EADIE, Betty J(ean) 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born Betty Jean Stewart, 1942, in Valentine, NE; married first husband, c. 1957 (divorced); married Joe Eadie (an Air Force technician); children: eight.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Seattle, WA. Office—Onjinjinkta Enterprises, P.O. Box 238, Granite Falls, WA 98252. E-mail—betty@embracedbythelight.com.

CAREER:

Writer and publisher. Onjinjinkta Enterprises (includes Onjinjinkta Publishing and a literary agency), Granite Falls, WA, founder and publisher, 1998—. Worked as a hypnotherapist.

WRITINGS:

(With Curtis Taylor) Embraced by the Light, Gold Leaf Press (Placerville, CA), 1992.

The Awakening Heart: My Continuing Journey to Love, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1996.

The Ripple Effect: Our Harvest, Onjinjinkta Publishing (Granite Falls, WA), 1999.

Embraced by the Light: Prayers and Devotions for Daily Living, Onjinjinkta Publishing (Granite Falls, WA), 2001.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Christianity Today and Ladies' Home Journal.

ADAPTATIONS:

Embraced by the Light and The Awakening Heart: My Continuing Journey to Love were adapted as audiobooks by Simon & Schuster Audio, 1993 and 1996, respectively.

SIDELIGHTS:

At the age of thirty-one, Betty J. Eadie entered a Seattle, Washington, hospital in 1973 for a partial hysterectomy. According to Eadie, following her surgery she had a near-death experience (NDE) as she lay dying from internal bleeding in an unattended hospital room. During the experience, she talked with Jesus and learned many lessons about life and suffering. For nearly twenty years following the experience, Eadie kept the story largely to herself, sharing it primarily with friends and family while she volunteered to work with dying patients and their families. She also participated in a near-death study at a university and became a hypnotherapist. Prompted by those who knew of her story, Eadie eventually began to speak publicly about her experience and wrote the 1992 best-selling Embraced by the Light, which sold more than six million copies and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and paperback for more than two years.

Eadie's book is part autobiographical in that it traces her life's struggles, hardships, and challenges, which include unhappy times at the St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and a failed marriage. But the crux of the book focuses on her NDE and the message about universal laws that she claims that Jesus told her to impart to the living once she returned from her NDE. The book includes detailed descriptions of her NDE experience, including the moment she left her body. Eadie writes: "Then I felt a surge of energy. It was almost as if I felt a pop or release inside me, and my spirit was suddenly drawn out through my chest and pulled upward, as if by a giant magnet. My first impression was that I was free. There was nothing unnatural about the experience. I was above the bed, hovering near the ceiling." From that point on Eadie goes through a dark tunnel with a light at the end, where Jesus is waiting for her.

Writing in the New Republic, Jonathan Raban noted, "In an understandably breathless sequence, she describes how [Jesus] Christ gave her a crash course in universal cosmology and the meaning of life." As noted by Eadie on her official Web site, Embraced by the Light, her NDE experience and encounter with Jesus taught her "that we live in a universe of Law and Order, and that God created it for us. He created laws that apply to everything in life, even those which govern the unseen forces that protect us. Through use of these laws, we attract to us either the positive or negative, bliss or misery, wealth or poverty."

In his review of the book, Raban commented, "It is a pity that Curtis Taylor, Eadie's co-worker on the book … has licked her prose into professional shape and has given it a style of machine-turned simplesse that fails to do justice to the very personal nature of the experience reported here. For even before her death and brief ascension, Betty Eadie had a story worth telling." For the most part, however, reviews of the book focused less on the style of the book or the narrative being told than on the plausibility of her story. Walter Kim, writing in New York, noted that "what's interesting about Betty's journey is its peculiar middle-American spirit." The reviewer added, "Betty's is a warm and comfy Jesus Heaven, the one Andy Griffith's aunt Bee might have gone to if she'd had a stroke while knitting sweaters." National Review contributor Matthew Scully also noted that Eadie's experience "was a fairly conventional Christian vision, and in fact she was told that only through Christ can we come to Heaven." Scully went on to note that he had trouble with Eadie's description of tangible objects, noting, "But am I an earthbound dullard for doubting, among much else, the spatial element to all this—spirits floating in and out of celestial buildings, sitting down at crystal desks facing podiums, angels sitting down at 'looms' producing heavenly garments? So far as I can tell, these eye-witnesses don't mean like a building or like a crystal desk or like a podium. They describe tangible objects you waft through or sit on." Nevertheless, the reviewer, who also commented on a similar book titled Beyond the Light by Phyllis Atwater, added, "one element here does argue for the general veracity of both witnesses: their claim to have experienced guilt and Judgment."

Eadie's experience and book also came under close scrutiny by many Christian theologians. Craig Branch, writing in the Watchman Expositor, noted that the book "is filled with mixtures of truth (historic Biblical Christianity), Mormonism ([Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] LDS), new age philosophy, occultism, and even a dab of Roman Catholicism." In a Christian Research Institute Journal article, Richard Abanes, Paul Carden, and Joe Maxwell also questioned the amalgam of religious philosophies presented in the book and noted specifically the mixture of Mormonism and New Age beliefs. They wrote, "This is not surprising, since Eadie … claims to have a 'Heinz 57' religious background and a history of paranormal experiences extending into her childhood."

Since writing Embraced by the Light, Eadie has written several follow-up books, including The Awakening Heart: My Continuing Journey to Love, which continues Eadie's story about how the NDE experience helped transform her life. She also established her own publishing company called Onjinjinkta, which published her 1999 book, The Ripple Effect: Our Harvest, and Embraced by the Light: Prayers and Devotions for Daily Living. In a review of The Ripple Effect, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted, "Personal accounts of healing, resolution, making peace with the death of loved ones and affecting stories of near-death experiences … are among the most remarkable and compelling parts of the book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Eadie, Betty J., and Curtis Taylor, Embraced by the Light, Gold Leaf Press (Placerville, CA), 1992.

Lawrence, Raymond Quigg, Jr., Blinded by the Light: Exposing the Truth about Near-Death Experiences, Thomas Nelson, Inc. (Nashville, TN), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Sun-Times, April 3, 1994, Jocelyn McClurg, "Death, a Lively Topic on Best-Seller Lists," p. 12.

Christianity Today, April 3, 1995, Douglas Groothuis, "To Heaven and Back?," p. 39.

Christian Research Institute Journal, winter, 1994, Richard Abanes, Paul Carden, and Joe Maxwell, "A Special Report: What Is Betty Eadie Hiding?," p. 7.

Indian Country Today, November 23, 1994, Pamela Stillman, "Author Meets God in Best-Selling Book," section A, p. 1.

National Review, September 12, 1994, Matthew Scully, review of Embraced by the Light, pp. 83-86.

New Republic, August 16, 1993, Jonathan Raban, review of Embraced by the Light, pp. 32, 34, 36, 37.

New York, August 1, 1994, Walter Kim, review of Embraced by the Light, p. 51.

Observer, December 17, 1995, Kevin Toolis, review of Embraced by the Light, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, July 6, 1998, Calvin Reid, "Betty Eadie Starts Her Own Press," p. 13; October 18, 1999, review of The Ripple Effect: Our Harvest, p. 61.

ONLINE

Embraced by the Light: The Official Betty J. Eadie Web site,http://www.embracedbythelight.com (August 10, 2004).

Watchman Expositor Web site,http://www.watchman.org/ (August 17, 2004), Craig Branch, review of Embraced by the Light, Volume 11, number 6,1994.*