In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  This Power wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

  The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

  The Higher Power does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when it is needed to resolve a problem.

  Where Cassadaga’s Spiritualists split from followers of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (as well as most orthodox faiths) is in their belief that a person’s soul hangs around after he or she dies. And this loitering soul—it’s just dying to talk to a trained medium. “Mediumship, when done in the true sense, will produce a real understanding of this existence and level of interaction to and from the spirit realm,” Cassadaga’s literature says.

  You need not be a medium or “healer” to be a Spiritualist. Even so, the faithful number only 500,000 in the United States. This number represents a significant decline from the heyday of Spiritualism in the mid- and late 1800s. Back then, Spiritualism’s two founding sisters, from Hydesville, New York, were touring the country, conducting these new rituals called séances, talking to ghosts on behalf of people like Mary Todd Lincoln and Horace Greeley. Spirits were also communicating with regular folks in any number of ways—table tippings, communicative creakings, messages received by automatic writers, Ouija pronouncements. (Never mind that a lot of these regular folks had just lost loved ones in the Civil War and were willing to believe just about anything if it eased their pain.) Spiritualism seemed to represent a new frontier in metaphysics.

  In the midst of this fervor, a young man named George Colby was told during a séance that he would found a Spiritualist community in the South. His spirit guide—a Native American specter named Seneca—led him to a spot where, ahem, underground rock alignments generated magnetics and harmonics and created a spiritual vortex. Around the same time, wealthy New Yorkers from the Lily Dale Spiritualist Community of Lake Cassadaga approached Colby about creating a wintertime retreat in Florida. Before too long, a forty-room hotel and some stately Victorian homes had sprouted above the spiritual vortex. Cassadaga got its own railroad station, too, so well-heeled Spiritualists could make like their tourist contemporaries and ride the rails from New York, Maine, or Iowa straight there.

  Spiritualism’s founding sisters would go on to confess their fraud before dying penniless, insane, and addicted to drink. No matter. Those dissatisfied with conventional Christianity as well as those attracted to alternative belief systems found themselves drawn to Cassadaga’s vortex. The community of Yankee Strangers built itself up. The Spiritualists weathered early fights with their Baptist neighbors; they experienced something of a renaissance during the New Age movement; they still manage to pull in about 150 people for their Sunday services. Including us.

  “Who knows what today will bring?” I joked as we neared the camp.

  “They do,” Noah said. “The mediums.”

  “I’m trying to go into this with an open mind,” Glenn said. “But I have a feeling it’s going to be locked shut, combination spun, by the end.”

  Cassadaga embraces tourism, but at its core it is a residential community of about fifty practicing mediums and healers. Its “downtown” is a small post office and a couple of psychics on one side of the road, and then the forty-room hotel and camp-owned bookstore on the other. This is the line of demarcation. Everything behind the hotel is part of the camp (even though the hotel no longer is). Everything on the post office side of the street is non-camp-sanctioned. “Leeches,” the camp members call these outsiders who arrived in the eighties.

  Many luxury sedans were pulling up to the allegedly haunted hotel just as we were. Most of them were from Orlando and its constitutive suburbs, which are a forty-five-minute drive away. All of them were here for Halloween weekend.

  Older men in khakis and floral-patterned shirts were milling about the hotel’s lobby, a section of which had been transformed via bedsheets, plywood, and protuberant nails into a fun house called Clown Town. That, or they were drinking the bar dry while their wives, daughters, and significant others browsed the public corkboards and Trapper Keepers for suitable mediums.

  “I’m not trying to sound sexist,” Noah said as we powered up our film gear.

  “Here we go,” Glenn said.

  “But I expect three-fourths to four-fifths of the clerics or whatever to be middle-aged women. And for the few men to be the high priests. Slash sexual-predator-type grifters.”

