Lily Dale (23 page)

“I know you might have the idea that this can't be done. Please set that aside. This energy can go through lead, through walls. Superman, Superwoman, they all do this. The energy is going where it needs to go for the highest and the best,” he said.

Elaine assured us that we already knew how to do what she was teaching us. We'd done it as children but forgotten how. She urged us to give up our ideas about whether what we said was right or wrong. Focus on healing, she said.

I worried about the idea that so many people needed healing. Was she saying everybody was sick?

Not exactly.

“People have gotten so out of touch with their feelings and their gut that they need a mirror that's going to be kind and loving,” she said. Our messages would be that.

I'd heard Lauren say much the same thing. “If people could get their heads and their hearts together, I'd be out of business,” she said.

As green as we were at giving messages, Elaine said we ought to proceed with full confidence in our abilities. “It's not ‘Oh, God, give me this.' It's ‘Thank you for what you're going to give us.'”

Don't try, our teachers told us. And don't analyze. Experience. We could analyze later.

 

L
ate Saturday afternoon we sat in two rows facing one another. We were about to play spirit chairs. My row stayed put while the people in the facing seats moved to their left after having exchanged messages. As each person sat before us, we were to say our prayer and then look into his or her eyes.

My first partner was Jim. On the first day, Jim volunteered to say the prayer before breakfast. He stepped up to the task with such energy and gave such a resounding blessing that I decided to stay away from him. So much positive energy jangled my nerves. But there he was.

As I looked into his eyes, my mind went blank. Nothing. Not a word. Not an image. I could meditate a thousand hours trying for such a total void and never reach it.

I had to say something.

“You're someone who really throws yourself into what you do.” This was weak, and I was cheating. Everyone in the room knew that about him.

I looked more deeply into his eyes. They were a soft brown.

“Oh,” I gasped, and, then, as though we were at a masquerade ball and he'd taken off a mask, I said, full of surprise, “that's who you are.”

In an instant I felt as though I'd moved from seeing what he looked like to seeing who he was.

“Being so out there costs you something, doesn't it?” I went on. “You're really quite shy and sensitive. You'd like to withdraw, but you don't. You're quite brave. You stay connected with people and keep trying because you know that's the way to live the best life. You seek the truth even when it's hard to do. You ought to be very proud of your courage.”

The connection was so intimate that it rattled me. I began to talk faster and faster. Words flew out of my mouth before I thought them, and I knew I was right. I could read it in his eyes. I felt powerful and full of knowledge that I hadn't imagined five minutes before.

Then Jim gave me a message. He said I came to the workshop as a skeptic, but I was being changed. He said I was there for a spiritual experience. I'd heard that perhaps a dozen times in Lily Dale, and I was tired of hearing it. My spirituality was fine, if you please. I was there to write a book.

I thanked him, trying not to sound churlish.

Next came Sally. I said the prayer, and I looked into her eyes. They had a glint that Jim's didn't. They were less wide but full of life. In an earlier exercise, when Charles asked us to demonstrate joy, Sally had thrown her clenched fists over her head and let out a piercing whoop. The explosion startled us all. One woman clutched her chest and said, “Don't do that.”

“You have a great fountain of joy in you,” I said, talking slow, feeling cheesy because I was cheating again. Then I morphed into my new self—fast-talking Chris.

“You have to protect that joy. It's your great gift. It's a gift for everyone around you. You don't understand how important it is. Don't let anything cause that fountain to lessen. If you do, you'll be robbed, but so will all the people who need to feel that joy. You've allowed what other people think and want to come ahead of that joy, and you must stop doing that.”

What the hell was I doing? I was gushing like a broken hydrant. I never tell people who they are. I never give advice to strangers. I don't tell. I ask. That's my business. To watch, to listen, to stay under cover.

Finally, I finished my spiel, came back to my true self, and asked weakly, “Does any of this make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I've had some bad experiences in the past couple of years, and I think they really caused me to withdraw from other people. I was not as outgoing as I used be. I guess I had dampened down my joy.”

“Oh,” I said.

She hugged me and then gave me a message. She said I was smart and tended to underestimate that. She said I had knowledge other people needed. She said I shouldn't waste that intelligence.

I didn't want to hear this. For all my life as a reporter, I believed that if I used my talent and intelligence well, people would benefit. I believed that every story had the potential to change how people saw the world. But I'd stretched myself as far as I could. The world hadn't changed. I hadn't enlightened anyone. I no longer wanted to trot out my intelligence, my theories, myself, in pursuit of some big vision. I felt like a trained monkey always dancing around hoping someone would throw out a penny. Instead, they threw tomatoes—you're not dancing fast enough;
you're not dancing well enough; the monkey down the street is dancing better.

I thanked her. I didn't like her message, but, as Elaine did before her, Sally seemed to have picked up my current state of mind. Or was I reading into it? Was I taking general statements and using them in my own ways? I didn't know. Maybe we were all doing that. Maybe the whole class was using our mysteriously sharpened intuition to connect with another kind of consciousness and at the same time using the same intuition and consciousness to eke meaning out of whatever was said to us.

Another Jim was my next partner. He looked dazed.

“I can't believe what's happening here,” he said. “I'm really getting things. This message giving was the part of the workshop I was most skeptical about. I never thought this would happen.”

I knew he wanted to write a book because he had already told me so, but this time I didn't use what I knew. I looked into his eyes and started talking. Again my boldness startled me. He didn't seem interested in what I was saying, but I couldn't stop.

I urged that he be more open about his own sensitivity. I told him that like a snail he needed to come out of his shell in order to move forward. I was talking as fast as I could, and all of it was drivel. I sounded like one of the mediums at the Stump who tells all the men that they're misunderstood and all the women that they give too much to others.

