Father Nathan Castle is a Catholic Priest who is a lecturer, a workshop facilitator, a retreat director, and an author. He has served in campus ministries in California and Arizona for 27 years and he has chaired the Executive Board of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association (CCMA). In his books titled Afterlife Interrupted: Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over and Afterlife Interrupted Book Two: Helping Souls Cross Over, Father Nathan describes the remarkable ways he and his prayer partners help “stuck souls,” who are people who died suddenly and traumatically, to complete their passage to the Other Side of the veil.
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Father Nathan Castle: A Catholic Priest Who Has Helped “Stuck Souls” Who Died Suddenly And Traumatically Adjust To The Afterlife, Including Patrick Swayze’s Deceased Sister!
I hope this finds each of you so very well. I’m feeling very blessed and honored, especially as a person brought up in the Jewish faith, to welcome Father Nathan Castle, a Catholic priest who is a lecturer, a workshop facilitator, and a retreat director to the show. Father Nathan and his precious dog, Toto, are in Tucson, Arizona.
Father Nathan graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio and entered the Dominican order in 1979. He received his Master of Arts and Master of Divinity degrees from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has served in campus ministries in California and Arizona for many years and chaired the Executive Board of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association. He is also the author of three books.
I’m looking forward to chatting with Father Nathan about his fascinating second book titled, Afterlife Interrupted: Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over and his fascinating third book titled, Afterlife Interrupted Book Two: Helping Souls Cross Over. These two books describe the remarkable ways Father Nathan and his prayer partners help stuck souls who are people who died suddenly and traumatically to complete their passage to the other side of the veil. This will surely be an incredibly interesting and very enlightening interview. Let’s begin.
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Father Nathan, what a pleasure to welcome you to the show. Let’s begin with this question because you have such a fascinating story to share with everyone. What causes a soul to become stuck? Is getting stuck before crossing over a common occurrence? Why did you remove the word stuck from the title of your second book titled, Afterlife Interrupted Book Two: Helping Souls Cross Over?
Afterlife, Interrupted Book Two: Helping Souls Cross Over
We can get stuck here or hereafter by the way that we imagine circumstances in our lives. With our own thoughts, we can paint ourselves into a corner and think, “I’ve tried everything and nothing’s working.” People often will go to a counselor or a confidant and complain about something that’s going wrong in their life that they can’t seem to get past. When help is offered, they resist it or won’t have it. Does anybody resemble that remark? It’s a pretty common thing.
It is a very common thing. People often say your thoughts create your reality.
They absolutely do. First of all, you experience the sudden death of your husband, so you can relate to your audience who have lost loved ones, especially suddenly. Most people don’t get stuck. Don’t think that because you heard a show and some priests talked about stuck souls, it is common. I don’t think it is. One thing is that they’re sometimes just overwhelmed. Everything happened all at once and they’re out of body. Sometimes, they need a chance to chill.
That’s why a lot of traditions have something that says, “Rest in Peace,” at a funeral. Sometimes they need afterlife rest to regroup, but the point of resting is rising or re-energized. That’s why we go to sleep. We rest so that we can be re-energized. That happens a lot, but sometimes people are more stuck because they create some exaggerated story in their minds and get heartbroken over it.
I have a question about this that’s popping up from me now. I was told when my husband crossed over that he had done this many times and he was an older soul. Do you think some of these stuck souls may be younger souls who haven’t had the experience of crossing over that much so they don’t know to go to the light?
I’m not sure. As you and I move in this world, we need a lot of people with a lot of different religious and philosophical trainings and then lots of people have cosmologies and understandings of the world that are quite different from our own. I haven’t been taught about past lives and that’s not a Catholic thing. However, I’m open to the possibility because I believe God and the things of God, including the whole universe, are a mystery and we can understand things only partly. I listen to that and I wonder about it. I know plenty of Catholic people who believe that they’ve had past lives, but as a practicing Catholic priest that I am, that’s not my cosmology.
As you and I move in this world, we need a lot of people with a lot of different religious and philosophical training. Click To Tweet
Please give us some examples. Why did you remove the word stuck from the second book and you’ve got stuck on the first book? They are all stuck, right?