  Walking the camp’s oak-lined and moss-hung streets took less than half an hour. Amid the peeling Victorian homes were traces of rural eclectic: a yard edged with miniature American flags; a Buddha wearing Mardi Gras beads and sunglasses; a Saint Francis statue overlooking golden sphinxes; a second-story door with no stairs leading to it. We admired the Eloise Page Meditation Garden, a shady lot filled with statuary, benches, and memorials to noted Spiritualists. We reflected upon Spirit Pond, which is where the ashes of dead mediums are sometimes dumped. Around us, visitors moved with purpose. We flagged down a few, interviewed them. They said they came here because they sought closure with a deceased loved one. They said they came here because they wanted to talk to God. One woman said she didn’t mind paying $120 an hour to “know for sure there’s another side.” Inwardly, I said a word of thanks for our not encountering a parent who’d lost a child.

  A couple of visitors told us that they also attended classes for mediumship “accreditation” that were offered here. Everyone, it seems, has one of the nine gifts of the Spirit. And everyone can have that gift “unfolded” for a nominal fee. “Get accredited at Cassadaga,” one Wilford Brimley–looking guy told us, “and it’s accepted everywhere, no question.”

  As the 10:30 a.m. Spiritualist service approached, we made our way to Colby Memorial Temple, a Mediterranean Revival–style hall erected in 1923. No crucifixes, crescents, or Stars of David to be found—instead, a troubling number of sunflowers had been planted around the building. We asked one besuited middle-manager type what gives; he recited: “As the sunflower turns its face to the light of the sun, so Spiritualism turns the face of humanity to the light of the truth.”

  “Rad,” Noah said.

  “I sense you need some healing,” the man said. “Come. Come to the healing gazebo.”

  He held the door for us as we crowded into the small, circular structure adjacent to the temple. Sunlight filtered through gauzy white curtains; multiple window-unit ACs whirred our sweaty skin into braille. We took the last three seats along the room’s perimeter and waited our turn to be “healed.” I was called up first by our middle-manager friend. I sat in the center of the gazebo next to a large man in an Are We There Yet? tee who had his own healer. Our middle-manager friend washed his hands in a small dish. He asked me, “What is in your mind right now?”

  “My feet hurt, and I miss my toenails,” I said.

  “Hmmm,” he said. He turned my palms up and placed them in my lap. He stepped behind me. Then he wiped his wet hands over his closed eyes. He gripped me by my shoulders. “Think of something that needs healing,” he directed. “So, my feet?” I said. Gently, he touched my temples, my arms, my legs. I perceived no energy flowing to or from me. Which is not to say that this was an unpleasant experience. It felt nice. Nice the way someone at Supercuts massaging your scalp as they shampoo you is nice.

  “How do you feel now?” he asked after three minutes of soft nudging.

  “Fine?” I said.

  “Well, improvement usually takes more than one session,” he admitted. Passed my way was a donation plate gone leafy with twenty-dollar bills. “May the healing power of healing spirit be with you each moment of each day,” our new friend whispered in my ear. I dropped a fin into the dish. “Much obliged,” I said.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Noah said, exiting the gazebo with me. We waited a few minutes for Glenn to get healed. He emerged
saying he did feel a third hand on his shoulder after the dude had moved on to his head. “But mainly the thing I thought of was how bad my shoulders hurt.”

  We entered the temple as its bell began to toll. It was a large, airy, downward-sloping hall with particleboard ceilings from which dangled six black orbs on chains. About a hundred people—most of them older women in pastels—sat in central pews and rows of chairs radiating from a stage containing something akin to a public-access talk show set: comfortable chairs, ferns, a piano, pink drapery, airbrushed paintings of the stars and planets as well as one single sunflower. Soft flute music wafted out of unseen speakers. “No kneelers,” I pointed out.

  The reverend was a short, middle-aged man with a full head of brown ringlets. He started things off by lighting three candles, explaining that this one symbolized body, this one mind, and this one spirit. Then came hymns, invocations. So far, so harmless—even if my own convictions prevented me from saying “amen” to any of this stuff. Certainly I was not going to recite their Declaration of Principles, which included claims like:

  5. We affirm that communication with the so-called dead is a fact, scientifically proven by the phenomena of Spiritualism.

