children in America, and operates an
orphanage in Haiti.
He notes at the end of the book: “It is said that the earliest spark for the
telephone came when Alexander Bell was still in his teens. He noticed how,
if he sang a certain note near an open piano, the string of that note would
vibrate, as if singing back to him. The idea of connecting voices through a wire
was born.
“But it was not a new idea. We call out; we are answered. It has been that
way from the beginning of belief, and it continues to this very moment, when,
late at night, in a small town called Coldwater, a seven-year-