No, that’s why I changed it. In your husband’s case, it wasn’t malicious. It was accidental, but sometimes on top of all that, somebody wanted you dead and killed you. It can be more and more complicated depending on what a person’s story is. Sometimes people’s whole identity, for example, is bound up in raising small children and then they die suddenly. They feel their identity is ripped away and they need to find a next reason for living even after they’ve died, but they’re not necessarily ready to because they’re still angry about having their previous reason for living ripped away without their permission. Sometimes they need to calm down at some point and recognize that you can keep thinking that as long as you’d like, but it’s not helping.
You’re right. It’s like you’re no longer in your body. What was the difference between being stuck in the first book and not in the second?
One thing that I’ve seen is that a lot of the people that my prayer partners and I have helped land in their afterlife in something that is healing. It has something of the affect of a clinic. For people that have been through twelve-step and addiction stuff, sometimes it’s like a behavioral health continuum. There comes a point where they’ve received all the help that level or place in the afterlife can give them, and it’s time to graduate. My prayer partners and I are like the discharge staff at such a place.
The work that they’ve needed to do has been promoted by others and our job is to help them get out the door knowing where they’re going, the way that you’ve gone through a bunch of surgeries and stuff. People will ask you on the day of your dismissal from a hospital, “Do you understand your meds? Do you know when your next appointment is? Do you know about physical therapy? Somebody is going to come in to pick you up. Will you be well-fed?” We have a job analogous to that at the end of a healing process where they’re ready to go onto the next level.
It’s cool what you’re doing. It’s wonderful. What a blessing that you are getting these messages. Let’s lead into that. What inspired you? What happened that helped you start helping these souls cross over? What does the church say about this unusual special work you’re doing?
I’m a Catholic from birth and in a very Catholic home that not only told me rules and regulations about faith, tradition, and so on. They taught me about the spirit and I had a family on Earth and in Heaven, and I had a purpose. Part of the way Catholics understand the afterlife is the idea of purgatory, that not everybody springs from Earth to Heaven in an instant that there’s some gradient or even the word purge means to cleanse that there might be something that involves cleansing.
That’s very cool. I never thought of it that way. That’s a very good concept.
Yes. Have you ever purged your closet, your house, or something like that? You’re happy afterwards because now it’s cleaner.
It’s not a punishment. It’s a place where you are getting cleansed and purified in a way.
Sometimes purging or getting rid of things helps you appreciate what’s important. You didn’t need ten coats. You picked out the couple that you’re going to use and eight of them go to the poor. I was taught as a child to pray for the souls in purgatory, especially if you help them move from purgatory to heaven, which was imagined as an international border like going from Mexico to the US or something like that.
Sometimes purging or getting rid of things helps you appreciate what's important. Click To Tweet
Both of my aunts were Dominican first-grade teachers and they were Catholic nuns. I had my mom and my dad, and I’ve just absorbed into this community. I was taught if your prayer was the prayer that got somebody over the border into heaven, you’d have a friend for all eternity. As a little kid, I’d fall asleep praying that way. I thought they were at the bank. When you go to the bank, you have to wait in a line with those zigzagged ropes. I thought I could help them cut in line.
You ended up doing it.
I knew that only the Catholics prayed that way, so I didn’t know very many Jews growing up in Southeast Texas, but I knew lots of Baptists who wouldn’t have believed in purgatory. They were Christian, but they didn’t believe in purgatory. I would look at the newspaper and see which church their funeral was going to be at and I would pray for the ones that weren’t Catholic.
Why am I not surprised? What a beautiful heart you have. What does the church say about what you’re doing?
The church is 1.4 billion people and they don’t all know me. The most important thing is I made a vow of obedience within my religious order in the Dominicans. There are 5,500 Dominican men in the world. In the Western United States and I live in Arizona, we’re organized into a group of 140 and elect a leader. The two leaders elected in the time my books have been out have both endorsed them and written at the front that, “Nathan can be trusted.” That doesn’t mean that I’m across the board that every Catholic would agree, but the most important ones in my life know me.
Also, the important people in your life support you.
There have been a couple of times when I’ve been disinvited to be at a Catholic church when I was brought in to do a workshop, and they learned about this part of my life and that’s okay. I only want to go where I’m welcome anyway. I’m welcome enough places that you don’t need to fuss about that thing.