  9. We affirm that the precepts of Prophecy and Healing are divine attributes proven through Mediumship.

  The congregation was invited to line up along the walls for their spiritual healing. Those who’d already been healed were led in guided meditation by the reverend: “You begin to feel your mind relaxing…You forget the past, and your imagined failure…Now is the time when you say, ‘I want to focus on my own well-being’…I see the light being absorbed into the body, and becoming light energy…This is happening because I love myself, and I want to experience love and happiness…”

  As chairs scraped and some guy tickled the ivories, I began to think of the great psychologist-philosopher William James. He’d described nineteenth-century phenomena like Spiritualism in his landmark study, The Varieties of Religious Experience. In it, James categorized these “anti-religionists” as individuals who very much like the glowing, white-hot charisma of certain creeds and their geniuses. What they don’t like are the politics and the lust for dogmatic rule that are apt to snake in and contaminate the originally innocent prophet or concept. To these anti-religionists, history makes it clear: When followers codify their encounters with the Higher Power, bad things happen. Encounters with the divine come to mean “religion,” and “religion” comes to mean “church,” and “church” comes to mean hypocrisy, tyranny, meanness, exclusion. The Spiritualists, the “anti-religionists”—they are pro spontaneity, pro authenticity. They are anti orthodoxy, anti intellection. They are, in fact, damn near Romantic in their pro inspiration, anti tradition tack. Pro individualism, anti conformity.

  Inspired myself, I flipped open my notebook and wrote: To these individuals—be they Spiritualist, Moralistic Therapeutic Deist, whatever—the overcoming of an inherited religion is seen as an achievement of maturity. Finally throwing off [Catholicism, Judaism, Jainism] like a clip-on tie after church is considered a liberating act. You are finally free to begin the process of becoming. Of determining who you really are, digging your Authentic Self out from under religiously imposed hypocrisies and psychological impedimenta.

  I continued: They believe the Higher Power wants me to find My Truth. I am to do this by custom-designing My Truth as if at a Build-a-Bear Workshop, taking whatever works from wherever I can find it: East, West, Global South, it’s all good. Having found My Truth, I must beware of anyone who attempts to impose theirs. All proselytizing is a mask of righteousness worn over a will to power. There is but one authority, and it is moi.

  Amen I say to you, the Golden Rule can be updated to read, You do you, so long as I remain free to do me.

  The guided meditation droned on. “Follow your soul, not your mind.” That kind of thing. Stop listening to your head, because it leads you astray, and start listening with your center. Breathe in the life-giving Universal Spirit, which fans your Divine Spark; trust not your craven ego; turn away from the allure of your pain-body; relinquish future and past so that you may live no longer in anxiety and regret; blah blah. Things got very Krishnamurti-Gnostic up there. “It’s time to stop stopping to think,” the reverend said. “Here, now, you live your truth.”

  Noah leaned over and said, “All this ‘golden streaming light’ talk is making me have to piss. I’ll find you guys outside.”

  A Spiritualist matriarch come all the way from Connecticut preached the homily, entitled “This Wonderful Journey of Self-Discovery.” After that, the congregation beseeched the Infinite Spirit a few more times. While stifling a yawn I stretched and gazed about—and noticed that Glenn was actually doing it. He had closed his eyes and was holding his upturned palms in front of him as though he were a mendicant. He was repeating after the reverend: “This happens because…I love myself…”

  I nudged Glenn when the reverend announced there’d be a new members’ gathering after the final blessing. An instrumental version of “All You Need Is Love” ushered us out of the building.

  We followed the congregants into the temple’s parking lot. And what did we find there, adorning the chariots of these spiritual spirits, these freethinkers who choose seeking over submitting, believing over belonging? Why, a ton of Hillary for Prison 2016 bumper stickers. That’s what.

