Faith Works 10-14-22

Faith Works 10-14-22
Jeff Gill

Talking to the dead, as one does
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Speaking as a Christian believer, I would describe speaking to the dead as an entirely logical and reasonable behavior.

If a more pragmatic, not to say materialist philosopher were to ask me if they answer back, that is where the conversation might get awkward.

Because they do. I understand that an atheist might challenge me aggressively about the idea of communicating with God, but there tends to be a more gentle approach from skeptics of all sort when it comes to people asserting they speak to the dead, recently or longer ago. We have all sorts of psychological inferences we can make in the modern age, suggesting it's more a conversation inside our head than with any objective external . . . and J.K. Rowling plays interestingly with this idea inside a sort of heavenly King's Cross between Dumbledore and Harry Potter, a conversation you either know or you don't, so I'll leave it there.

However, all sorts of people who are not Christian believe their loved ones communicate with them after death; Spiritualists come in a variety of flavors, theistic and otherwise — we once had a large settlement of such folk at Summerland Beach on the southwest corner of Buckeye Lake, and their summer lands were not vacations in July but the Spiritualist name for the Life Beyond, however understood.

Christians even have a variety of views on the afterlife and how it works, both for those entering into it and for how we, the living, might hear from it: including the firm belief that you do not, and shouldn't.

I'd put myself at least on the cautious side, warning people that trying to communicate with the dead does happen in the Bible, but it rarely is a good idea if it's the living making the effort to break that barrier down from our side. Obviously, if someone once dead returns through the veil, that's different (and that's usually Jesus).

My own talking to the dead is a more benign and less anxious activity, and is often a matter of walking through cemeteries, being open to what the stones and their stories are saying. You've read some of those dialogues right here, as I learned about the struggles families in Indianapolis had in the early 1940s as young men died in training, even before the war began, and after the conflict started, a shocking number died even before the enemy was anywhere near. It's a message I could have learned in books or heard from a narrative, but I found it on tombstones, in a section, told in pieces.

Oh, that's not talking to the dead, some might say. Well, I don't know about that. I think about dates and days and lives and families gathered at such a spot, and I start to see images and feel emotions. Is it all projection, imagination, psychology? How can you be sure?

Or it is the dead, speaking softly, and not just in cemeteries. This is a season when we have a chance to listen, in church and elsewhere, to stories that aren't in today's news, but still have resonance to speak to us. From where? We can discuss that, can't we?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in a number of cemeteries recently, and isn't that October for you? Tell him about your favorite graveyard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.