These days he is the pastor of a modest little church in a run-down part of Cincinnati. But he used to be a professor. Tenured. With a much better salary than he has now.
Giving up his job at Northern Kentucky University to become a minister at a struggling little inner-city church convinced most of his former colleagues that he's crazy. They were used to the old Howard Storm, the one who was cynical and an atheist. The one who taught art. The one who took a group of students to Paris in the spring of 1985.It was at the end of that trip that Storm suddenly became gravely ill. He was rushed to a Paris hospital, where he got sicker and sicker. The diagnosis was "perforated duodenum" and for the next 10 hours there was no surgeon available to operate. The pain was so intense it was like someone was ripping him open with knives.
Some time in the middle of the night, Storm suddenly found himself out of his body, looking down at his sick body. He felt great, although of course confused about this turn of events. And then, just as suddenly, he found himself being urged into the hallway by a group of people he assumed were doctors and nurses.
In the hallway everything was gray. The farther they walked down the hall, the darker and more dismal things got. Storm wanted to turn back but the people began fighting with him and cursing him. They weren't demons, Storm explains now. They were just self-centered people like himself. He felt lonely and scared and had the sense that this was going to be his fate for eternity. That's when he heard a voice telling him to pray to God.
Howard Storm the art professor hadn't prayed in years. All he could think of at first were some phrases: God bless America, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, for purple mountain's majesty. And then he suddenly had an image of himself as a little boy. He was singing "Jesus Loves Me," although the grown-up Howard couldn't remember the words. He had, for most of his life, considered Jesus to be no more real than Snow White. Still, he called out to Jesus to help him.
And Jesus did, says Storm. He carried him away from that dark hallway. He surrounded him with love. "I knew that He knew me better than I knew me, I knew He knew me more intimately than my wife or my mother knew me. I knew that He loved me in a way I didn't know I could experience being loved."
Storm has told the story of that experience hundreds of times; he told it again a week ago when he was one of the keynote speakers at the annual convention of IANDS, the International Association of Near Death Studies. The conference was held at the Wyndham Hotel, where a make-shift bookstore sold books with titles like "Lessons From the Light" and "After the Light" and "Beyond the Light." Howard Storm hasn't written a book, but he is famous in near-death circles anyway.
During a lunch break, Storm ordered pasta and talked about how his near-death changed his life. After his experience in that Paris hospital he wanted to hug everybody, he says. He wanted to talk about Jesus. Months later, after he had recovered, it was his near-death experience that seemed real and his real life that seemed like a dream.
He spent most of his time praying and urging others to pray. "I was a Bible-thumping fanatic," he says now. "One night my wife said, `I love you but I can't stand to live with you anymore, so I'm going to leave you.' I was dumbstruck. She said, `You talk and talk and talk about love all the time but you need to show it."' You need to start picking up your clothes off the floor, she told him. And helping clean up the dinner dishes. It was his first lesson in humility, but not his last.
Meanwhile, he had started going to church. Through church he found a community, a place where there were more than enough ways to demonstrate his love. He could visit nursing homes; he could teach Sunday school.
Eventually he attended seminary, became an assistant pastor, and then a pastor of his own church, Zion United Church of Christ.
He thinks there were three reasons why he was once an atheist. Not believing in God was a way of rebelling against his father's values. And the church he grew up in was a "lukewarm" church that didn't convey a sense of deep conviction. Most importantly, as a rational, scientific atheist, he was able to look down on people who believed "in supernatural things." He was a professor, an intellectual. A man who knew better than to have faith in things that could not be proven.
But now he has met Jesus, he says, and everything is different. Being embraced by Jesus, he says, changed his heart, and that changed his personality, from a person who was manipulative and self-serving to a person who wants to spend his life serving others.
There are plenty of people who don't believe his near-death experience, he says. It was just a chemical reaction, they'll tell him. But Storm doesn't buy that. Heck, he took LSD in the '60s in San Francisco. Chemicals don't change you forever, he says, the way a near-death experience can. "I went from a person of tremendous melancholy and no faith to a person of faith and joy."
"I've lived life with a scientific, materialistic view of the world," he says, "and now I've had 13 years of living life with faith and God. And my experience is that life is incomparably better living it in faith than living it without faith."
He is certain about God now and God's love, he says. He knows why we're here: to learn to love as Jesus would. During his near-death experience, he says, Jesus made it clear that he didn't care anything about all the prizes Storm had won in his life. All He cared about, says Storm, "was how I had interacted with other people."