Spirituality

This small, rural community in upstate New York looks like many others in the state. Victorian cottages cozy up to one another and large oaks dot sidewalks. But look closer and you’ll start to see the “Medium Open” signs or stumble upon the Healing Temple. Welcome to Lily Dale, America’s oldest Spiritualist community.

Lily Dale was founded in 1879 as an adult Spiritualism summer camp. People would come, set up tents, and then wait for the dead to arrive. Seances and message services followed. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, even Thomas Edison (maybe), joined in. Spiritualism is committed to proving the continuity of life by communicating with spirits who have passed on,

What began as that tented summer commune now is a small hamlet, with about 250 residents, many of whom are registered mediums. Every summer, Lily Dale welcomes an estimated 30,000 visitors. Some are searching for healing or spiritual guidance. Others come out of curiosity or skepticism.

At 4pm a service is held at the Forest Temple, an outdoor structure that dates back to 1894. At these services, a medium gets up in front of an audience and starts listening for dead people. “I’m getting a Mary. Can anyone claim a Mary?” There’s a beat or two of silence, and then (most of the time) someone raises their hand in the audience. Then the medium is thoughtful, as if listening to a phone call on a bad line. “Mary wants you to know that she’s always watching over you and that she’s walking beside you in this life.” And then Mary leaves and the medium continues her work as moderator for the afterlife.

Medium Elaine Thomas doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that Spiritualism reached its zenith against the backdrop of the American Civil War and World War I. She says, “Spiritualism grew out of people’s pain and their subsequent need to find healing. Spiritualism and mediums demonstrate that life continues beyond the grave.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many people are also grieving in these turbulent times of pandemic, wars, and violence, and are searching for comfort. “When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?” (Isa. 8:19). Only in Christ can they find the truth and comfort they need (John 14:1-6; 1 Thess. 4:18).

Death abounded in America in 2020 and 2021. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 570,000 more people died in 2020 than in 2019, with about 350,000 of those attributable to COVID-19. Another 350,000 people died from the coronavirus by the fall of 2021, bringing the death total to 700,000 and counting (as of March 18, 2022 over 969k deaths are attributable to COVID).

When roughly that same number died over the four years of the Civil War, it had a widespread impact on American culture. Historians say changes included increased attention to cemeteries, the rise in the importance of family photographs, and rapid growth in the popularity of practices of spiritualism, a new religious movement that claimed to help people communicate with the dead.

What impact today’s pandemic deaths will have on American culture remains to be seen. But one shift is notable now: The percentage of people age 40 and older who say that religion is “very important” in the funeral of a loved one has gone up for the first time in a decade.

The importance of religion at funerals jumped 10 percentage points in 2020. It went up another 2 points in 2021. Most Americans still don’t think religion is important at funerals, but a growing number are feeling a new need for it.

Sarah Jones, an atheist raised in a strict evangelical home, wrote about this experience:

I could plant a flag for my grandfather . . . but the gesture feels thin. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial—whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.

In the early Twentieth Century, Spiritualism was very popular. Mediums and fortune tellers claimed to be able to make contact with the dead and their claims were given legitimacy by such well-known supporters as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series. However, there were also individuals who worked diligently to debunk the claims of these spiritists, among them the famous magician Harry Houdini.

Houdini was one of the most popular performers at the time and he would travel and give live performances across the United States. Part of his magic act involved recreating some of the illusions used by so-called mediums. He would reveal to how slight-of-hand and simple tricks could be effectively used to make people believe they were being contacted by their dead loved ones.

Houdini himself had previously investigated the legitimacy of these practices in part because of his own desire to reconnect with his deceased mother. After a failed attempt to contact her spiritually, he realized the vulnerable position of grieving people. Houdini became disgusted with the way spiritists took advantage of those in mourning.

A handful of individuals were employed by Houdini to go into cities prior to his performance there. Included in these “ghost-busters” was Rose Mackenberg. She would attend seances and meet psychics wearing various disguises and pretend to want to contact the dead. She would then report back to Houdini. On the night of the performance Houdini would call out specifically the local spiritists and disprove their supernatural claims.

