By sharing these experiences of mine, along with how I’ve interpreted and integrated them into the rest of my belief structures, I feel like I’ve at least fulfilled my basic duty as a conscientious citizen of this orb on which we humans find ourselves.
 
What will come of this effort?
 
Quite possibly nothing at all.  If it has any effect, the most likely one seems to be spurring some other people with experiences similar to mine to share theirs, too.  If enough people do this, maybe better-credentialed people might also consider it worth their while to begin some preliminary sniffing around in the area.
 
Also, from what I’ve heard and read, the modern-day Catholic Church has a special investigations team for vetting possible saints, which subjects potential miracles to some pretty rigorous screening, and proclaims to them to be actual miracles only when there’s no other explanation for their occurrence. If these folks could expand their scope just a bit to include the sorts of experiences I’ve described here, who knows what they might be able to document?

I may not be the best person to propose this to them, though.  For one thing, they might consider me a just wee bit impudent for suggesting that people at the communion rail ought to start saying “Pass the crackers.”  And  somehow I doubt they'd give me an enthusiastic two-thumbs up for my descriptions of how I believe they let a super-salesman named Saul of Tarsus, and later, a Roman emperor, lead them down some unproductive paths r.
 
—Oh, and maybe I’d better consider removing the story of how my Cotta ancestors helped Martin Luther thumb his nose at them and the whole stodgy, sometimes hypocritical administrative superstructure they later drifted into.
 
But who knows?  Maybe the work St. Erlembaldo did nearly a thousand years ago to help them revitalize their organization and get back to their ideals will persuade them to take a more tolerant view of the bratty insolence of one distant member of his family (me).

A potential outcome of all this might be that some radically broad-minded scientist somewhere would also become curious.  Who knows what this person’s explorations might involve?  Could they incorporate the “mirror neurons” that the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has spoken of as a possible physiological basis for human empathy—as well as a lot of Eastern mysticism?
 
Or could such an effort result in the positing of a hypothetical additional form of “soul energy”—with a dimension of sentience, which is missing in the other forms of energy we know about, like simple electricity?
 
Could this form of energy be especially transmittable within networks of kinship? And could it also be found to be especially capable of transcending time—and thereby carrying a soul’s memories, knowledge, and insights forward into a contemporary moment when they’re needed to help someone?

Well, stranger things have happened.  I once dated a girl whose father was a NASA engineer.   She told me her dad used to sit around watching Star Trek with his engineer buddies, and they’d get ideas from the TV show for things they might actually be able to build.
 
Still, these questions are so far above my pay grade that I won’t even attempt to address them.

What I’m reasonably confident of is that I’ve now done my duty, by sharing the unusual experiences I’ve been privileged to have.  This enables me to feel free to go back to stirring up trouble in other areas of contemporary life where I’m also without formal credentials, and oddly enough, nobody can recall having invited me into the discussion.
 
Hey, it seems to be what I’m meant to do!  And I believe that’s the most solid foundation anyone can have for a satisfying life.