#88 Richard D. Lewis: The Paranormal Christian
Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus, I’m Johnny Burke. Today’s guest is Richard D. Lewis. He is a journalist, a U.S. Air Force veteran and author of the Paranormal Christian books, which aligns supernatural phenomena with the biblical worldview. Today, we will be talking about encounters with angels, ghosts, and other beings. Richard, welcome to the show.
Richard Lewis: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Johnny Burke: How did your journey of exploring the metaphysical world start?
Richard Lewis: Well, you know, for me, it started with a voice, an intuition of a feeling, a knowing inside. When I was a little kid, this voice would tell me things. It actually saved my life because I was abducted as a child. When I was taken, this voice actually told me at the right moment, how to escape my captors. This is something I get into in my first book, the Paranormal Christian book one. So I’ve always had this presence, this knowing, and I didn’t have to go to church to find out about God, because I already had this voice that was speaking with me.
Johnny Burke: Speaking of, intuitive experiences, sometimes it does start with a voice. Did you ever have any, episodes when you’re young, where you were able to talk to spirits or anything unusual?
Richard Lewis: Well, so I’ve always been active with, with prayer and going to church as a young child, I began to formulate an understanding of what it was that I was experiencing and things like that. It was more like a one-way experience where I’m being guided, but nothing like spirits coming up to me. Now, later on, I had much more profound experiences, for example, loved ones that have passed on speaking to me. And that’s common in later years, but not in my childhood
Johnny Burke: Not in childhood. Okay. And speaking of those experiences, the Paranormal Christian books – they do include encounters with angels?
Richard Lewis: Oh, definitely. That was a huge thing that really pulled me into this concept was the triple number phenomenon. I’m sure many of your listeners have experienced this, or number sequencing where you see like one 11 or 11, 11, 4, 4, 4, things like that. This started way back, in my childhood and I knew that something profound was happening along with things like finding pennies, um, and just you get the sense that there’s something bigger than you are operating and you want to know what it is.
I’d be doing my homework or something and I would get a feeling and I would look up at the clock and it would be, 333, and then I would go back to what I was doing and watch some TV or something. Then I’d get that feeling again and look up at this 444. I would talk to my mom about it. She was a Christian mystic, and she was open-minded about these things, but most people just thought it was a coincidence or whatever.
So a little bit later in life, I looked it up and I found out that this was actually a common experience and the more I got into that, the more I studied it. And I did start having these profound experiences. I actually went to Doreen Virtue’s angel therapy practitioner certification program in the early two thousands. And I went to something that we called angel camp, where we actually learned how to do angel readings and, oh yeah, we would actually. See these beings that are working with people. I don’t find that it’s anything that’s not already revealed in the Christian faith.
What I’m trying to do with the Paranormal Christian is to be able to bridge the gap between the strange, the unusual the paranormal and correlate it to what we see revealed in the faith as what is said in the Bible.
Johnny Burke: What prompted you to go to this angel camp?
Richard Lewis: I felt like something was calling to me and I wanted to find out what am I supposed to do? Being saved from the abduction experience right there, let me know that I was here for a reason. And I think a lot of people are waking up to this knowledge that there’s meaning behind life. What I’m trying to do with my work through the Paranormal Christian series is to reach out to people and let them know that there is a purpose and a plan behind it all. So that was just part of the exploration.
So these beings were calling out to me, grabbing my attention through the triple numbers, though, messages and television, billboards, things like that. I wanted to get to know them a little bit better and just go as close as I can. And I did, I had many profound experiences. I saw guardian beings. I saw Hawkman spirits. I’ve seen bird people that you read about in almost all of the native traditions. I’ve seen ghosts and of course, angels, guardian angels. I feel like I’ve almost been to the other side and back; I haven’t had a near-death experience or anything like that, but have had after-death communications and, it’s wild and, I’m honored to just be a part of it.
Johnny Burke: Can you walk us through some of your experiences? let’s start with the angels first. What did they look like? what were the communications?
Richard Lewis: Most of the contact that you’ll have with an angel will be with your own guardian angels. In, the New Age line of thinking they pretty much call them guides. And it’s basically the same thing. Angels are a common experience across all cultures and religions and time and they’re here for us. They don’t really try to get credit and stuff for what they do. They do it quietly. Most people don’t even know that they’re doing what they do and aren’t even aware, but you’ll get like an intuition. You’ll get a knowing, you’ll get a gentle nudge- that’ll be from your angels. When I see an angel, in the least profound way would be like, I’ll see a spark over somebody’s shoulder. That’ll happen quite often when someone is talking to me and they’re really connecting with me. Something a little more profound is happening in this exchange rather than just a surface conversation. That’s the most common way.