Houdini’s actions were motivated by a desire to expose fraud. He knew that many people were comforted by their interactions with these mediums, but he also knew that those mediums were hucksters looking to take advantage of them. He believed it was more important to take away the comfort provided by the deception in order to reveal the truth.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Error; Truth - It is important to know the truth even when it hurts. Many unbelievers may be comfortable in their ignorance of the truth, but ultimately their worldview is a deception. As Christians we have the truth and it is our responsibility to share it with others even when it is uncomfortable. 2) Afterlife; Occult – This illustration could also be used when preaching a text that involves spiritism, such as the medium of Endor.

Physicist Alan Lightman is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for specializing in the intersection between science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality. He writes about a profound, transcendent experience in his life:

It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience.

After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before. ... And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.

Lightman is in awe of nature but is unsure where that should lead him:

It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God offers unbelievers opportunities to consider the meaning of life, eternity, and their place in it. Some, like this professor will taste and then turn away (Heb. 6:4-10), while others will recognize the hand of Almighty God and bow before him (Ps. 8, Ps. 19).

Dr. David H. Rosmarin, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School argues that “Psychiatry Needs to Get Right with God.” That’s the title of his recent article in Scientific American, Rosmarin writes:

Nearly 60 percent of psychiatric patients want to discuss spirituality in the context of their treatment. Yet we rarely provide such an opportunity. … Of more than 90,000 active projects within the National Institutes of Health, fewer than 20 mention spirituality anywhere in the abstract, and only one project contains this term in its title.

In the wake of COVID-19, Rosmarin observed our hunger for a connection with God and the church. In the early days of the pandemic, Jeanet Bentzen of the University of Copenhagen examined Google searches for the word “prayer” in 95 countries. She identified that they hit an all-time global high in March 2020, and increases occurred in lockstep with the number of COVID-19 cases identified in each country.

In the past year, American mental health sank to the lowest point in history: Incidence of mental disorders increased by 50 percent, compared with before the pandemic, alcohol and other substance abuse surged, and young adults were more than twice as likely to seriously consider suicide than they were in 2018. Yet the only group to see improvements in mental health during the past year were those who attended religious services at least weekly (virtually or in-person): 46 percent report “excellent” mental health today versus 42 percent one year ago.

Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Night Show, asked Ringo Starr, “What happens when you die?”

Starr replied, “I think we go to heaven.”

Colbert asked, “What’s heaven like?”

“Heaven’s great, but you don’t stay there very long; you just gotta get yourself together again and come deal with all that [stuff] you didn’t deal with last time you were here.”

On the final episode of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Dolly offered various responses to the question: “What is the theology of Dolly Parton?”

After stating that she was “spiritual not religious,” Parton said, “The Bible says let every man seek out his own salvation, and that means to save himself. Whatever it takes to save you, and if you can get to that place and find your own peace then you can do good for other people if you are at peace with yourself.”

When asked about the afterlife, Parton responded, “You don’t really know, you just hope, and you have faith. That’s what faith is. I think it’s not the end of me. I don’t think it’s the end of any of us. I think we’re recycled and if nothing else we just go back into that great flow of divine energy and hopefully we spread ourselves around in other wonderful ways.”

In his book The Grace Awakening, Charles Swindoll recounts an experience he once had while ministering at a Bible conference. On the first night he had briefly met a couple who seemed to be friendly and quite glad to be at the meetings. However, as the week went by, Swindoll noticed that roughly ten minutes after he would start speaking at every meeting, the husband would be fast asleep!

This experience began to irritate Charles so much that by the time of the final meeting, he was convinced that the man was there only to please his wife, and was "probably a carnal Christian." At the conclusion of the final meeting however, the wife requested to speak to Charles for a few minutes. He figured she wanted to talk to him about her husband's lack of interest in spiritual matters.

