Lily Dale (Plus)

by Christine Wicker

  This was dangerous, and I did not believe it. We could learn to listen to ourselves, yes. That was good. But we could not be trusted to do only what we wanted to do. We could not trust those spirits. Ask anybody who lived through the Holocaust. Or the Rwanda massacres. The world is too evil a place for me to trust Lynn’s universal divine love as she does.

  One day, during one of our many debates, somebody mentioned the Dalai Lama, and I said, “I met him. Did I tell you that story?”

  32

  It was one of my last jobs as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. The Tibetan Buddhist leader was coming to Bloomington, Indiana, to conduct an important ceremony that had never been conducted in the United States. People from all over the world would be there.

  I arrived at the end of the first day just as all the pilgrims were being let out. My car was mired in crowds coming out of the meeting. The people carried fronds of some kind that they’d been bidden to sleep with under their left side, while they held some other plant in their right hand, or some such thing. Although I have great respect for Buddhism, I was out of sync with this event from the beginning.

  We reporters were kept at the back of the crowd so that we could barely see the Dalai Lama, which made me even more churlish. I did my job with fairly poor grace until the last day, when it was announced that the Dalai Lama would conduct a press conference. We were all excited—buzzing about, jostling, ready to be awed in a very unreporter-like way. He might shake our hands, we were told. This really psyched us. Some people think the Dalai Lama is a god on earth, and we were going to shake his hand.

  As we milled around outside waiting, I noticed a young woman in a miniskirt. Everyone noticed her. She had long legs and long hair. She was beautiful, and a crowd of men stood around her, smoking, watching, making her laugh. I was watching her too. Ruefully. I had once been the center of such crowds, perhaps not quite so large or so entranced, but I’d had my day. It was over. I would never be the center of such attention again. Usually I was reconciled to that, but sometimes it pained me. This was one of those times.

  The organizers called for us to come into the tent. The Dallas Morning News is a big name in religion journalism, as the publicist must have known. She put me on the front row. The crowd was large, and everyone wanted to ask a question. She made sure I was recognized.

  As the Dalai Lama began shaking hands, coming toward me down the line, I heard a wail behind me.

  “I want to shake the Dalai Lama’s hand.”

  I turned around, and there she was, the beautiful girl. Big, pleading eyes. Sad face. Begging for her chance.

  Good grief. How could I reach for the hand of a god with that wailing in my ears?

  I couldn’t. Her pleading voice ruined it. Where were her male admirers now? I sighed, turned, stepped back.

  “Quick,” I said. “Take my place.” Maybe we could both shake his hand.

  She reached out, took his hand, let go, and moved back so I could touch him too. But it was too late. He had moved on.

  The Dalai Lama finished the line of greeters and turned to walk away. No more questions. No more handshakes. It was over. How stupid I am, I thought bitterly. Always hanging back, missing out, trying to be some kind of goody-good, never taking care of myself.

  Then he turned back.

  He looked directly into my face and said, “I want to shake the hand of this woman.”

  And he did. He reached across the barrier, and he grasped my hand. His was bigger than I expected, and warmer. I could feel the heat of it long after he was gone.

  I ended my story to Lynn by asking, “Did he know, or was it a coincidence?”

  “He knew,” Lynn said. “Of course he did. And you know what he was telling you, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. He wanted me to know I wasn’t such a fool. He wanted to let me know that I was right to sacrifice my own chance for another person.”

  But Lynn had her own take. “You did what you wanted to do. You followed your heart, not because someone told you to but because you wanted to. He was saluting you. As one Buddha to another.”

  There it was again, that Lily Dale lavishness. Buddha? No.

  “Yes,” Lynn said. “You were a Buddha. We all are.”

  There was nothing else to do with that except make a joke of it. So we started bowing to one another, saying, “Buddha. Buddha. Buddha.” I was laughing and shaking my head at the same time. No. No. Maybe we are the Buddha sometimes, but it can’t be that our deepest, truest selves are the Buddha. That would be too good. Too easy.