I hate people who foist ill-founded opinions on others. Why was I doing this? I finally wound down enough to shut up. I think we were both immensely relieved.

Jim's messages to me were of a different nature. He was seeing pictures. He saw children's building blocks with letters on them. He saw the words “super heroes.” Then he got a vision of a forest and fields and horses running. None of this meant anything to me. I told him so.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Now that he had his legs under him, he was ready to run with those visions. Messages he was getting meant far less to Jim than the ones he was giving. I understood completely. Our own powers were so strange and so powerful that we no longer cared what people could tell us. We wanted to know what we could tell them.

My next partner listened to my impassioned, hackneyed message with smiling impatience. Then she interrupted.

“What I really want to know is where I should go to school.”

Psychics had told her she should become a nurse, but she didn't want to. I asked a few questions about her career plans. I shut my eyes. Nothing. As we began to discuss her plans again, a trainer tapped me on the shoulder.

“Try not to talk to each other. You're often blocking what you can get from spirit.”

I closed my eyes. In the upper right edge of the blackness I saw a little figure with a nurse's cap on.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “All I see is a nurse. I know that's no good.”

After the exercise ended, Elaine asked for comments. People flung their hands in the air and waved them like school kids.

“Now we know enough to be dangerous,” said a tall young woman with a thick braid hanging down her back.

“I'm good at this,” shouted Beth the hypnotherapist as she pumped her fist into the air.

“You're good now, but wait until tomorrow when you'll be really good,” Elaine said.

I left the fire hall thinking I'd experienced a connection so intimate and so powerful that it was scary. Did mediums feel this? If so, maybe what I took to be a lack of communication skills was a shield that they put up to protect themselves. If they felt such intimacy with every person who sat in their parlor, no wonder they wanted to hide during ordinary conversations. Maybe that's
why they seemed not to listen to others and why I always had the feeling that they might break off the conversation any minute. I'd do the same thing if I were hooked up to such intensity day after day. I'd get some reserve and keep as much of it as I could.

I was disturbed but not convinced. I had a ready explanation: I had been reading people's faces and body language. I had looked into their eyes, which is not something people often do. I had said things I observed and intuited but hadn't brought into consciousness. The workshop focused that consciousness, but not perfectly. I'd also made a kind of fool of myself.

 

T
he next day, we sat in circles of six, and a trainer sat with us. First we did physical healing. Our trainer for that was a cherubic-looking woman with long, wavy, blond hair. She often said, with great relish and anticipation, “Love me up.” Lots of hugging was required. As usual, I felt no energy when healing or being healed. The only surprise was that when the healers worked on me they concentrated on my shoulders and neck, areas I needed help with and hadn't mentioned. But, then, who doesn't need help with their shoulders and neck?

Later, we practiced giving messages. Elaine called this verbal healing. We didn't try for spirits, just messages. We were to say whatever images, words, or feelings came to us. The lights were always left on.

The first task was to figure out whom to give a message to. Our teachers said we might see a spirit form around a certain person, as mediums often did, but more likely we would merely feel drawn to that person. We might sense energy around someone, or a color, or simply the inclination to pick a certain person.

When one student had trouble getting a message, our trainer suggested that she give a message about childhood. When my turn came, I tried the same technique. I picked a blonde to my
left and asked whether I could come to her. She said yes. Then I sat there mouth-breathing, like an adenoidal dunce. I had nothing to say.

I closed my eyes. At first I saw only blackness. Then the skirt of a dress and the legs of a little girl appeared. One moment nothing, and the next moment they were there. I couldn't see the child's shoulders or head.

“I see a dress that has a full skirt and a petticoat under it.” I was laughing skeptically even as I said it. “It's the old-fashioned kind of slip, a can-can that makes the dress bell out.

“The dress has a sash, a wide sash,” I said. “It ties in the back in a big bow. It's rose-colored.”

I felt foolish, and a refrain was singing at the back of my brain,
You're making this up. You're making this up. You're making this up.
It was unnerving me.

“I know that's ridiculous,” I said. “Who wears a sash?”

The other members of the circle laughed, but I didn't open my eyes.

Like a diver about to plunge, I pulled a long breath of air into my lungs.

“That's what I see. The sash is rose-colored. The dress is off-white with flowers on it. Not flowers massed together but spread out on the background of white. And they're big, but not huge. Red and pink, I think.”

I didn't think. I knew. I could see it. But what was it?

It's a desperate attempt to fit in,
the voice said at the back of my head.
You've conjured up something because you don't want to be embarrassed. Cowardly to the core.

Now my words started to speed up.

“You were a girly sort of little girl.”

I stopped. Part of my mind was groping for how to put this so I wouldn't insult her. Another part was still trying to shut me up.

You're extrapolating,
the voice of reason said.
You're building on what you've seen, you phony. The woman is wearing makeup. Nice clothes, well pressed. Her posture is good. So you've turned her into a priss. Admit it.

“Not prissy, exactly, but girly,” I said, “very feminine. You liked to dress up and wear fancy dresses. You thought that was just a wonderful thing to do.”

You're being ridiculous,
the voice said.
Imagining things and passing them off as truth, embroidering on what anyone could see and making it into some great revelation. Disgusting. Stop it.

I opened my eyes.

“What kind of sleeves did it have?” she asked.

“What? I don't know. I didn't look.”

“Well, look,” she said.

I closed my eyes. The vision was gone.

“Were they short?” she asked.

“I'm sorry. I don't know,” I said. “They might have been.”