Imagine how greatly embarrassed he was when the wife mentioned that her husband had terminal cancer and that they had attended the conference mainly at his request. It was his “final wish” to be at the conference even though the pain medication he was taking made him drowsy. She then said, "He loves the Lord, and you are his favorite Bible teacher. He wanted to be here to meet you and to hear you, no matter what." Charles Swindoll wrote, "I stood there, all alone, as deeply rebuked as I have ever been."

What a dangerous thing it is to judge others. Jesus said, "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you" (Matthew 7:2).

Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. More than half of young adults in the US believe astrology is a science. The psychic services industry—which includes astrology, aura reading, mediumship, tarot-card reading and palmistry, among other metaphysical services—is now worth $2 billion annually, according to industry analysis firm IBIS World.

Melissa Jayne, owner of Brooklyn-based "metaphysical boutique," said she has seen a major uptick in interest in the occult, especially among New Yorkers in their 20s. The store offers workshops like "Witchcraft 101," "Astrology 101," and a "Spirit SÉance." "Whether it be spell-casting, tarot, astrology, meditation and trance, or herbalism, these traditions offer tangible ways for people to enact change in their lives," she said. "For a generation that grew up in a world of big industry, environmental destruction, large and oppressive governments, and toxic social structures, all of which seem too big to change, this can be incredibly attractive."

Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas, and is doubtful about the existence of God. But when "weird things"—inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and complaints from staff members of constant headaches—started happening at the ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep skepticism about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a plumber all failed to find the cause of her office's troubles, she finally got help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead.

She's not alone. While Norwegian churches may be empty and belief in God in sharp decline, "belief in, or at least fascination with, ghosts and spirits is surging. Even Norway's royal family has flirted with ghosts, with a princess coaching people on how to reach out to spirits." As one Norwegian pastor said, "God is out but spirits and ghosts are filling the vacuum. Belief in God, or at least a Christian God, is decreasing but belief in spirits is increasing,"

Scott McKnight writes in “The Hum of Angels”:

I was visiting a bird-supplies store when I mentioned to the owner that my wife and I had owned a hummingbird feeder but had never once seen a hummer at the feeder, so we tossed it out. I concluded that there were no hummers near our home.

The shop owner asked where we lived, I told him, and then he said, "They are there. Not only do some of your neighbors have hummers on their feeders, but hummers are all over the village." What he said next was the take-home line: "You just have to have eyes to see them. Once you do, you will see them everywhere. They are small and fast and camouflaged, but they are not that hard to spot."

Eventually we bought a new feeder, filled it, and waited until our eyes got accustomed to the sight of hummers. We now see them everywhere. When other people go on a walk with us, we often observe a hummer—but it is rare that our friends spot one. It takes experience. You need to learn to spot them out of the side of your eyes and acclimate to their habits of zooming and darting and taking shelter on obscure branches and even on telephone lines. But once you've learned to spot a hummer you will see them everywhere because they are everywhere.

Like angels. They, too, are all around us. Few of us have seen one because we first have to learn what we are looking for. In a good book about angels, Martin Israel, quoting a friend, wrote this: "Eternity lies all round us and only a veil prevents us seeing it." The hum of angels surrounds us, and we only need ears to hear it or eyes to see them. Or perhaps a special sense for them. After all, the Bible tells us that Balaam's donkey could see an angel that Balaam himself could not see.

The poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen died in November 2016. For many people Cohen became famous with his moving and biblically-infused song "Broken Hallelujah," especially with one of its last lines—"I'll stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah." Though he would often protest that he (in his own words) "wasn't really a religious man," Cohen seemed unable to sing or speak for very long without bringing up God. Shortly before his death, in an interview with the New Yorker, Cohen said, "I know there's a spiritual aspect to everybody's life, whether they want to cop to it or not. It's there, you can feel it …"

Although Cohen primarily identified as a Jew, he was drawn to the person and work of Jesus. Commenting on his song "The Captain," Cohen said, "What I mean to say [in this song] is that there are many things about Christianity that attract me. The figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It's difficult not to fall in love with that person." After praising Christ's emphasis on resurrection and rebirth, he concluded, "When we have this notion that there is no mechanism for resurrection, there is no redemption from sin, then we are forced to embrace evil and we get the kind of activity like genocide."