That’s true. You talk about working with a prayer partner. Together with a prayer partner, you’ve been able to help over 400 stuck souls complete their passage to the other side. Your books are fascinating. I enjoyed reading them, so how do you experience these stuck souls who need your help?
They come in the night in a dream. Not everybody remembers their dreams, but I always have, or at least I remember the ones I remember. There are probably others that I forget, but I do remember dreams most mornings. If you were with me over coffee, I could tell you some dreams. Most of the time, they’re about my own psychobabble, whatever my psyche is doing, processing things and such.
Several years ago, I was dreaming about ending a round of golf. We went into the bar and were having a drink, and it turned out there was a silent auction for a charity. I’ve run charities my whole life and fundraised around them, so silent auctions are no big deal. That’s another part of my psyche. I saw a piece of framed art along a wall and pointed out to my partner, “Look at that horrid piece of art on the wall. Someone should be ashamed for donating that to a charity who would give something for that.” It was so horrid that I wanted to get a closer look at it the way that we do when there’s a tragedy. You’ve been through the death of your husband on a freeway, but do you still slow down when you see a crash on the freeway and want to get a closer look?
No.
You don’t because of that, but most of your readers probably do.
A lot of people I also watch and I go, “I’ve been there and I’ve done that.” Bless them.
Good for you, but many of us still stop, gawk and looky-loo. I started like that. I wanted to see more of it because it was so awful. We didn’t have televisions on the wall several years ago, but it moved toward me and inside the frame, a movie began to play. It was a man burning to death on the radiator of an engine of a car from the late ’50 to early ’60s, the kind with fins and lots of chrome. He wasn’t in a crash. Something else happened to make him catch fire. He was screaming with anger at someone outside the picture frame as he died. It was so different. I woke up from it right away.
The first part or the golf game was mine, but not the screaming guy. I sat up and said in prayer, “Whoever you are, my name is Nathan. I saw what you wanted me to see. Don’t leave yet. I’m going to try to write this down because it’s important.” I was on a retreat with twenty other people and one of them had spiritual gifts that I thought might be handy. She and I had practiced praying together already. I said to her, “Would you mind if we get a break? Could we pray together about whatever happened?”
I don’t use the word channeling because, in the Catholic church, it’s radioactive. It upsets people. I say it’s a gift of prophecy, which belongs both to Judaism and to Christianity. The prophet allows God to speak through them. She did that and said, “Whoever this guy is, he wants to talk to you. Would it be okay?” I said, “We pray protective prayer first.” We prayed to Michael the Archangel, in the Catholic Christian tradition, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and a number of other different saints and made sure that we were safe from any influence that would be negative. That’s important. I don’t pick up hitchhikers on Earth or on the next plane.
Afterlife: I don’t pick up hitchhikers on Earth or on the next plane. Not everybody is a safe company, or at least not at present.
When I read that, I thought that it was wonderful that you do that.
Not everybody is safe company or at least not at present. We did that and out came a story of this man. It’s in so many podcasts. If you go to my YouTube channel, so many podcasters asked, “How did this get started?” and that story’s been told again and again. He spoke up and we learned about what he was upset about and we helped him.
Did you help him to cross over?
We did. In his specific case, he had died at twenty years old. He kept an eye on his wife for the next 40 years. She was dying of cancer in her early 60s and his issue was, “I want to greet her when she crosses, but I can’t the way I am.” He was from rural Georgia. We figured, “We’ll do what we can and figure out how to help you get what you want.”
I remember reading that story in your book. It was a great introduction to what you started to do. You’ve answered the process you use to help them. Are they all recently deceased? They’re not, are they?
No, they’re not. Once in a great while, we’ll get somebody who’s been gone for a long time, more than a century, but that doesn’t happen very often at all. Most of them have died during my lifetime. A little bit more during the 20th century, but before I was born. Mostly in recent decades, at least. Sometimes you can tell by the way they tell a story. When the car flipped over, they pulled out their cell phone and called 911. That’s going to tip you off a little bit.
That’s more recent.
The way that movies orient us towards time and space with fashions, music, and cars, sometimes they’ll do that. They’ll let me know that this was in the ’50s, the ’40s, or something like that with those cues, but mostly, they’re relatively recent.