  Like a deep-sea anglerfish waggling its bioluminescent lure, we pretended to futz with the boom mike. Almost instantly, congregants approached. “The spirits are wise,” said one mom-mulleted woman who declined to give a name (yet was a dead ringer for the Realtor whose billboards we’d been passing on the highway). “They want to guide and uplift us. Wouldn’t it be egotistical not to hear what they have to say?”

  A burly guy in a motorcycle club jacket told us, “I actually want to come here.” Fanned behind him, his motorcycle clubmates nodded. “When I thought about going to church before, it was hell this and shame that. Here, it’s positivity.”

  We thanked them for their time, and we went and joined the new members’ gathering in progress in the century-old Andrew Jackson Davis Building. Here, neophyte mediums were pacing the creaky salon, practicing their gifts on a few dozen volunteers who pecked at complimentary donuts.

  One smoky-eyed woman introduced herself as a confident person who knew she was intuitive since childhood. In Puerto Rico, she said, she always had that sense of just “knowing.” She received spirit visits from many of her friends and family members at or after the times of their passing.

  “Let me touch with you over here if I may,” she began. One raised hand had a question about a departed father. The medium answered, “When he was on the earth plane…” This segued into “Don’t let things get you down…he’s behind you, pushing you up…” before ending with “Strong vibrations…just keep going.”

  Another medium, with long, floss-colored hair, took the floor. Hers was a strong connection to the Spirit Realm and the Earth Mother, she said. Although her grandmothers had made their transitions to the Spirit Realm, they came often to visit her at the old family home, especially now that it was in disrepair and in danger of foreclosure. Their spirits turn on lights and open cabinet doors. They also highlight water damage and locate palmetto bug nests.

  This medium walked along the walls studying the blurry enlargements of old lithograph postcards that lined them. Abruptly she spun around, slapped both hands to a sunflower-tableclothed table, and peered across at an elderly invalid who was breathing through an oxygen machine.

  “You’ve got some energy inside of you,” the medium said. “I see you’re hooked up to some oxygen, but there’s a little ball of energy inside of you…”

  The collection plate was passed onto the invalid’s lap. She glanced down at it, then back to the medium. Behind the oxygen mask, her sunken face wore the startled, ring-mouthed expression of a mummy, or a b
aby removed from the breast.

  “I’m getting the word…‘feisty,’ ” the medium said, fanning the air as if to bring a smell nearer. The invalid’s eyes widened; her nods were barely perceptible. The medium began nodding, too, and smiling.

  “I don’t know how feisty you were,” she said, “…but it’s still there! It was there before, and it’s there now! You know, you’re not giving in…You don’t want to give in! You’ve got time to come! You really do!”

  The medium took one of the invalid’s hands, saying, “You’re going to keep going, kid! That’s what they’re telling me from the other side. ‘She’s got it! She’s got it!’ ”

  Hearing this, the invalid smiled like someone so happy to be disabused of a particular, lingering fear: that we live and die as we dream—alone. Her nurse reached into her purse for her.

  * * *

  —

  Glenn did as instructed. He let his hand drift over the board of psychics until he was guided by the Universe to one picture: Darcy. Darcy was a bright, quippy blonde in her early fifties. Originally from Kentucky. Originally a midlevel executive for Hilton in Orlando. Darcy was starting the new, more evolved phase of her life.

  “Once you come here, you just keep coming. You get sucked in,” she told us with a laugh as she walked us to her…I guess you’d call it her studio? Her atelier?

  “You might even get sucked in,” she said to the three of us in mock warning. “We never proselytize; people just stop on the side of the road because they’re pulled here. How do you think you got here?”

  We arrayed our film gear around Darcy’s suite, which was full of crystal pyramids, crystal dolphins, bookshelves lined with self-affirmational tomes (and one Make America Great Again cap). She sat Indian-style and barefoot in a wingback chair and motioned for Glenn to have a seat in the one opposite hers. Out of frame, Noah monitored the camera, and I watched the battery levels on the mikes.