  Maybe death is just walking through a door. Maybe the dead are always with us. Maybe life has purpose, and nothing is ever lost. Maybe we live in a responsive universe that conspires to help us. Lily Dale was full of such lovely maybes.

  “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.”

  That night as I lay awake, my mind too restless for sleep, I thought over the grand universe that Lily Dale lived in, and I remembered the God-voice that Lynn heard after she saw the dead deer on the road.

  “Yes, Lynn, but can you accept it?”

  As Lily Dale’s glowing vision intruded itself into the dour landscape of my mind, I could hear the question being put to me: “Christine, can you accept it?” Could I accept this dazzling new hope?

  I ran over the evidence for Lily Dale. Dozens of people had told me their stories, and I had my own story of a spirit in my house, which Greg confirmed. Gretchen pinpointed a disruption at my uncle’s funeral, told me how he died, and gave a version of his name. I’d seen the Virgin Mary shape in the clouds and refused to believe my eyes. Lauren Thibodeau redefined my love life. The two dead mediums Patricia Price said were helping me caused me to ease up in my work. But all those things had been so embedded in wrong calls and cryptic sayings that they had not changed my mind.

  Then Sherry Lee told me eight pretty convincing things. I was certain that five were facts she could not have known by normal means. I’d seen my white crow. So, yes, I would accept that there might be knowledge and pattern and purpose and force in the universe that worked toward the good. Now the question was, Would I follow my white crow into the thicket of beliefs that Lily Dale embodied?

  33

  I entered the evening development circle in high spirits, ready to chat. The young woman on my left said she became interested in mediumship after attending a class on communicating with animals.

  Sure. I was in the groove now. I knew people could do that.

  Alive or dead?

  “Oh, alive,” she said. She didn’t have an animal of her own, and so the teacher gave her some pictures of animals. As she flipped through, the photo of an Andalusian stallion appealed to her right away. He was the one. So she began communicating with him.

  He talks?

  “Telepathically.”

  What’s he say?

  “He invited some people to a party once. His owner didn’t know it until they started showing up.”

  I didn’t grin as I once would have. I didn’t shake my head. I didn’t nod either. If I’d been a true confirmed believer in Lily Dale, I might have rolled my eyes and let it go, but my faith was too new. I didn’t believe a word of that stallion story. Couldn’t. And I didn’t want to count myself among people who did.

  The bulletin board outside the auditorium noted that Patricia Price was going to teach a class in materialization. I took that to mean that spirits would appear before our eyes. Chapman Clark’s failure to show up at the psychomanteum had been a disappointment, but, as Anne said, we might have needed to sit longer. If Patricia Price was confident enough to advertise a circle dedicated to materialization, she must be pretty certain she could conjure up a few spirit forms. I wanted to be there when she did.

  When the circle was full and the meditation was over, Patricia brought out a flashlight covered with a red filter. Once the overhead lights were doused, we were to hold the flashlight under our chins as it traveled around the circle, and we woul
d look at each face as spirits materialized before them.

  Patricia seemed dead serious about it. The red light was supposed to help us see spirit forms. It worked, after a fashion. Held under people’s chins, the light threw their features into ghastly contortions. It hollowed their eye sockets and made their noses translucent in a most unattractive way. Hair fanned out around their faces like spider webs. Bushy eyebrows grew into caterpillars of monstrous size.

  A man with craggy features had Abraham Lincoln’s spirit before him, my fellow circle sitters exclaimed. When a woman with a big shock of red hair held the flashlight, people all around the circle saw the spirit of a fox before her. George Washington came from the face of an older woman with a straight nose. A beautiful dark-skinned woman wearing a shawl held the light slightly before her face so the shadows fell in lovely patterns. A Middle Eastern princess, they saw, a belly dancer, an Egyptian queen. I was an old lady again. Not American Indian this time, just old.