Some of these souls have been in a holding pattern for a long time until they find you.
I thought at first that none of them paid attention to time. One of the things I’ve learned is that we try to simplify things by creating categories in our minds and imaginations that dying and surviving must be like this. Except that there are billions of people on the Earth right now and we don’t all do the same things the same way. There are a lot of ways to do anything.
Afterlife: There are billions of people on Earth right now, and we don’t all do the same things in the same way. There are a lot of ways to do anything.
People that die and come to me, I listen for how we can help. We’re at the end of a healing continuum when we’re not getting people as though they were in the crash, the fire, or the flood. They’ve already been helped by others and we’re at the tail end where we help them move from the healing place they’ve been to the next set of opportunities.
You’re a facilitator.
It’s graduation day. They’re oftentimes the way that a college graduate or high school graduate might look ahead to all the possibilities out in front of them. “What are you going to do the rest of your life?” It has that affect to it. The person has moved through the healing that they needed after their abrupt death and now, they have the energy and the enthusiasm to look forward to going, “I’d like to do that.”
They picked you as the person that they’re going to work with.
We’ve asked, “Why me?” One guy said, “Your light was on.” I thought that was sweet. One Catholic lady said, “I used to shop from the JCPenney and the Sears catalog, and they gave me a catalog and said, “Sit there and page through this.” She came upon me and my prayer partner and said, “I was a Catholic. I’d like that one.”
It’s like going to my show with all the healers, mediums, and people who could help you. If you’re interested in healing, go choose one. It’s the same thing.
One person told me, it was like being at a travel agent or in the lobby of a hotel when you’re checking in and there’s a shelf full of all the local things that you could do and see. They were shown a lot of possibilities. My prayer partners and I were one of those.
Your light came on. That’s great. With all that’s happened to all of these people who you helped to cross over, is there anything such as judgment on the other side, even in the case of suicide?
Not the way that people think about being punished as a consequence of being judged. When you think of what happens in a courtroom, all we’re trying to do is arrive at the truth of what happened. That’s what courtrooms are about. Sometimes people are trying to be deceitful or trying to get away with something. Other times there are different points of view. The judgment that I’ve seen is about arriving at the truth and not shaming anybody. If a person is believing something about themselves, their world, or others that isn’t true, it will hold them back. It’s important to see things truly.
I do believe that they have to become responsible for the ways they hurt other people and all those things.
A lot of your readers have been in grief. Grief is hard enough. Losing a loved one is hard any way you look at it, but sometimes people make it harder by believing things that aren’t true. “If only I had done this, that, or the other, he or she would still be alive.” Sometimes people will feel guilty about things that the rest of us would say, “Sweetheart, that’s normal.”
Losing a loved one is hard any way you look at it, but sometimes people make it harder by believing things that aren't true. Click To Tweet
“I wasn’t there at the moment he died.” People will do this bedside vigil and they go for a cup of coffee and they die. They’re upset with themselves that they weren’t there. They’re all ways that people can make grief harder than it needs to be. If they come to me, I’ll say, “You’re entitled to grieve anyway. You please, but you have dirt in the wound.”
When a person takes their life by suicide, is there judgment about that when they cross over?
They’re surprised that there isn’t. Sometimes they hide because they anticipate that they’re going to be punished. Sometimes they try to isolate themselves in the afterlife as best they’re able, but what I’ve seen is it’s not tolerated. We are not islands. We belong to each other always. I call them guardian angels. Sometimes people call them guiding spirits or whatever. Their guardian will stay with them, even if they suicided, and give them all the space and privacy they can, but they won’t allow isolation because it’s detrimental. You can create some room like the one you’re in in the afterlife, but your guardian will be in the corner of it, quietly sitting there watching.
They try to get you to listen to them. They try to talk you into some little bit of engagement. Some of the folks that suicide wanted the pain to stop. They weren’t trying to commit murder on themselves, hurt their loved ones, or anything. Sometimes they were in such pain that they hoped this would stop the pain. They learned that it might have changed a lot of things, but it didn’t end my life completely. They’re then coached, “Let’s pick up where you left off. Live in the present moment. Now, you see that you did in fact, survive your death, but let’s work on how we can get you up and around.” There’s a team of people that help folks.
