The Bellwether Revivals (50 page)

Introduction

‘In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who commence a new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds, and the vanity of authors who presume the immortality of their name and writings.’

E
DWARD
G
IBBON

I couldn’t save my sister Tabitha from falling off the rooftop of our high school fifty-four years ago, but I saw the whole thing happen. She had gone up to the roof alone—not because she was the kind of rebellious kid who skipped class to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes (like her older brother) but because she was the kind of smart, keen student who liked to raise bacteria in Petri dishes to get extra credit from her science teacher. She would go up there every recess to observe how variables like direct sunlight or extreme shade affected their growth. I am not quite sure
how she came to fall. The school building had a pretty high parapet and I don’t think she stumbled. She may have climbed up there for some reason, maybe to find a particularly shady nook for one of her Petri dishes—I don’t know. But I do remember the sight of her falling as if it were yesterday.

At recess, I liked to sit with my friends on the bleachers and act tough as other kids went by. That’s what I was doing as my sister fell. I was talking tough, leering at some freshman boy and calling him names, and I guess I looked up for a tiny moment and saw it: a dark shape dropping towards the ground. Then I heard the horrible, haunting smack of her body against the cement parking lot. And I remember my friend Thomas laughing and saying, ‘Holy hell. Somebody just bought it.’

It is difficult for me to describe the grief I felt when I realized that dark shape was Tabitha. Although I’ve managed to box my grief away over the years, like some old photo album containing too many painful memories, the feeling of loss has never really left me. It is triggered whenever I hear her name spoken (which is not often), and whenever I think about high school (which is often), or whenever I see a Petri dish (which is more often than you might think).

I wrote about the sensations that come with bereavement a great deal in my book
Engines of Grief
and I don’t wish to retread old ground or dwell on the issue for too long here. This is not another book about grief, after all, it is a book about hope. But there is one last memory about Tabitha I would like to share here, if only to demonstrate how those two seemingly divergent states of being—grief and hope—are forever linked in my mind.

Roughly a year after my sister died, I attended a meeting of a local spiritualist church near Boston. Rather, I should say, my parents attended a meeting, and they took my begrudging sixteen-year-old self along with them. I was rattled by the despair of losing my sister, of course, but despondency seemed to affect
my parents a different way. It possessed their minds, consumed their every conversation. My mother went from being a happy-go-lucky housewife who always had a smile for everybody and a pie cooking in the oven in case the neighbors dropped by, to being a cheerless, downtrodden person who didn’t like to venture outdoors and saw doom lurking around every corner. My father’s way of coping was to apply himself to the task of investigating the circumstances of my sister’s death. Because he was a scientific man, a math teacher whose favorite phrase was ‘in mathematics there are no accidents,’ he wasn’t satisfied by the police report that ruled Tabitha’s death as accidental. He set out to explain the circumstances of my sister’s death like some private detective. For a while, he harassed one of Tabitha’s schoolfriends, Liz, to such a degree that her parents threatened to obtain a restraining order. My father became so obsessed with finding out what happened that he seemed to forget himself.

During this desperate process, I think he began to realize that everything in life is not understandable according to the laws of mathematics. Somewhere along the way, I don’t exactly know where or when, he found himself drawn to other things in his pursuit of answers. He started to look beyond what he’d always believed in—beyond the pure reason of science.

We were not a church-going family. I was not baptized and neither was Tabitha. It was much too late for my father to ‘find God’ in any conventional sense. He’d railed against organized religion his whole life. Instead, he found comfort in what people refer to as ‘the supernatural,’ but which he preferred to call ‘the metaphysical.’ He began—as many grieving people do—to believe in things like ghosts, angels, the spirit world. By the time I was seventeen, he had as many books in his study on spiritualism and mediumship as he had on calculus, geometry, or algebra. He began to attend meetings at a spiritualist church near Boston—the Waltham Church of Spiritism.

When we moved to Waltham in the spring of 1953, my mother and I thought we were moving to be closer to my father’s work, but later we realized we’d moved because he wanted to be nearer to the spiritualist church. He’d been attending three meetings a week there for several months before he finally convinced my mother to join him. She left for the Waltham Church one summer night, indifferent about the prospect, but when she came back she was giddy about what she’d encountered there.

The resident medium, she said, had claimed to be receiving the voice of a spirit whose name had the initials TC. Of course, she had taken this to mean Tabitha Crest and raised her hand. The medium had said he was sorry, he had lost the signal from the spirit world, and the voice of TC had gone—perhaps if she came back next week, he could try again? She reported all of this to me in the kitchen over cocoa, while my father stood by the counter, nodding.

The following week, we all went off to Waltham Church together. Despite my father’s great conviction that I would find it all very enlightening, and despite his advice that I should retain an open mind about metaphysical things, I was wholly skeptical about what I would find there. When a forty-year-old man with a bad shirt, a crew cut, and horn-rimmed glasses took to the pulpit and began to ask everyone how they were doing, I felt no better about it. When he just stood there, finger in one ear, breathing loudly through his nose like some folk singer pitching a harmony, I almost laughed. When he raised his hand to stifle the mumbling congregation, and said in a dry Bostonian voice, ‘Please, everybody, stay quiet now. I must be able to commune with the spirits coming forward to me tonight,’ the needle on my cynic-o-meter began to peak. ‘Yes, spirit,’ he said, ‘I do recognize you, spirit. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a spirit who’s been with us before. Somebody with the initials—what’s that now? BC?’ The congregation stayed
quiet. ‘TC?’ My parents fidgeted. ‘TC, yes, that’s it now,’ the medium said, ‘TC.’ No gender had been assigned to these initials, but this did not matter to my parents, both of whom held their arms aloft. ‘Here!’ my father said. ‘That’s my daughter!’ The medium fluttered his eyes open and said: ‘Yes, sir. She is with me now.’

