Communicating With Spirits

Each summer thousands of people flock to Lily Dale, a small, run-down Victorian town in upper New York State. They come to consult the hundreds of mediums who live there - Spiritualist believers who claim to deliver messages from beyond the grave. Journalist Christine Wicker visited Lily Dale once out of curiousity - and kept coming back for three years. In this conversation with Beliefnet, Wicker explains how Lily Dale challenged--and expanded--her own sense of spiritual possibilities.

You describe Lily Dale as the nation's oldest Spiritualist community. What are the fundamental beliefs of Spiritualism?

That they can prove the existence of the afterlife by communicating with the spirits. They also believe in a universal intelligence--a God. They don't believe that you go to hell.

They have bibles in spiritualist churches, and they often talk about Jesus as being the greatest medium of all time. Because, of course, he did healing. He had knowledge of the spiritual world beyond what most people have. And he came back!--as a spirit. So they have great reverence for him. But the thing that's really distinctive is their belief that anyone can communicate with spirits.

Why do they think spirits want to communicate?

They think spirits want to come back and assure us they're all right and that they're still alive. Often what they come back to say is that they love us, and sometimes they come back with apologies for behavior. But one thing that William James noted is that they often don't say things that we might want them to say. (laughs) They don't come back and say, "The lottery ticket's in the drawer."

But spiritualists do talk about heaven, which they call Summerland. There are books with information from the spirits describing what you do there and how old you are. A lot of them say you're 35, which is supposed to be the optimal age of physical, emotional and mental development. Or some people say that you are the age that you were when you were the happiest.

Do they think people age in heaven?

I heard two different stories about mediums talking to women who'd had abortions. They came to the meeting wanting to communicate with the spirits of their aborted fetuses. And in both cases, these mediums reassured the women that the babies were happy and growing up in Summerland.

You write about a lot of praying in Lily Dale. Whom do they pray to?

They address their prayers to Mother-Father God. They pray to God and they do believe in God. But I had a lot of trouble with that because, although I'm not Southern Baptist anymore, those are my origins. So when people would talk to me about spirituality in Lily Dale, I have to tell you, I was just lost. For me spirituality was about doing God's will, and I never heard people [there] talk about doing God's will. And they never ask for forgiveness because they don't see any reason to have forgiveness. They believe that whatever you do, you pay for. That you reap what you sow, that it all comes back to you, in this life or the next.

Spiritualists don't have a big dogma or doctrine. And so everybody can believe pretty much what he or she wants. One of the things that's nice about going there is that nobody gets mad at you if you don't believe what they believe. It just wouldn't occur to them.

The other thing I really like about them is that while the mediums act as a conduit for the spirits, they never claim any special holiness. They don't set themselves up as gurus.

Continued on page 2: »