They’re helping them to heal on the other side. Does anyone ever truly die alone, including those who have seemingly died alone due to COVID?
No.
This is important for people to hear because I hear all the time that people are like, “Those poor people died alone.” I have been told in my world that’s not true. Why don’t you tell people about that?
There’s a whole category of near-death visitation. Are you familiar with that phenomenon where a lot of times in hospices where the death of someone is quite clear that it’s approaching? My grandmother had that. You might be there physically in this body trying to console your dying loved one and they’re talking to their mother who died many years ago. They’re looking past you while you’re looking at them because they’re looking at somebody in the upper corner of the room. That happens a lot when others come to visit. Sometimes they even call their name out loud if they are able to verbalize it.
All these people who feel that their loved ones died alone because of COVID, they did not die alone. They were surrounded by their loved ones from the other side.
Yes. It can still be a grief on your part that because of COVID, you couldn’t go into the nursing home room. I understand that. That should be respected, but if a person was counseling with me, I’d say, “I’m sorry that happened. None of us would wish that. It would’ve been nice that you have been able to hold her hand, but let’s deal with what’s now. The truth is nobody dies alone,” whether they want to receive that or not, it’s up to them.
It’s such a comfort for those who are open to receiving that. You have such wonderful stories of stuck souls you helped to cross over to the other side. I’ve chosen a few for you to share with all of us. Let’s begin with your story about a young girl named Ronnie, who was swept out to sea by a tsunami and got stuck because she thought her parents were angry with her.
She’s a dear. In the dream, I was at a beach and knew I was in Sri Lanka, the little island nation South of India. I knew I was a young girl. The way she told a story put me inside of her. They don’t all do that because there are different ways to tell a story. She bobbed around when this wave swept her and she drowned. She was twelve years old and spoke British English, the way Indian people do. They don’t say vacation. They say holiday. They were on holiday and it was a Sunday morning and her parents were sleeping in and the beach looked so beautiful. She was forbidden to go to the beach without them, but she broke their rules and went down to the beach because she couldn’t stand it.
She said, “I couldn’t have been more unlucky. I arrived at the beach just in time to be swept out to sea.” She was the only child of Asian parents and she said, “We Asians have a great deal of respect for our parents and I died being disobedient to them.” She was very stuck about depriving her parents of their only child and any grandchildren they might have had. She loaded herself up with guilt about being disobedient. We had to talk her down off the ledge.
How did you talk her down off the ledge?
One of the things I said was, “It’s okay, dear. You died being disobedient to your parents. I want you to tell me stories of how disgraceful and disobedient you were that would’ve made me loathe you.” She said, “No, it wasn’t like that. I was mostly kind and obedient to them.” I said, ” That’s the point. You died at the worst possible moment and you know that, but what you’re saying about yourself is way exaggerated.” You were mostly an obedient child. It’s just that you were disobedient at a critical moment. Can you forgive yourself that brief lapse and get on with it?” She was able to do that. She needed to change her mind.
Please tell us the story of Shelby, the retired country lawyer who was stuck due to shame.
In the late ’70s, some of the American-made cars were these enormous heavy sedans like Lincolns and Cadillacs. We used to call them land yachts. They were slow and clunky. I was driving one of those and I was in the smallest town in Georgia. I was in the central district and I was turning left onto a side street. The street became a staircase that I was driving down. There was water at the bottom of it and I landed in water. The current pushed the car around to the left and the car began to sink. Nothing controlled anything and I went underwater and woke up.
It turned out that Shelby had a 50-year marriage. His wife had died. He had been widowed for a short time. He was a lawyer, so he dressed in a suit every day of his life. He would go to a café near the courthouse and sit with his cronies, but his daughter was trying to take the car keys away because she thought he was going into dementia and it wasn’t safe, but he wouldn’t allow it. When he took a turn onto what he thought was a street, it was a boat launch.
Maybe some of your readers have launched a boat. There’s oftentimes a cement ramp that goes down into the water and it has little ridges in it that look like a tiny staircase to give the tire some traction. That was the staircase in the dream. He went down the staircase and drowned. He was horrified because it was a small town. He knew the sheriff, the coroner, and the person that had to cut him out of his seatbelt. He was very fastidious in his dress. He had a lot of grooming products. His appearance was very important to him and he died in this muck of nastiness on the bottom of a river. Other people cut him out of his clothes and saw his naked wrinkly body covered with grime. He was horrified by it.