You can hear a voice, you can feel something I’ve even felt something brush my face, like a gentle stroke of a wing across my face or my leg. I’ve even felt an index finger poking me in my forehead. And, I’ve had angels keep me from being late for an appointment or late from work -I’m oversleeping, and there’s a shaking and it wakes me up and there’s nobody there, you know, well, there is somebody there it’s just not a physical person. A lot of people see them as beings of light, and that makes perfect sense because they are celestial beings. They’re they’re spiritual beings.
Johnny Burke: I just spoke with someone not more than three or four days ago. Her name was Lucy Brand. (This is an upcoming episode) .She was telling me about some of her experiences and she’s clairvoyant as well as clairaudient and she actually saw Archangel Michael and Archangel Raphael, and apparently, they did have wings. Is that common?
Richard Lewis: Yes, angels have been depicted with wings as long as people have been drawing them and describing them. And you know, there’s different theories on this. That is the aura that you see, even in the paintings of the saints, paintings of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and you see halos, and that’s kind of like the aura.
Johnny Burke: Did you ever see one? And if you did, did they have wings or did they just look like normal human beings?
Richard Lewis: When I see an angel, it’s not like a photograph. It’s more of an impression. And a lot of it depends on, how profoundly clairvoyant I am at that moment in time. To reach that level of clairvoyance, you really need to really purify yourself. You cut off the caffeine, the chocolate, fats, cut down on the meat, all those kinds of things. When I was going to the angel camp, we had a regimen where we were fasting from all that stuff. We had a media fast, no television, no radio.
When you live on that kind of level, it’s kind of like a religious practice where you separate yourself and go to a monastery or something. You will have more profound visions and experiences when you do those kinds of things. You see this in the native traditions, you see this in Christianity, in almost all faiths where you quiet your mind. In the Bible it says, ‘be still and know that I am God ‘ and this is what happened.
You ever seen the movie Daredevil? Where Daredevil’s blind, but he sees with like a sonogram hearing and it’s like outlines, like silver outlines. So that’s what I see in the most profound moments. Then yes, I would see wings, like the Hawkman guardian I saw when I gave a reading on one of the people. I immediately saw this being that looks kind of like Hawkman from the comic books, but not in not in a silly cartoony way, but regal. But yeah, you make out wings and, and you see that.
Johnny Burke: Beings like the one you just mentioned, like Hawkman. They’ve been described to me by several people as spirit guides. I’ve been told this dozens of times- we all have them. They’re a little bit different than angels although sometimes they can be the same thing -as far as I’m told. But some of these spirit guides can look almost like something that’s come out of a comic book, but a lot of their function is to protect us. In your experiences did you get a sense of that, or not really?
Richard Lewis: I think the Bible’s really clear that guardian angels are a real thing. This is in Psalm 91 and 11. From my experience, that is what they are, and they will appear in various and diverse ways. We see all kinds of diversity in the physical world. Why wouldn’t the spiritual world be just as diverse? When I see it being like that, to me, that’s an angel and it’s a guardian angel. It’s a guardian spirit. In fact, when it was in between me and this lady that I was reading for in such a way that it imposed itself, like it was protecting her. Not protecting her from me, but it was letting me know basically,’ Hey, I’m here. You got to get through me to get to her.’ Was the sense I had from the presence of this being.
I experienced similar entities years ago when I would be in between sleep and being awake, like after physical therapy. Laying on the table and getting my knee iced and then I would see this Birdman appearing over my face. It was really unsettling. Spirits will do that and then sometimes that tends to be more of a spooky experience. So then you got to wonder what you’re seeing and, and this is why we’re told in first John, for one and six to test the spirits, because you really don’t always know what it is that you’re dealing with. I believe that these beings can modify how they appear to us too. So I don’t think they necessarily hold one form.
Johnny Burke: I’ve heard that several times and another thing that keeps coming up when we talk about angels and guides is that they’re here to help us, but they are not here to interfere with our soul contract that you make in between incarnations and come down here. No matter how good or how bad it is, the spirit guides or angels, whatever you want to call them, they’re here to help us, but they’re also not to interfere with our path.
