Teach Your Children God’s Message: A True Message By God For Life From Death, by Patricia Allen McCuen

[Note: This book was provided for free by the author in exchange for an honest review.]

For a book with a long and somewhat unwieldy title, it is a rather short and straightforward narrative of a near-death experience the author had which killed her then fiance in 1991 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (the area where I spent the first three years of my life). It begins with a vivid and descriptive account of the accident and its aftermath as well as the near-death experience itself and the aftermath, with the main point of the message given at the end which has a rather humane goal to seek to protect the innocence of childhood and to recapture it ourselves by not pushing God away. The author is correct in stating that the message she presents is not a new one, and her presentation of the message is not done from a rational or logical perspective, but rather from that of an intuitive but emotional person engaging in emotional reasoning.

Coming from a slightly more rational perspective as a reader, this book prompted a variety of questions: how did it take so long to write about what happened in 1991, and how were the details remembered until then? The author makes some reference to writing, so it is possible that there was some fairly contemporary work done to write down impressions and details, along with a later gathering of facts, perhaps, to form the composite picture seen here. Given the hyper-real sensations that near-death experiences prompt [1] (the author gives an account of her injuries, and they were serious ones), it is perhaps of little surprise that the author views them with such great authority, but given the research done on near death experiences and the results of trauma, it is a bit of a disappointment that the book does not at least attempt to deal with the rational explanation for what she saw and immediately jumps to the mystical.

As a student of post-traumatic stress disorder and its consequences, some of the incidents of this book (including the nightmare the author had after having been given a sleeping pill to calm her insomnia as well as her dissociative incidents in the hospital) are clear evidence of the great trauma that the author suffered. Likewise, the book itself takes a somewhat defensive tone about her experiences, expressing a great deal of frustration at having her insights ignored when others probably pointed out that what she saw was all in her head. The fact that this does appear to be the case does not mean that the insights McCuen has about the need to care for and protect children are not valid or important, simply that they must be shown on other grounds rather than being a supposed emissary from God whose near-death experience grants her some sort of insight or expertise that would be more important than the scriptural record. The benefit that a reader will get from this book will greatly depend on how they view her vision, how much they agree with the author’s claims to special intuition and insight, and how they view the need to protect children from the dangers of the adult world. As far as this reader is concerned, whatever my opinion of the author’s experiences from a rational and scientific perspective, I wholeheartedly agree about the vital need to teach children about God’s ways (including death and the resurrections) as well as the importance of caring for and guarding children to preserve them from harm.

[1] http://on.io9.com/c9zsMeX