He was stuck about being an old fool. Had he only listened to his daughter’s advice, this would never have happened. He created a story in his head about his funeral and said, “He was so respectable until the end and then he died this old fool.” He had that tape playing in his head. I wonder if any of your readers have some ugly story that they tell about themselves that they think is their truth and could you stop it?
Could you forgive yourself and let it go, please? What did you do to motivate him to cross over?
I haven’t used this word in this interview, but I often do. It’s the word vetted. Nobody comes to me unready to pass. I’ve learned that, even if they seem a little bit reluctant, they wouldn’t be on my line had their guardian and health team thought they were ready, even if they were barely ready. I knew he was ready because he wouldn’t be in the line otherwise.
Afterlife: Nobody comes to me unready to pass.
I said to him, “Shelby, you were a lawyer. You are proposing some facts that are not in evidence. You’re not allowed to do that in a courtroom. You can’t say publicly in a courtroom something that you can’t back up. You’re saying some things about you that cannot be verified. I want you to tell me the truth.” I played with him in a courtroom way. Eventually, he was able to say, “I get it. I’ve stayed in this loop too long. I need to go on.” All he needed to do was change his thinking.
Isn’t that magical for all of us? All you have to do so many times is to change your thinking. In one of your books, you also have two very touching stories about stuck souls who took their lives by suicide. Could you share the story of the stuck soul named Leaper Bob, who fell, but now floats, and tell us why he got stuck?
They’re at the end of my second of the two books. They have a section of their own. There’s a woman who was in one of those big bands like Glenn Miller. She was the female singer and everybody else was male.
That was an amazing story.
Her name is Bea. She and Leaper Bob came in the same dream, which is very uncommon. They came as bookends of the same dream. It turned out that they were brought to me because they both suicided in the ’30s or ’40s, so long enough ago in a time that it’s safe to tell their story because anybody that grieves them had decades and decades. For most people, they’re an old photo. He was affected by The Great Depression in 1929. His career was in financial services and then the crash happened and nobody wanted financial services anymore. Overnight his livelihood went away.
He said, “I didn’t lose a fortune. Nobody wanted financial advice anymore. Most people didn’t have money to manage. My hours were reduced. I had three kids at home. It got harder every day.” His office was on the second floor of a six-story building. Some of the floors above them were a hotel and a nightclub on the top floor that had a dancing under-the-stars thing. He started drinking. He and his wife were trying to save money to pay bills and then he would spend the money on drinking. He said, “That made everything worse.” He started not going home because it was unpleasant.
One day he decided, “There are hotel rooms above me. I could register in a room. I could go up and have a drink at the bar. You don’t have to pay the hotel bill until the morning and I won’t be here in the morning,” and that’s what he did. He steeled himself with a couple of drinks. He wanted to talk to somebody before he left. Talking to a friendly bartender gave him some opportunity to say something to somebody. “I went down to where my room was. I walked from the door to the window,” and lept to his death.
We helped him by imagining something that falls but comes back up. He didn’t want to use his real name, but my sister was helping with that one. She said, “Corks go underwater. They bob. When the fish is on the hook, the cork goes underwater, letting you know there’s a fish, but bobs back up.” He decided, “I like that. I’m bobbing back up. It’s true that I fell, but I’m coming back up.” He decided to call himself Bob.
There’s another story about suicide that is mind-blowing. It’s worth reading the book to find out about that. Also, there’s the story about Patrick Swayze’s sister titled, Help Your Brother, Johnny Castle. Aside from the fact that it’s about Patrick Swayze’s sister, I love the way you became a sleuth to figure out who was communicating with you. Please share Vicky Swayze’s story with us, including when Patrick showed up for her on the other side.
I’ve never heard from his family and I wouldn’t want to disturb anything about them, but we always get permission to use these stories from the people in them. Vicky gave us permission. She said as far as she was concerned, it was fine to tell it publicly. I was working at Stanford University and I was the chaplain of the Catholic community there, and I had credentials to visit Stanford Hospital.