You have to forgive me: I am an old man and I can’t recall the rest of that evening with complete accuracy, but there are certain things I know for sure. First of all, the medium, whose name was Kendall Johnson, never addressed the spirit as Tabitha (he might well have convinced me of his psychic powers had he plucked such an unusual name out of thin air, instead of a set of initials). He also talked about a diary my sister kept in her bottom drawer, as if this were absolute proof that he could only be talking to Tabitha Crest, surely the only girl in the history of the world who’d ever kept a diary. ‘You must read it,’ he told my parents, ‘she wants you to read it. It’ll answer a lot of your questions.’

But my lasting memory of that night is of the congregation itself. The church was crammed. Fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred people. And it occurred to me then, as it occurs to me now, that everybody in the room was grieving for someone. Whether it was a sister, a brother, a mother, a father; whether it was a daughter or a son or an aunt or an uncle; they were all mourning the passing of somebody they loved and had come to Waltham Church for one reason: the slightest hope that they might be able to talk to that person again.

My rage began to grow when I figured this out. I wanted to stand up and shout, ‘You’re all such frauds! You’re all such phoneys!’ but I didn’t. Here was a place that preyed upon the most anguished and helpless people. It purported to give hope when there was none to give—and, worse, it charged a price for admission. It was immoral, I thought, abhorrent, and I told my parents so on the car ride home. I said I would never go back
there as long as I lived. ‘How can you say that, Herb? You heard the man,’ my father replied. ‘The thing about the diary?’ When I told him it was only coincidence, suggestion, sleight of hand, my father scoffed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You can stay home next time, and I’ll go talk to your sister.’

But a few months later, my mother stopped going to the Waltham Church with him. She claimed she was too busy for it. Around the time I was graduating high school, my father started going to another spiritualist church in Watertown, and then another in Dorchester, and then another in Roxbury, and soon he stopped attending spiritualist churches altogether. He took to working longer hours and returning home later, spending nights alone in his study with the lights off and a bottle of Johnnie Walker for company. He became melancholy. Some weekends, he wouldn’t get out of his pajamas or even take a shower—and for a man who’d always prided himself on his appearance, this was a significant backward step. One night, I came into his study and he was passed out drunk. On the desk in front of him sat my sister’s diary. He’d pried open the tiny lock. Every page was blank, apart from one, which bore a faded scribble, as if Tabitha had used it to test a pen.

My father died three years later, when I was living as an undergraduate in his native England. It was only after he died that I realized how much my angry response to the spiritualist church had affected him. I had trodden roughshod over something he had placed his faith in. I had destroyed the one thing he had left of Tabitha: the hope of her continued, peaceful existence in some other, better place. And I understood that the reason I hadn’t stood up in the church that night and shouted ‘You’re all such phoneys!’ was because I knew that I would be taking away the last thread of hope for an entire congregation.

At the time of writing my book
Engines of Grief
, I co-chaired a symposium at the University of Denver with a psychiatrist colleague of mine, Dr. Evan Meade, in which he touched upon
an idea that struck a chord with me. He posited that in times of great anguish and bereavement, the most valuable thing a person can possess is a single thread of hope, even if that hope is entirely baseless. He referred to it in terms of religion, in regard to what is often termed ‘blind faith.’ I recall the conversation sliding past me (as most conversations now do), and the symposium was over all too quickly, but that kernel of an idea stayed in my mind for a long time after.

Then, ten years later, I was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. A grade four glioblastoma multiforme tumor—the worst kind. I won’t get too much into the complexities and modalities of this now, because I will be discussing them at length in later chapters, but I will say this: on the day my doctor told me the bad news, I thought a great deal about my sister, about my parents, and about the ideas my colleague Dr. Meade had discussed at our symposium. In fact, I began to think a lot about hope, about what it meant—specifically, what it meant to
me—
and the more I thought about it, the larger the issue became, until it felt like something I had to write about.

One of the most important things I have come to understand through the course of my experiences with the myriad healers, mediums, and wannabe prophets you will read about in the chapters that follow is how my father—such a mathematically minded man—could abandon his convictions and place his faith beyond the laws of science. It had always bothered me that, even when the claims of the mediums at the Waltham Church were so obviously bogus, he seemed utterly convinced by them. I think I had always resented him for being so easily duped. But I understand now, after the personal battles I have been through lately, that when my father talked this way, behaved this way, he was not really my father at all. Like a drug addict, he was under the influence of something much stronger than he could rationally control. His mind had been seized by a delusion.

It is the same delusion my own mind has been prey to in the years since my diagnosis. It is the same everyday delusion that makes a crippled man shout Hallelujah and fall from his wheelchair when a preacher touches his head. It is the same delusion that sends a fireman into a burning building when there is no chance of survival; that makes a rocket scientist drop to her knees and pray to a God she’s never believed in when her son is kidnapped; that makes a farmer keep on planting the seeds in the arid soil when the rain doesn’t come and the crops don’t grow; that encourages a father of five to place his last fifty bucks on a rank outsider at the dog track; that makes a barren woman spend her life savings on an IVF treatment with a five per cent ratio of success; that makes a respected psychologist with a brain tumor and a profound skepticism for the metaphysical world attend five sessions a week with a faith healer called Padre at some backwater dive in Bigfork, Montana; that makes a simple man called Kendall Johnson believe he is endowed with the ability to commune with the dead.

It is the delusion we all know as hope. And what this book will investigate is whether this simple delusion is as benign as we believe it to be, or if it is something considerably more harmful.