Johnny Burke: What are your thoughts on your experience?
Richard Lewis: Well, they definitely won’t interfere with your free will choices. They want the best for you, but they’re not going to stop you necessarily from doing something bad or, whatever else- that’s on you. They’ll try to get you to do the right thing. I would say that there are extreme cases where an angel would intervene if you were about to experience a premature death and it really wasn’t your time in the sole contract, an angel could intervene. Full possession is very rare, but it can happen and it can happen with an angel, though temporary. You know, take the wheel, like, say you passed out while you were driving, and you were about to go off an embankment and angel could actually grab the wheel through your body just long enough to get you back on track.
Johnny Burke: I’ve heard episodes of that as well, which I think is really cool. Angels are one of my favorite topics. Because a lot of people that come on to the show talk about angels. They talk about spirit guides, and soul contracts, and all that other good stuff.
Richard Lewis: It’s very compelling. It’s in the Bible, but it’s also in all the other religions and cultures around the world. So the weight of evidence is quite clear.
Johnny Burke: It is. There’s one thing I’ve been told over and over is that every single one of us has spirit guides. There is usually more than one, and they can evolve and they can come in and out of your life based on your development. Even though I’ve never experienced it, it seems to me, pretty easy to understand. Here’s a quote from your book,” a mystical exploration of paranormal phenomena through the lens of the Bible.” We know that the paranormal and the Bible are not things that are known to coexist. What prompted you to look at this phenomenon through the lens of the Bible?
Richard Lewis: Well, for me they do coexist. If you look at the Bible, it’s a paranormal revelation from cover to cover. That’s the thing that I’m trying to get across to people- paranormal simply means supernatural. So if you accept the witness of the Bible, you have to accept the supernatural, i.e., the paranormal. You’re talking about angels and, , in Psalm 91, it talks about guardian angels, in Matthew 18 and 10, it talks about guardian angels. All around the globe people have an understanding of angels.
There are strange things afoot, ghosts, UFOs, and after-death communications. People are experiencing things. And so we have to be able to give them answers. And I found that people weren’t always getting those answers from the church. It’s not that these answers conflict with the revelation that’s given to us through the scriptures and through our faith. It’s just people aren’t really peering deeply enough to see that it’s there. Let’s bring the paranormal back into the light where it belongs.
Johnny Burke: Okay. Now you mentioned after-death communications. Can you give us an example of an event that you felt or saw or otherwise experienced?
Richard Lewis: Well, this definitely gives a lot of comfort to people who’ve lost loved ones. There does seem to be a measure of provision where I would say that divine God allows this to happen. What I’ve found is that. when a loved one passes over, they have some time before they cross over to basically say goodbye and, that’s a very common experience. Anyone you talk to will tell you about dreams that they’ve had, with a parent that’s passed on, or God forbid a child. They’ll experience it usually in a dream, they don’t usually say very much, spirits, aren’t very talkative. They might say a word or two, but usually, they just bless you with their presence. And you know, you felt what your mother’s spirit feels like, and you know that’s who that is. Close relatives, like my father and my mother, I’ve definitely experienced them. I had this really profound, dream with my mom just a few years ago. I talk about this in the paranormal Christian Book Two where she came to me in my dreams. We had a few words and, it was great to be reunited with my mom again -I hugged my mom.
The next morning on the way to work, I was thinking about this, got in right behind a person that had” mom” right there on their license plate. I was like,” wow, this is amazing”. So I went home, and I was telling my wife this story and this and happened to be my mom’s birthday, the next day after the dream. And right as I was telling her this story, she said,” happy birthday, mommy.” And right on television, there was an image that came up on the show that we were watching that looked like it spelled out the word exactly: M.O.M. So I actually froze the live television and took a snap of that. And that’s in my book. I also took a picture of the license plate of the person that I was in behind that same day. But my editors were telling me “Rich, you don’t want to put that in the book.” And I was like, “yeah, you’re right.”
This is how spirit communicates to us. It’s constantly happening. Even though you may not have personally experienced angels, or at least you don’t think you have, they’re always there talking to you.
Sometimes you’ll get an idea, an inspiration. Music, for example; the word music comes from the muses. Every creative person or a person that invents things will always get these messages, these ideas, these concepts. You might think it’s coming from you, but quite often, it’s coming from outside of you.
