We all took our seats and introduced ourselves. The people seemed utterly ordinary. There was a librarian. A nurse. An insurance agent. A retired attorney. Most of them came to these monthly meetings regularly.
Reverend Ida lit the candles, turned on the lava lamps, and lowered the overhead lights. We held hands and sat in silence for a few minutes as she began to chant. The words were about love and the spirit, so simple and repetitive that soon I was able to join in. Then she asked us to form a “healing circle” around Jeanine, a slender, pale woman about my age who was wearing dark jogger pants, a zippered sweatshirt, and a rust-colored turban. She sat slumped in her chair, her eyes rimmed with dark circles, her long fingers with stubby painted nails knitted together in her lap. Jeanine asked us to please be gentle since she was “wired.” She showed us a tube that snaked out from beneath her loose green sweatshirt and explained that this was how she was getting her regular doses of chemo.
Reverend Ida instructed each of us to close our eyes and concentrate on sending healing thoughts and energy to Jeanine. Feeling very self-conscious, I kept my eyes open a slit. Everyone else stood with their eyes closed, their hands hovering over Jeanine’s head or touching her back or shoulders. I reached out and let my hand rest lightly on her arm, trying to smother my inner skeptic.
This went on for about ten minutes, but it seemed much longer. When it was over, spots of pink had appeared on Jeanine’s cheeks, and she was in tears. She thanked us. There were murmurs all around of “God bless you.”
Several people commented on the breeze they’d felt during the healing circle. It was more than a breeze, one woman remarked. More like little tornados and whirlwinds whipping around the room. Reverend Ida said those were spirits. Several spirits, in fact. Others said they’d felt a tingle of electricity in the air. It was so strong, one woman said, that she was nearly swept off her feet.
“If you don’t feel a healing tonight,” Reverend Ida said, “you’re never going to feel one.”
I nodded and smiled, but I’d felt no breeze and not the tiniest tingle of electricity. All I’d felt was sympathy for this poor cancer patient and pressure to say that I sensed something that I did not.
But psychic healing wasn’t what I’d come for, so I was glad when Reverend Ida eased the group into a discussion of the “astral plane,” an intermediate world between heaven and earth where disembodied souls hang out. She explained that the living can travel there in dreams, during deep meditation, or even while conscious. Like Laura, I thought. Tonight, Reverend Ida promised, she’d guide us there.
One woman wanted to know if people like Jeffrey Dahmer would be there, too. No, Reverend Ida assured her, because he was evil. Not even, the woman pressed, if Dahmer’s motives were pure? What if he truly believed what he’d done had been done for a good reason? Not even then was the answer.
Reverend Ida turned off the lights and left only a single votive candle lit. The flame and its reflection in the coffee table’s mirrored top cast an eerie circle of light on the ceiling. “If you open yourself up to it and create a circle of light,” Reverend Ida said, “the spirits will step into it.”
The woman who was worried about Jeffrey Dahmer had another question. What if she opened herself up to the spirits, and someone she didn’t much like when they were alive visited her? A perfectly reasonable question, in my opinion. Reverend Ida dismissed the concern. Another woman said she talked to her dead grandfather all the time in her dreams, and he was a whole lot nicer than he’d been when he was alive.
Dreaming that you talk to your dead grandfather was one thing. I looked around the circle and wondered if any of these people had experienced anything even close to what was happening to Laura.
The room fell silent as Reverend Ida turned the music back on and led us through a guided meditation. It began, “Close your eyes and envision in your hands a flower. Any flower. Feel it. Look into it. Then look up and see a beautiful field. A brook. Deer and antelope frolicking on the other side. Go stand in the brook. Feel all of your cares and anxieties washed away. A beautiful monk comes toward you with a basket of flowers.”
This went on. And on. It was warm in the room, and soon a man across the circle from me was softly snoring. A few minutes later Reverend Ida told us there was ectoplasm and electricity in the air. She said we should open ourselves up. Not be afraid. “We are safe within the circle of light.” Then she summoned spirits to step into the light and announced, “The meeting is yours.”
After a long silence, people on all sides started to talk. They brought images to one another. A silver teapot. A hairbrush. A single pearl. A man with a pick. Sometimes there was a name with the image, sometimes only an initial. There were messages, too, like “P says, do what you have to do.” Or “J wants you to follow your heart.” One woman brought the woman sitting next to her muffins with needles sticking out of them. No message, but she wondered, had someone close to her died who was into cooking and sewing?
Reverend Ida cautioned that the symbols were not to be taken literally. The person receiving the message would give it meaning. And, she said, she’d received a message for me.
The circle fell silent as she asked me if I knew a man who’d been crushed to death. Perhaps someone who’d fallen to his death? Because she saw concrete, slabs of concrete. “He’s here, telling me… the message is…” She strained, listening, then lowered her voice. “I’m feeling pressure from two sides, but I will be able to reconcile them and stand up straight between them, on my own.”
Everyone looked at me expectantly. I knew no one who’d been crushed to death, not literally. But people who’d been conflicted? Pressured in opposite directions? You could say that about Laura’s brother Josh, needing to reach out to Laura but realizing it wasn’t healthy for her to keep taking him in. It could have described me at that moment, feeling as if I should see meaning where I found none. In fact, that description—pressured from two sides—could be forced to fit just about anyone at any time, dead or alive.
Then Reverend Ida brought me a name. Victoria. It meant nothing to me, amazingly, since mine is a generation of Vickys and Susans and Nancys. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And there’s a message from Mom or Mommy. She says hello.” A murmur of approval swept through the circle.
I almost laughed because it seemed so unlikely. My mother, a Hollywood screenwriter and a confirmed atheist, would have been appalled to have found herself waiting around for years on the astral plane to deliver a line as prosaic as Hello.
Finally, I was the only one in the group who hadn’t brought a symbol or message into the circle. I apologized, saying I was new at this. But I thanked everyone and assured them that I felt light, luminous light. And gratitude for being able to bear witness. I was relieved when that seemed to be enough.
As the meeting broke up, I realized how ebullient they all were, their own spirits genuinely uplifted by the evening’s experiences. Reverend Ida urged me to come back. I thanked her and said I would, though I knew I would not. She told me not to be discouraged, that I’d get the hang of it. And I suspected that was all too true, because how many meetings like this could anyone sit through and keep right on seeing and feeling nothing? I’d have soon found meaning in the messages and symbols people brought me. And maybe, in my dreams, I’d have been pleasantly surprised to discover that my mother had mellowed since she had died.