Talking to Ghosts

By Audrey Stallsmith

Was talking to ghosts really the best way to deal with anxiety? I’ve been reading a book about the families of Lincoln and his murderer and their connections to the spiritualism prevalent during the Victorian era. 

The Booths were actors and, though the father had had mental lapses at times, it struck me that the family members’ main problem was that they based to many of their actions on emotions. And the charlatans in the spiritualism movement took advantage of one of those emotions—grief—to deceive their customers. 

I don’t doubt that there also were sincere psychics who thought they could help the bereft by communicating with the dead, but their leaving themselves open to whatever spirits wanted to inhabit them was highly dangerous, to say the least. And, although we now can conclude that many of those psychics’ trances probably actually were self-hypnotism, they still are strictly forbidden by God. 

In Leviticus 19:21, He said “Do not defile yourselves by consulting mediums and wizards, for I am Jehovah your God.” In Leviticus 20:6 a warning is added “I will set my face against anyone who consults mediums and wizards instead of me and I will cut that person off from his people.” 

The Old Testament doesn’t say that communication with the dead is impossible. In fact, the witch of Endor actually was able to bring up Samuel when Saul demanded to speak to him. But, judging from the fact that her success frightened her so much, we might conclude that was an exception to the rule in her case! 

I don’t see anything wrong with us speaking to the dead ourselves, since it is hard to abruptly cut off all communication with someone we love. After my mother passed, I always was saying in my mind, “Now, Mom, what did you do with so and so?” since she was the one who always knew where everything was! And I didn't think of her as a ghost, since I know she now is more alive than any of us ever are here on earth. But there’s a difference between “talking to” and “praying to,” and I would end up asking God instead. 

His use of the words “instead of me” give us a clue as to why mediums were supposed to be stoned to death back then. They were just another example of the human race’s inclination to do an end run around God Himself. Apparently many of us find ghosts less scary than we find Him because He makes higher demands on us than they do. 

Oddly enough, many of the people consulting mediums in that period of high anxiety surrounding the Civil War years didn’t seem to be looking for communication with the dead as much as for the answers about the future that God refuses to give us. Granted, he does guarantee that, if we choose Him we will go to live with Him eventually. But He doesn’t tell us whether that will be tomorrow or forty years from now or what trials we will have to endure in the meantime. That frustrates our need to feel in control—actually a good thing since we aren’t the ones in control. 

Unfortunately, John Wilkes Booth didn’t see it that way. He was so outraged at the outcome of the Civil War that he at first contemplated kidnapping Lincoln but eventually decided on killing him instead. He, in fact, reminds me of those protestors who recently stormed the capitol due to their anger over their side not winning. 

The assassin actually thought that his killing Lincoln would throw the nation into turmoil and allow the South to rise again. So, he was stunned to find that, after some initial confusion, the government contrived to go on without the Great Emancipator. Ironically enough, Booth may have thought Lincoln more important than Lincoln thought himself. 

That president had been more of a rationalist, so much so that he hadn’t always considered himself Christian, though he’d come to rely more and more on God to get him through his frequent bouts of depression, the difficulties of the Civil War, and the death of his son. From the jokes he made about the spiritualists from time to time, the author of the book concluded that Lincoln tolerated them for the sake of his high-strung wife but didn’t take them seriously. Though he definitely had emotions too, frequently dark ones, he didn’t allow them to deflect him from his duties. 

In The God of All Comfort, another Victorian—Hannah Whitall Smith—notes the dangers of relying on feelings when she says, “The truth is that what satisfies us is not the Lord, but our own feelings about the Lord. . .consequently when our feelings fail we think it is the Lord who has failed, and we are plunged into darkness.” 

She goes on to add that “The last and greatest lesson that the soul has to learn is the fact that God, and God alone, is enough for all its needs. . . As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us.” 

She should know. She lost three children to childhood diseases. And it’s a good thing that she had one godly son, Frank, who died at eighteen and about whom she wrote her first book, The Record of a Happy Life. Because he was the only one of her grown children of whom she could be proud. 

Her minister husband, who was charismatic enough to make a stirring preacher also had mental issues similar to those of Booth’s father—and a similarly histrionic personality. He would end up abandoning his faith—because he wasn’t feeling it anymore—and virtually abandoning his marriage by his infidelity. As his wife lacked his emotional personality, he accused her of not caring about him at all, proving that he equated love with emotion too rather than with commitment. 

Dallas Willard believes such reliance on emotion rather than knowledge to be one of the main problems with the modern church. He writes in Knowing Christ Today that “the current guide to reality and what is good in the United States, if not the western world as a whole, is sensuality or feeling. . .[Americans] judge Christian activities and their own religious condition according to their feelings. The quest for pleasure takes over the house of God.” 

As for Hannah’s family, the daughter who was most like her vacillating father left her husband and children for another man—on whom she also cheated. And the daughter who most resembled Hannah fell in love with a famous atheist who eventually would dump her. But that daughter apparently never regained her faith either. Nor did their essayist brother or the abandoned grandchildren whom Hannah uncomplainingly raised herself.

I’m guessing she may have come to regret the fact that she’d let so many other famous writers—including skeptics—into her house when her children were growing up. And that she’d espoused the doctrine of universalism, probably as a reaction to the cruel doctrine of predestination which was so prevalent at the time. After all, the idea that everybody eventually will be saved anyhow leaves people with precious little incentive to change their sinful ways now. 

At any rate, it’s a good thing that Hannah wasn’t the sort to throw tantrums when things didn’t go her way. As one of those so-called unemotional types myself, I know that we feel as much as other people do. We just don’t express those feelings as much, either because we don’t think they are all that important to anybody but us or because we think that they aren’t anybody’s else’s business but our own! 

Both those of us who suppress our emotions and those who base their decisions on them make them too important. As Timothy Keller advises in Encounters with Jesus, “You must nether repress your feelings nor be ruled by them.” In the end, it’s our choices, not our emotions about them which decide our fate. 

And basing those choices on something as short-lived and impossible to pin down as feelings is like trying to get answers from gauzy ghosts. Real faith demands a gritted-teeth adherence to what we know is right even when it goes against everything our emotions tell us to do. 

Though Hannah may not have contrived to save her own family, her classic The Christian Secret of a Happy Life did prove indispensable to many other believers, in her own generation and beyond—especially those of us who are told that our religion lacks something because we aren’t emotional enough. Although its title seems ironic, considering the type of life Hannah actually lived, she concluded that life still clinging to The God of All Comfort (the title of her last book). 

How she was able to do that perhaps is explained best in one of her letters to Frank, in which she writes, “As for joy,. . .thy joy is to be in the Lord, not in thyself. Spiritual joy is not a thing, not a lump of joy, so to speak, stored away in your heart, to be looked at and rejoiced over. Our joy is all in Christ. . .now I never think whether I have joy or not. I have Christ, and that is enough.”