Johnny Burke: Now, when you had the dream with your mom, were you aware that she had passed or was it a type of moment where …. So you were? Right. Okay.
Richard Lewis: Absolutely. I knew that I was in a dream and that, that was my mom.
Johnny Burke: Would you consider that a lucid dream though? Because you were actually aware you were dreaming?
Richard Lewis: It was something like elusive dream although I wasn’t consciously doing anything to control it. Most people think of lucid dreaming as like,’ oh, look, I’m dreaming. I think I’m going to fly for a little while that’ll be fun. ‘it wasn’t like that. I was in the parameters of this dream. I knew what was going on. I knew that it was my mom, so in that sense it was lucid. Okay.
Johnny Burke: I’ve heard other people that have said the same thing; that they were lucky enough to see a relative who was passed and actually be aware that they’re dreaming at the same time.
When we talk about the church and faith communities, there’s not a whole lot of discussion about after death communication or reincarnation for that matter. Why do you suppose that is?
Richard Lewis: Well , after-death communication is one of those topics where they don’t get into it very much because there’s not a lot of information on it and out of a preponderance of caution, the church will often remain silent on something. I mentioned earlier about discerning spirits, first John, one through six; ‘how can you test the spirits if you don’t interact with them?’ So to me that implies there would be some interaction. The key I think, is that you don’t know who you’re interacting with all the time, but the church doesn’t expressly say that there isn’t a provision where you couldn’t have an experience with your departed loved one. In my own life, and in so many people I’ve interviewed, this is such a common thing that it just happens, and everybody talks about it. You hear people talking about, “yeah, I saw my dad at the foot of my bed” or “my mom came to me in a dream”.
I’ve had it happen, not just in dreams, I’ve had it during waking moments. It’s not something that happens every day but, I’ve had my mom appear to me at other times. My father appeared to me at his wake, and we interacted, and I’ve had that happen with other departed, loved ones as well.
Johnny Burke: Having that ability; is that a gift or is it sometimes more of a burden?
Richard Lewis: I think it’s both. But first of all, I think we’re all gifted with psychic abilities and, it’s kind of the more common vernacular to refer to these things as psychic experiences, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience. In the Bible, it talks about things like word of wisdom, word of knowledge, and you see these things happening. For example, there’s the famous story of the Witch of Endor where the medium there conjures the prophet, Samuel. Some people say,” well, that’s a forbidden practice, so you can’t count that”. How about the transfiguration? Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus and talk to him.
And there’s a story of the rich man and Lazarus. So these are all examples in the Bible where people who are passed on are still conscious, still interacting. And the Bible says, I’m the God of the living, not the dead. So that tells you right there. I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I’m the God of the living, not the dead. That right there opens the door for that. Now reincarnation? That’s definitely really digging into it. Even though I’m a Christian, I’m not afraid to dig into this because many Christians believe in reincarnation and I’ve come to that belief, but I don’t think it contradicts the Bible.
Johnny Burke: Do you not know me as Elijah? Was it John the Baptist that said that?
Richard Lewis: That was Jesus. And, in Matthew 11, verse 14, he says, and if you’re willing to receive it, he is speaking of John the Baptist is Elijah.
Johnny Burke: So it was John the Baptist then, right?
Richard Lewis: It was John the Baptist that he was talking about because they were trying to figure out- actually what started the conversation was the disciples were trying to figure out who Jesus was. And people were saying that he was Elijah, that was returned as Elijah, or one other prophet. So right there that implies a belief in reincarnation or at least something that looks a lot like reincarnation.
Johnny Burke: Because Elijah had died 400 years ago…
Richard Lewis: Exactly. and right there, Jesus said he is Elijah. That’s a pretty good endorsement. It doesn’t say he was like Elijah; it says he is Elijah,
Johnny Burke: Right. Exactly.
Richard Lewis: But he was also John. That’s the thing about reincarnation that you have to understand; that spirit force, because we are a spirit, soul, and body. Even though it’s in the Bible, people don’t understand that. So that’s something that I teach in my books; we’re spirit, soul, and body. Your spirit is that which animates the body and creates the soul through the union of body and spirit. So the spirit might be, in this incarnation, I’m Richard. But then I might be somebody different in another incarnation, but I’m still the same spirit. So that’s, that explains how someone could be both Elijah and John.