My sister was living up in Oregon. She was raising alpacas which are from Peru. She had a love for the people of Peru and used to do summer trips down there to help people in the Andes with dental care. She grew to love St. Rose of Lima, Peru, who’s also a member of the same order I am, Dominicans. She has a love for St. Rose and used to talk to St. Rose when she said her prayers. She was saying her prayers and said, “St. Rose won’t leave me alone. She keeps saying help your brother, Johnny Castle.” I keep telling her, “I don’t have a brother named Johnny.”
You’re Nathan Castle and the message is, “Help your brother, Johnny Castle.”
She was saying, “St. Rose was so insistent. She won’t leave me alone. I have to help my brother, Johnny Castle.” I went online and googled Johnny Castle and up came Patrick Swayze because that was the name of his character in his breakout role in Dirty Dancing. Dirty Dancing was a low-budget film. Patrick Swayze was a pretty unknown actor, but he went crazy and made him famous. Johnny Castle was the name of the character. Patrick was in Stanford Hospital dying of pancreatic cancer and I had the credentials to visit Stanford Hospital. She said, “I have not used to being your spiritual social secretary, but I’ve delivered the message. I’ve done what I can do. It’s up to you now to figure out what to do next.”
I went to the head of chaplains, told him this story, and said, “Is there any way that I could be allowed into his room?” and he said, “Absolutely not. There had been a scandal in Hollywood about some reporter getting into a celebrity’s room and photographing charts and stuff, violating their medical privacy.” He said, “No, you may not go anywhere near him. He would have to ask for you.”
I dressed up as a priest, with a black collar and a white little tab. I brought communion. You said you have a friend who’s a Catholic Eucharistic minister. That’s what we do. I sat in the lobby for half an hour, and I kept waiting. I said, “Holy Spirit, I’m sitting here. I’m making myself as available as how to be. Now, somebody needs to walk up to me and say, ‘Thank God you’re here. Patrick’s waiting for you.’” It didn’t happen. I said, “I have other things to do. I can’t sit here all day.”
I went into prayer not long after that with a partner and said, “Holy Spirit and God, we’re trying to help Johnny Castle, but I don’t know what to do. You’re going to have to tell me what’s next.” Out of that came Patrick’s sister, Vicky. It turns out she was in a garage band in Houston playing at local bars at the time that her brother went to New York and got made it big. She got embroiled in the late-night booze, pills, and stuff that can sometimes accompany that way of life. She became an addict. She was never free of it ever again. She fought it and her family paid for some rehabs and things, but she never managed to stay clean and sober for more than a few months. She died in her early 40s.
She told us that she got tired of being thought of as this never do well family member, that they were happy to see you, but they were always on their guard that it wouldn’t be long before you’d be crying, wanting to borrow money, or something because you were broken again. She said, “When I did die, it frustrated me that I was this family member that was loved but was also a burden. My brother is dying and I don’t want to leave until I can go with him. I want to help him and show that I can be a standup family member that can be counted on.” That was important to her. She hung back and didn’t cross until her brother did.
Did she cross with him?
Yes. She waited for his death.
Did he say anything or did you get anything from him?
Sometimes people will let me know they’re there, but they don’t want to talk. They’ll let me know energetically, of the five senses, it feels most like touch. It’s also an ID in your head, like identifying. They can say, “It’s me, Patrick,” but you can’t see them. It’s not exactly hearing, but it’s knowing. My prayer partner asked her, “Is Patrick around?” and she said, “He is right here, but he’s saying to me, ‘This is her moment. I was in the lights and before the microphone all the time.’” At the very end, when she was ready to cross, she said, “He’s not going to speak himself, but he wants it to be on the record that he’s saying he’s proud of me,” and then they left.
What a blessing for her. Father Nathan, what is your message about the importance of healing that you’d like to share with our readers?
Think of how healing normally happens, like if you cut yourself. You don’t have to imagine it because you had huge wounds after your accident. You allow it to happen from the inside out according to its own pace. You do everything you can to promote your healing and advance it, but it also has an appropriate pace to it. Patience is important, but as I was saying, grieving people can sometimes make grief harder by having dirt in the wound.