  Good grief. This was a kid’s game. Were these people serious? Yes, they were.

  By the time we came to the end of the circle they were seeing the full bodies of manifesting spirits.

  I was disgusted into complete silence. Afterward my fellow sitters excitedly compared spiritual revelations. I didn’t speak to anyone. How could I have ever been taken in by such foolishness? Self-delusion, wishful thinking, fantastical imaginings. These were at the heart of Lily Dale. Was that all there was?

  The next day I saw one of my classmates, a young man who was spending the summer in the Dale, helping out with classes and attending as many as he could. He was a nice guy and seemed perfectly sane.

  “Tell the truth,” I said. “Did you really see spirits last night?”

  He did. Lots of them.

  “I didn’t see a thing except a bunch of people letting their imaginations run away with them.” I didn’t usually speak so bluntly, but I’d stayed too long in the Dale, and it had bruised me.

  He said I failed to see anything because I was using my rational mind. I needed to let go of it, put away my notebook, and enter into the next group without skepticism. “You know what the definition of insanity is, don’t you?” he asked.

  “I do,” I snapped, hoping he wouldn’t oppress me with that old chestnut. He didn’t even pause.

  “It’s thinking that you can do the same thing in the same way again and again and get different results.”

  “Thank you,” I said sarcastically.

  Only in Lily Dale could somebody be called crazy for holding to her rational mind. All the fury of a betrayed believer engulfed me. Let go of my rational mind? The thought gave me vertigo. If the secrets of the universe revealed themselves only to people who blathered about, letting themselves be led by anyone with any kind of crackpot idea, I’d have to live without the secrets.

  The summer season was almost over on the day I left. The truths of Lily Dale had only partially convinced me, I guess, because it didn’t take much to send me scurrying back to consensus reality. I liked it there, nice and cozy with all the respectable, reliable, living people gathered around talking about verifiable facts that everyone can see and agree upon. Maybe I was too cowardly for big revelations, or maybe I was too sensible. Whatever it was, I once again contrasted the marvels of Lily Dale with the disappointments, and now the disappointments swamped me.

  What had I really witnessed? I had heard about spoons bending, but I never saw one. I hadn’t seen anything really, except the Virgin Mary in the clouds, and that was imagination. The table in Anne’s class had only seemed to dance by spirit power.

  My faith in Anne had taken another hit when I finished reading Harold Sherman’s book about her, the one with the preface by the oilman. It was written in the early 1970s and included Anne’s predictions for the future. By the year 2000, people’s houses would be held together by magnetic forces, she said. No nails or wood would be used. Curtains would hang without rods, and pictures would attach to walls by themselves. Furniture would be suspended in the air. Clothing would be radically changed. Smoking tobacco would be outlawed. Her predictions were so off that reading them embarrassed me.

  During my time in Lily Dale I had seen no dead people, felt no energy, and received no visitations. Chapman hadn’t shown up. All I had was talk: other people’s accounts and my own experience with mediums who made some good guesses amid a mountain of bad ones.

  Lily Dale almost drew me in, almost counted me among the people who look to Andalusian stallions for party invitations. I’d made a narrow escape, perhaps; but I was out. Disgusted with the whole place, I left early one August morning, happy to be going home. I wasn’t going to blast Lily Dale as a community of lying frauds and crazy people. I was just going to walk away. Shrug and walk away as millions of other people have walked away from Spiritualism since it began.

  And that might have been the end of this book.

  34

  I might never have come back to the Dale if it hadn’t been for Gayle Porter. Gayle was the student medium who refused to talk with me until I took a two-weekend workshop called “Spiritual Insight Training.” She said I’d never understand Lily Dale without that training. If I took the workshop, I would be giving messages myself, she said, and then she would talk to me.

  Her contention that she knew what I did or didn’t understand was presumptuous, I thought. I also didn’t believe her. I would not be giving messages at the end of such classes. But she had reached a long finger into my psyche, pulled up one of my many fears, and dared me to ignore it.

