When Fear Falls Away
Reflections on near-death experience, the Rule of St Benedict, and the oblate journey into love

There is a moment in the film Heaven is for Real that has stayed with me. Colton, a little boy who has just come through a life-threatening operation, wakes up changed. Before, he had been terrified of spiders. Now, quietly and simply, he is not. No therapy, no gradual exposure, no effort of will — his fear is just gone. Something he encountered while hovering between life and death has set him free.

Colton’s story is the centrepiece of a film about a near-death experience (NDE), and his accounts of what he saw and heard during his surgery have moved millions of people. But it was that small detail — the vanished spider fear — that particularly lodged itself in my mind. Because researchers who study NDEs consistently report exactly this: that people who pass close to the threshold of death and return, almost always come back with their fears profoundly diminished or gone entirely. Not just the fear of dying, but a host of smaller anxieties that had quietly ruled their lives.

The Testimony of Those Who Almost Died
The near-death experience is not a modern phenomenon, but serious research into it began in the 1970s, most famously with Raymond Moody’s work — his landmark book Life After Life (1975) was the first to gather and name these experiences systematically — and later with cardiologist Pim van Lommel, whose study followed cardiac arrest patients in Dutch hospitals over several years. What van Lommel found — and what has been replicated in studies across cultures and continents — is that a significant proportion of people who are clinically dead for a period report experiences of extraordinary clarity: a sense of leaving the body, of passing through light, of encountering a presence of overwhelming love, of having their life reviewed not in judgement but in compassion.

The aftereffects are, in many ways, as striking as the experiences themselves. Those who have had NDEs return, in the vast majority of cases, less afraid. Less afraid of death, yes — but also less anxious about daily life, less driven by the need to compete or accumulate, more open to others, more given to love. Something they briefly touched has rearranged their interior world.

It is as though, having been immersed — even for a moment — in something they can only describe as unconditional love, the fears that had seemed so solid and so permanent simply dissolve. They no longer make sense in the new light.

But what about us, the large majority who never experience such a dramatic, life-changing event? Is there another way to achieve such transformation?

Benedict’s Wisdom
St Benedict begins his Rule with an invitation, not a command. “Listen,” he says, “carefully, my child, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” It is the voice of a parent, and it is significant that Benedict frames the entire spiritual life as a response to a voice that is, at its root, loving. The Rule is not primarily a document of discipline. It is a school for learning to hear, and to trust, and ultimately to love.

And Benedict is clear-eyed about where most of us begin. In Chapter 7, his great chapter on Humility, he describes the early rungs of the ladder of spiritual growth as being motivated by fear — the fear of God, the fear of consequences, the awareness of our own smallness before the divine. He does not dismiss this. Fear, for Benedict, is a legitimate starting point; it is simply not the destination.

The destination is described in some of the most beautiful words in the whole Rule. When the monk — or the oblate — has climbed through all the degrees of humility, Benedict says something remarkable: “the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear.” He is quoting the First Letter of John directly: “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). Benedict’s choice of words is deliberate. He uses the same Latin word “timor” for the beginning of wisdom—the reverence and awe before God that grounds humility—as well as the fear that needs to be overcome. In a way, fear is the scaffolding that is no longer needed once the work is complete. The whole architecture of the Rule — all the prayer, the work, the obedience, the humility — is pointing towards a single transformation: from a life constrained by fear to a life set free by love.

Keep Death Before Your Eyes
There is another passage in the Rule that speaks directly to this. In Chapter 4, Benedict lists the Tools for Good Works — a practical inventory of how to live well — and among them, almost in passing, he includes this instruction: mortem cotidie ante oculos suspectam habere — keep death daily before your eyes.

This can sound, to modern ears, morbid. But Benedict means almost the opposite. To hold death consciously in watchful regard is not to be haunted by it but to be liberated from the habit of pretending it will not come. Benedict wants sober, clear-eyed awareness of death rather than fear of it. It is, in fact, precisely the mechanism that near-death researchers identify: those who have faced death directly, who have passed through the threshold and come back, return without the unconscious dread that drives so much of ordinary human anxiety. They have looked, and found not annihilation but love.

The oblate who keeps death before their eyes in Benedict’s sense is practising, day by day, a kind of voluntary surrender of the illusion of permanence. And in doing so, they may be slowly freed — freed from the grasping, the striving, the anxiety about outcomes — to live, as Benedict puts it, in “the love that casts out fear.”

Awakening
Colton woke up from his surgery transformed. The oblate wakes up each morning — to Lauds, to lectio divina, to the quiet rhythm of ora et labora — and begins the same transformation, more gradually but no less really.

This is, perhaps, one of the most consoling things we can take from the NDE literature as people of faith: the assurance that the direction of reality is love. Those who have touched the furthest edge of human experience do not come back reporting chaos or indifference or judgement. They come back speaking of light, of welcome, of being known completely and loved completely. They come back, in other words, having briefly glimpsed what St Benedict spent his life trying to lead his monks towards.

We who are oblates have chosen — in whatever modest, ordinary, part-time way — to follow that same path. Not through a surgical emergency or other brush with death, but through the steady, faithful practice of the Rule in our daily lives. Through showing up for prayer when we would rather not. Through sensing God in the stranger. Through the humility of accepting correction, of serving others, of sitting quietly with God when nothing seems to be happening.

Our fears do not disappear overnight. But, little by little, they may lose their grip.

We Do Not Travel Alone
And we do not travel this road alone. That is, after all, the other great truth Benedict insists upon. The Rule is not a manual for solitary self-improvement; it is a blueprint for community. Humility, in Benedict’s vision, is not something we achieve in private — it is something that is drawn out of us by living alongside others, by bearing with one another’s weaknesses, by allowing ourselves to be known and to know. The monastery, and by extension the oblate group or chapter, is the place where the slow transformation from fear to love happens in and through relationship.

We are not called to complete this journey alone. We are called to travel it together, each of us at different stages, each of us both learner and guide.

What Can Be Sweeter?
Benedict closes the Prologue to his Rule with a question that is really an astonishment: “What can be sweeter to us, dear brothers, than the voice of the Lord calling us?” The voice that calls us into the oblate life — into prayer, into community, into the daily dying to self that Benedict asks — is not the voice of threat or demand. It is the voice that those who have glimpsed the other side hear in the light: a voice of love so total and so welcoming that every fear, however small or large—be it the fear of a spider or the exposure of a different weakness or a past mistake, of losing a job, a position of respect, or a loved one, of vulnerability, failure, aging, disease, or loneliness, or the fear of an uncertain future in the face of climate change, economic upheaval, societal division, crime, pandemics, and war; and yes, even the fear of death—simply ceases to make sense.

Colton heard something of it in the space between life and death and woke up free. We hear it — more quietly, more gradually — in the Daily Office, in lectio divina and other forms of contemplative prayer, in conversations with our fellow oblates, and in the simple, faithful act of showing up, day after day, for the journey we are making together.

That is the school Benedict invites us into.

Klara Brunnhuber
Oblate of Douai

Further reading: Raymond Moody, Life After Life (Mockingbird Books, 1975). Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (HarperOne, 2010). The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 4 and 7. 1 John 4:7–21.