The Reverend Paul Grubb was laid to rest in Memorial Park on Monday afternoon. Brother Grubb, as his many followers and friends called him, had been the pastor of Faith Temple on North Trezevant for more than half a century. He was also married to the Rev. Lula Grubb (left), and the obituary in The Commercial Appeal made no mention of his wife’s remarkable adventure — one that made her a national sensation in the late 1940s.
Lura Grubb died and visited heaven for five hours. Then she came back to earth to tell us all about it.
At the age of 17, while living on a farm in Mississippi, Lura supposedly “died” of meningitis. A doctor, she said, declared her dead. As she later recounted in her very popular book, Living To Tell of Death, she woke up in heaven, surrounded by angels who wore “unimaginably sheer, cobwebby robes.” During her brief visit, Lura says, “A fountain was opened above me, as if by the magic touch of a controlling switch on the arm of God’s throne. Then a warm, soothing oil began to run down over my body, healing me as it flowed.” Although she desperately wanted to stay in heaven, as you might imagine, Lura told believers, “God sent me back as a help and a warning to mankind.” All of her ailments, she claimed, vanished: “As the soothing oil of Heaven reached my internal organs, I had the sensation of a ball — the size of a baseball — uprooting in my abdomen and rolling rapidly upward until it came out of my mouth and disappeared.”
Sister Grubb spent the rest of her life telling this amazing story, and “she became the subject of wonder and firm belief from the pious farm folk.” That I can certainly understand. But what seems really strange is that Lura apparently visited stores across the country looking for the same material worn by the angels. “I’ve searched the stock of the hundred largest department stores and fabric centers, from New York to Los Angeles,” she told one newspaper reporter, “and have not yet found material to compare to the angel-spun robes of the sainted throng.” Why on earth would she think she could find such heavenly things — on earth?