  If I walked away, I’d never know for sure. Someone could always say I’d failed to do all the research that presented itself. They could say I’d been a lazy reporter. I couldn’t stand that.

  I signed up for a September class certain that it would demonstrate how misguided Gayle was. As soon as I mailed the check, I began to dread it. I knew the drill. Insufferably perky leaders isolate a group for a weekend, create false intimacy, and cause people to cry, hug, and give maudlin testimonies. I hate that stuff, especially the hugging. I hate doing it, and I hate being the only little tight end in the class who won’t. If people are hugging, you have to hug. What else can you do when they come for you? Dodge under their arms?

  Giving spirit messages was part of the weekend. So was healing, which particularly spooked me. In one healing class that summer, people sat knee-to-knee for ten minutes looking into each other’s eyes as they took turns repeating, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” The woman who told me about the class said she did this with a middle-aged male, who was a stranger to her. She said the experience healed her of deep trauma and a longtime hatred for men.

  I was happy for her, and equally happy to keep my trauma and hatred if that was the only way to give it up.

  I arrived a day early and spent the afternoon cruising the back roads of the rolling upstate New York farm country. I stopped at a park on the edge of Lake Erie and began to walk. I wanted to quit this project. The summer was over. I’d given it my best, and I still didn’t know what was going on inside the mediums’ heads. I’d asked, they’d answered, but nothing was clearer. My skepticism may have blocked understanding, but without skepticism, I’d be defenseless, open to any oddball fantasy.

  I was also tired of journalism itself. All summer, when my research stalled, I’d stomp about Shelley’s house muttering about adopting a Chinese baby. Rearing a child would be useful, a contribution to the world. It would not be a waste of time, as journalism, particularly this journalism, was. Writing a book is like crawling into a dark tunnel. It takes everything I have, saps the rest of my life, puts me into a daze, exposes me to ridicule. All those feelings had peaked by September, and, as I walked the edge of the lake, I whispered to myself like a sulky child, “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”

  In that mood, I returned to Lily Dale. On the porch of the Maplewood Hotel, several women introduced themselves. We all needed to eat before classes that night. I knew the way to Grandma’s Kitchen in t
he nearby town of Cassadaga. Over plates of spaghetti, chicken fingers, and iceberg lettuce salads, we told each other why we had come. A vegan massage therapist wanted to communicate with the universe. A hypnotherapist wanted to see dead people. Another woman had lost her job as a waitress at Red Lobster and was looking for new direction. A fourth woman was there because her relatives wanted her to work in their new wellness clinic and thought this class would start her education in what she needed to know.

  Later, I met a woman who hoped to contact her late mother. It took her two days to do it, and when she finally did, her mother said, “What took you so long? It’s easy to do.” Many students were there because they experienced premonitions or visions and wanted to know how to control and use them.

  Our class of about thirty people, mostly women, met in the main room of the fire hall. Two teen girls were in the group because one of their mothers had paid the fee. She believed the training would help them keep a grip on what was important as high school life tried to push them around. We sat on folding chairs that were so hard some people brought pillows. A fire helmet hung on the wall. We could sometimes hear the squawk of a shortwave radio broadcasting various local emergencies. People’s sneakers squeaked as they walked across the linoleum floor.

  Elaine Thomas, founder of the School of Spiritual Healing and Prophecy, which sponsored the workshops, is a licensed Lily Dale medium who began her exploration into Spiritualism more than thirty years ago after consulting an eighty-three-year-old medium in Buffalo. Encouraged, perhaps unwittingly, by her rabbi, who taught her that anything of a religious nature ought to be questioned, Elaine began to examine and modify the beliefs she grew up with. When she became an elementary school reading teacher, her students reaffirmed her belief that children can contact the spirit world but are taught to ignore what they know. Eventually she and her family settled in Lily Dale.