Grieving people can sometimes make grief harder by having dirt in their wounds. Click To Tweet
If you ever cared for a child or bandaged anybody that got hurt on the playground or something like that, the first thing you want to do is wash it out. You then want to put on some ointment and Band-Aid. If your grief is worse than you wished it were, or if you’re getting any indication from people around you that it seems excessive, check your work. Maybe there’s something where there’s dirt in the wound. Could we cleanse the wound and maybe the grief would be able to move at a faster pace?
You’ll be able to bring yourself through it. There’s more to your life on the other side of it.
I don’t say to people, “You’ll never get over it.” That’s self-defeating.
I’m with you on that.
It’s true you’ll never have that person back in quite the way that you had them before their death, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not available to you somehow. I don’t think you can live joyfully while at the same time, you’re saying to yourself something like, “I’ll never get over it.”
Tell us the best ways for people to connect with you, purchase your books, and if there’s anything else you’d like to say to them.
My website is the best way to find me. If you go on the site, it’ll show you a bunch of different things. In the upper left is one of those little envelope icons that creates an email. If people want to talk to me, I ask that they read one of my books first because I don’t want to rehash material that’s available to them. Our conversation would be more beneficial after they informed themselves a little bit.
The books are available on Amazon in paperback, eBook for an e-reader, and also on Audible. The Audible is sweet. It’s in my own voice and most of the time, in the voices of the actual prayer partners that took part in the original session. That has a loveliness to it. In the upper right of the website, there’s the icon for YouTube. My YouTube channel is my name, Father Nathan Castle. If you permit it, this interview, at some point, will be archived there to make it available.
I’d be honored to do that. I’m always encouraging people to subscribe to this show through YouTube, also. We’re both in the healing business. It’s how we can help people.
I’m an author, but I have a vow of poverty. I’m not shilling to sell more books because I need another yacht or something. I’m trying to get a message out, but I’m happy to help people if I can. I ask that they move through the website. I don’t like Facebook Messenger and other ways that people might ask a question, like on YouTube, LinkedIn, or something else. I don’t have enough hours in the day to chase down all these things. If you want me to reply to you, go to the website because I watched the email carefully.
That’s great for people to know. For all people in this universe, Father Nathan, what is your tip for finding joy in life?
Know that you are here because you’re supremely loved by the God who brought you into being. However, you imagine that. You are a bundle of love, whoever you are, even if you’ve been told your whole life that you’re not. You’re here for a purpose, even if you don’t know what it is, but there’s something purposeful to be done near you. You don’t need to look all your life for your vast purpose. The next-door neighbor could use a visit, a trip to the grocery store, or something. There’s always something that you can do in service to somebody else. I believe in the cosmic happy ending. Whatever happens to anybody’s life, I do believe that there is a great roundup, whatever you want to call it. I believe it’s wonderful. The best is yet to come.
You are here because you're supremely loved by the God who brought you into being. You are a bundle of love, even if you've been told your whole life that you're not. Click To Tweet
Thank you for that. Father Nathan, I love this profound message from Ronnie. “Tell them that it doesn’t matter what religion you are or what you think about it. You will live after you die. Even if you die in a way that seems colossally tragic, you step out of that. You’ll walk out of that like one might walk out of dirty clothes and go on.”
Your two wonderful Afterlife Interrupted books are great reads that illumine Ronnie’s message in many ways. Thank you for helping stuck souls who died suddenly and traumatically to complete their passage and enabling them to be happy and free. Thank you also from my heart for all the ways you continue to help people heal on both sides of the veil.
Here’s a reminder to everyone to follow and like us. I’m social at @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and especially on YouTube. Like, subscribe, and hit notify to make sure you’ll get the inspiring new interviews coming your way. Thank you so much. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings, and bye for now.
Guest Links:
- Father Nathan’s Website
- Father Nathan’s Books:
- Afterlife Interrupted: Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over
- Afterlife Interrupted Book Two: Helping Souls Cross Over
- Connect with Father Nathan Castle on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
- Father Nathan’s Email
Host Links:
- Irene Weinberg on Instagram
- Irene Weinberg on Facebook
- Irene Weinberg on Twitter
- Irene Weinberg – Grief, Rebirth + Healing Podcast on YouTube
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