Johnny Burke: I’ve been told we’ve had hundreds of past lives, if not thousands.
Richard Lewis: Well, reincarnation, it’s considered a heresy in the church, but it’s an old teaching and a lot of people think the church -Father Origen believed in reincarnation. He definitely believed in the transmigration of souls and in a world before ours. I believe in those things too, and I don’t think it contradicts the Bible. This spirit’s soul body will die, but who’s to say that spirit doesn’t animate another body at some other point until the resurrection body? which the Bible talks about.
Johnny Burke: For those people that are listening, who have not listened to this podcast before, if you really want to learn about reincarnation, go to www.reincarnationresearch.com, which is a site that was administered by Walter Semkiw, who unfortunately passed last month. But he talks about the work of Ian Stevenson, who was the psychiatry chair at the University of Virginia. Knowing what you know now, and seeing evidence of different types of psychic phenomena, when you hear someone say “I believe Christianity needs a reboot. “Are you inclined to say that might be right? Or is it something you want to avoid?
Richard Lewis: Oh, no, not at all. I don’t think Christianity needs a reboot at all. I think the problem with Christianity is all of the baggage and all of the dogma that’s gotten attached to it. But I think the faith revealed in the Bible through what we profess in the creeds is all about the paranormal. It says that God is the maker of all things visible and invisible. Right then and there you’re talking about the paranormal. The problems with the church are things that people have done because we all have free will choices and through those free will choices, we can bring a lot of suffering to ourselves and to others.
Johnny Burke: Yes. Very much so. You mentioned something about UFOs, which I believe as one of your experiences. Tell us about that. How did that happen and what was it like?
Richard Lewis: the UFO problem is multifaceted. There isn’t a clear single explanation for what UFOs are.I didn’t actually see a UFO until much later in my life. I’m also an Air Force veteran. So I’ve seen all the high-tech, advanced, aircraft and even spacecraft that we field. And there’s a lot of things that are, are unknown, Ben Rich of Skunkworks said that there were things that were 50 years ahead of anything we’ve seen. The Paranormal Christian book Two. I devote about 20% of the book to the subject of UFOs. And I go through the history of UFOs and all the different theories and including the interdimensional theory, which I think has a lot of merits certainly for the close encounters.
I’ve seen a couple of UFOs. I saw one when I was in Colorado Springs in the military years ago. As I was traveling on the road, I saw a reddish orange-ish, globe, a ball of light, really. It was kind of bouncing along. It looked a little bit like the light on a radio tower, only it wasn’t blinking, and it was also free moving through the air. I was actually making my way to the base at the time and several people were pulled off the side of the road, also looking at this thing. I saw it go for quite a bit, and then it disappeared. I came home that night and I went to the news and I was trying to find, all my local news channels to see if there were any reports, and I didn’t get anything. I actually called Norad. I was just an airman at the time, and some public affairs NCO got on the phone with me and basically gave me the talking point ‘the air force doesn’t acknowledge this and that’ and everything, so that was one.
I also had a sighting in Borrego Springs in 2016. I went there for a sky-watching visit with my son. You can actually see the Milky Way galaxy, you can see, the Andromeda galaxy, things like that. And we’re just laying on our backs there, looking up at the stars, and what I saw was like this oval shape form in the sky. It was like an eye opening. It was like white, like yellowish white, and it opened and it closed. I felt that I was experiencing something profound. Perhaps a portal opening or something, was this spiritual? I’m not really sure,
Johnny Burke: wow.
Richard Lewis: It was definitely nothing conventional because I’ve been on-site as a journalist and working for the Air Force, covering like the Delta four heavy launches, the space shuttle launches. I’ve seen all these exotic aircraft, the B2, the F 1-17, I’ve seen them up close. I’ve seen them in flight, and this is nothing like any kind of conventional equipment that we have.
Johnny Burke: Your book series, the Paranormal Christian has plenty of experiences, yours and the experiences of others as well, which covers quite a bit of ground., Sounds good. I think you’re going to get a lot of curious people who, once they see those two words, co-mingled; Paranormal and Christian, they’re going to think, ‘what is this? I have to check this out. ‘
Richard thanks for coming onto the show. How can our listeners learn more about you online?
Richard Lewis: My website is Richard D Lewisauthor.com. And you can find my books on Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, and all the common places where you find books.