The popular novelist Andrew Klavan was raised in a non-practicing Jewish home. For about the first 45 years of his life, he lived as a "philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist." Klavan explains some of the steps along his journey that eventually led him to faith in Christ:

Jesus never appeared to me while I lay drunk in the gutter. And yet, looking back on my life, I see that Christ was beckoning to me at every turn. When I was a child, he was there in the kindness of a Christian babysitter and the magic of a Christmas Eve spent at her house. When I was a troubled young man contemplating suicide, he was in the voice of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired me to go on. And always, he was in the day-to-day miracle of my marriage, a lifelong romance that taught me the reality of love and slowly led me to contemplate the greater love that was its source and inspiration.

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. Slowly, I came to understand that his life, words, sacrifice, and resurrection formed the hidden logic behind every novel, movie, or play that touched my deepest mind.

I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my forties, lying in bed with one of Patrick O'Brian's great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I'd found, and for the work and people I loved: "Thank you, God."

It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual's hesitant experiment with faith. God's response was an act of extravagant grace. I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience "the joy of my joy," and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day.

This would lead to a full acceptance of Christ as Lord. Later, Klavan was baptized and wrote a book about his spiritual journey titled The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.

An article in the Washington Post is titled "I'm an atheist. So why can't I shake God?" and it suggests that it's "hard to believe in nothing when your psyche is wired for faith." The author Elizabeth King tells how she abandoned her childhood Christian faith for atheism. "Until my mid-teens, I was a 'born again' Christian who loved God with all her heart. These days, though, I'm an atheist with nothing to prove.

"The story of my departure from the church resembles those of many others who have abandoned the flock. When I was about 16, I started asking questions during services that my youth pastors couldn't or didn't want to answer: Why is it a sin to be gay? Why is it okay to spank children? Where does the Bible say we can't have premarital sex?"

Still, in spite of her atheism, King states, "somehow God has found a way to stick around in my mind." She thinks that "God's lingering presence" could be attributed to "the inner-workings of the human mind" against which the atheist battles hard. She claims, "If I could … banish this figure from my psyche, I would."

In the end, she has to admit, "I have no choice but to accept that I'm an atheist with a sense for God."

Is our world becoming overwhelming secular? Not exactly, says researcher Rodney Stark. In his book The Triumph of Faith, Stark argues that our world is still very open to spirituality, including traditional Christianity and other beliefs. Stark writes:

The world is more religious than it has ever been. Around the globe, four out of every five people claim to belong to an organized faith, and many of the rest say they attend worship services. In Latin America, Pentecostal Protestant churches have converted tens of millions, and Catholics are going to Mass in unprecedented numbers. There are more churchgoing Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else on earth, and China may soon become home of the most Christians. Meanwhile, although not growing as rapidly as Christianity, Islam enjoys far higher levels of member commitment than it has for many centuries, and the same is true for Hinduism. In fact, of all the great world religions, only Buddhism may not be growing. Furthermore, in every nook and cranny left by organized faiths, all manner of unconventional and unchurched supernaturalisms are booming: there are more occult healers than medical doctors in Russia; 38 percent of the French believe in astrology; 35 percent of the Swiss agree that "some fortune tellers really can foresee the future," and nearly everyone in Japan is careful to have a new car blessed by a Shinto priest.

In a remote valley of northern California forty-two radio telescopes point skyward. The Allen Telescope Array is a powerful tool for an organization called the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. The SETI Institute began decades ago, and this latest technological marvel represents a new phase in its cosmic search for extraterrestrial life. The array of large telescopes is "listening" carefully to the universe. In sync with each other, the telescopes read and record distant radio frequencies from across the universe, in the hope that something from the heavens will indicate the presence of an intelligent life form.

While the technology is new, the search is not. For all of human history humankind has looked upward and soulfully wondered, What is beyond? Who might be there? If we're honest, we all can admit that we default to a SETI mode at times. We may not gaze through a telescope, but our wonderings cause us to search, to look up, to look out, to look beyond for something out there that will bring meaning to our lives here. The SETI Institute has invested millions on the hope that the heavens will say something to us. But perhaps our scientific dollars are being wasted. Perhaps we've simply been unwilling or unable to hear what the heavens have been shouting all along.

The lonely artist had made up his mind. Today was the day he would end it all for good. He climbed the tropically wooded hill behind his Tahitian hut, more alone than he had ever been. The famous painter and atheist Paul Gauguin had failed to achieve meaningful success as a painter in his lifetime. He'd abandoned his wife and children, alienated his friends, and headed to Tahiti in search of the authentic life untouched by the poisons of conventionality, greed, and power. Now he had come to the end.

Just days before, he'd completed one last painting, intended as his final testament to the world. He'd described its philosophical ambition to a friend as "comparable to that of the gospel." It was a massive, three-panel work depicting Tahitian women of all life phases. Moving from right to left, it showed the beginning of life in an infant and the end of life in a sad, old woman—and various stages between. In English it was titled: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

And now, having finished his greatest work, Gauguin walked up the wooded hill and swallowed all the arsenic in the tin. But he ingested too much arsenic, causing him to violently vomit the poison before it could take effect. He managed to find his way back down the hill, and would die a few years later at the age of 54.

But those three questions—Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?—didn't come from Gauguin. They came from a Christian leader in France named Bishop Felix Dupanloup who drew from a much larger story than himself. Gauguin had studied under this dynamic Christian leader during most of his teen years. Dupanloup's introduction to Christianity instilled in Gauguin the practice of pondering these basic questions about God, our selves, and others. Dupanloup was convinced that once these three questions get into our hearts and minds they cannot be erased—not completely anyway, particularly in this young student. No matter how far he roamed (or ran) from God—no matter how he tried to shake his past—the passionate bishop's three questions, those he taught as more fundamental than all the others, could not leave the tormented and seemingly unyielding Gauguin. They became the substance of his final testament.

In It's a Long Story: My Life by Willie Nelson, Willie recounts his time as a "popular" Sunday School teacher at Metropolitan Baptist Church—a popularity he attributed to his "openness in exploring spiritual issues"—an openness that led to his eventual dismissal. Willie's dismissal from the church was an "opportunity to delve deeper in the mystery of the Holy Spirit. More than ever, I sought to learn about the Lord."

One book that had a huge impact upon Willie was The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, which taught that Jesus discovered and embraced the notion of reincarnation. Willie wrote:

From the first moment I considered the concept of reincarnation it made sense. The old paradigm was just too cruel, just too unchristian, to be believed: If you die in your sin, you spend eternity in hell. How could the compassionate God of mercy ever set up such a system? On the other hand, I was drawn to the idea that you keep coming back till you get it right. Reincarnation seemed merciful and completely Christ-like. Jesus got it right the first time around and was, after all, God incarnate, perfect man. But the rest of us would need several lifetimes to shed our sins and learn the lessons necessary to heal our troubled souls.

Here's how the late film director Stanley Kubrick (1928-199) explained his view of life: "The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. … The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it's hostile but that it is indifferent. … However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

Editor's Note: Here's another interesting quote about Kubrick's beliefs (and perhaps his longing for God). After his death, his wife Katharina was asked if Stanley Kubrick believed in God. She said, "Hmm, tricky. I think he believed in something, if you understand my meaning. He was a bit of a fatalist actually, but he was also very superstitious … I asked him once after The Shining, if he believed in ghosts. He said that it would be nice if there 'were' ghosts, as that would imply that there is something after death. In fact, I think he said, 'Gee, I hope so.'"

Possible Preaching Angles: Do we have to supply our own light or is Christ the world's true light?