A Ghastly Correspondence - The Final Letter

On God and ghosts

This is the sixth and final letter in a correspondence series between writer

Wil Dalton

and me. Here are the links to the previous posts: Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3, Letter 4, and Letter 5. Read Wil’s Letter 5 here:

A Ghastly Correspondence - Letter 5

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Conclusions

First of all, given the topics at hand, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for anyone to expect “conclusions” at all.

Secondly, I feel suddenly resentful that it’s on my shoulders to deliver them.

Third, and finally, I am flattered by your sentiments regarding Letter #4. I was really proud of my work there, and I’m afraid I peaked early with it. By contrast, your last letter was your best yet, and left me with a whole lot to respond to.

So I’ll lean on that.

Let’s start with the lies

Your story about the boy who cried ghost, and then freaked out when he believed his own lie, is about as good of an indictment of human reliability as anything I’ve seen. The irony of that room full of kids who were convinced you’re lying to them is not lost on me.

But like I said in my last letter, just because everybody lies, all the time, about everything, doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth buried under there.

What if, for instance, that kid came up with the whole con because somewhere in his past he did indeed have a paranormal experience that shook him, and this was his subconscious effort to exorcise it. But then, when his lie sparked the imaginations of his peers, the plan backfired, triggering the trauma response that so baffled you at the time.

This is probably not what happened, but you see what I’m saying. Despite our frivolous behavior, and our trite conversations, our souls are dark pools, hiding all manner of strange and frightening secrets.

Every lie is just a mutated manifestation of truth.

Back to Lisa, for a moment

You asked:

…did she tell you how the experience has affected how she lives her life today? Like, does she refuse to go back to her childhood home? Does she burn sage or hang iron or line all her entrances and windows with salt?

I haven’t talked to her much about these things beyond the notes she sent. I know that she is a believer in both God and ghosts. I know that she has an abiding and sympathetic interest in horror films and other stories of the occult. I don’t know about her relationship to sage.

You’re afraid

You spent a lot of words trying to properly contextualize an experience you couldn’t dismiss. I’ll even bet there’s a big part of you that hopes I’ll admit I made the whole thing up.

But I didn’t.

Besides, if either of us wanted to, we could easily find countless other stories as compelling as hers, or more so.

Regarding Lisa, you conclude with this:

My hope is that her scary experiences were necessary to grow her faith. I don’t know if this view is explicit in any catechism, but I like to imagine the devil (or other fallen angels) intent on doing evil and cursed to find their every action only resulting in good.

Are ghosts fallen angels?

I’d like to suggest that you resist this kind of thinking. It is an effort to collapse the dimensionality of a mystery into a cosmology with which you are already familiar and comfortable.

When presented with a perspective that challenges our ideas about how the universe works, our first impulse is to attempt to shoehorn it into our assumptions, rather than allow our set of operational paradigms be plastic enough to reshape themselves to accommodate a more complicated reality.

But it’s hard to do this, because it means constantly rewriting the root layers of code that run our very personalities. Our ego doesn’t want to adapt, because it feels that to adapt is to die, and it is not wrong. Just as the seed must die for the sake of the tree, and the child must die for the sake of the adult. Change is death.

But it is also life. And so: we must force our ego to face the death of paradigm plasticity, and thus embrace the everlasting life of growth.

God, etc

I hoped to avoid discussions of faith so I would not alienate my religion averse readers. Then I foolishly shared ghost stories from my own lived experience and I cannot be honest without acknowledging how I understand myself and the world where I love without admitting the all-encompassing role of my own faith.

I don’t know whose fault it is that we wound up talking about God, but I’m willing to let you take the blame.

It’s a touchy subject!

People equate God with religion, and I think it’s fair to say nobody likes religion these days — the most common posture is “spiritual but not religious.” To claim Christianity is to enter an unwinnable semantic battle of preconceptions.

But here we are: Christians, both, having accidentally cornered each other into talking about it.

I was born and raised Mormon, which is the colloquial term for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — an intractably long name for a religious organization, but what can you do.

At some point in my 20s, I realized I was going to have to reckon with not knowing things that I grew up believing I was supposed to know. Not just things like whether Jesus Christ was resurrected, or whether the Bible and/or The Book of Mormon were “true,” but whether there even was such a thing as God at all, or if instead, as many of the most influential minds of the past few centuries suggest, we live in a universe of deterministic materials, each of us briefly instantiating the illusion of free will inside of a cramped, egocentric cage.

Can we even really know anything “true” about “reality”?

So I spent a lot of years a pace or two back from the sort of outward convictions I expressed so freely in my youth. The words “I don’t know” became a warm balm to my soul. Because I didn’t know, and that was OK. Especially because if you look around, it’s clear that regardless of what they claim, most people hardly know anything at all.

But you can only live so long with an allergy to truth-claims. It’s tough to work meaning out of agnosticism, and the fruit of meaninglessness is despair. People who go on long enough without a sense of purpose wind up dead. This continues to be a frustrating phenomenon for the materialists.

So I came back to religion with a different attitude. I started to realize that virtue had to be its own reward, or it wasn’t virtue. In other words, loving my neighbor had to be something I did for its own sake, rather than because some omnipotent rule-maker had arbitrarily mandated it.

In an unexpected twist, I started to realize that this might be what Jesus was talking about all along: virtue for its own sake. What is the reward in heaven for being a good Samaritan? You get to keep being a good Samaritan forever.

This felt true to me like nothing else had ever felt true. I started to realize that Christianity, so-called, was basically just a codification of deep virtue for its own sake. That perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God is within you.”

Some time ago, I decided to step back into the label. I’m a Christian, of the Mormon variety. There’s a lot of culture there, baked in by the community of faith that raised me, but there’s also, now, a deep acceptance of the religious ideals espoused by that community.

Does it matter whether I “believe” the various truth-claims made by my community? Not really. What matters to me is that I practice living life as though I believe those claims, insofar as those claims are aligned with the things that I do believe are true — namely, that true virtue is its own reward.

You could say I default to “religious but not spiritual.”

And “I don’t know” is still a vital salve in a fevered world of competing philosophies.

Ghosts

Absent any empirical proof one way or the other, I have chosen to believe in God. I won’t get into the specifics of my own cosmology (there’s neither sufficient time, nor mutual interest), but suffice it to say that I have a preference for God’s existence, and therefore I believe.

Do I want ghosts to exist? Not really. Might they, anyway? Of course they might. And the stories that we have told and heard in this exchange (and outside of it) suggest to me that there’s something there that doesn’t fit tidily into either a materialist paradigm, or a dogmatically religious one.

I don’t like it, Wil.

And because I don’t like it, and because I don’t have proof one way or the other, I’ll probably go on more or less not believing, and leave the ghosts in their stories.

But one day I might see a ghost. I might get haunted. I might personally experience something incontrovertibly supernatural. Will this damage my faith? My chosen set of beliefs? Will it shake from me what little knowledge I have gathered?

No.

No more than any other “shocking” revelation of science or psychology. This universe is full of mystery. I have chosen to believe it is also shot through with meaning, and not just of my own making — I have chosen to believe in a God who embodies all meaning, a God who can comprehend all the things we cannot comprehend. A God who does not believe, but knows.

Because while we are terrible arbitrators of truth, truth persists outside of our own determinations. Whatever might be true about ghosts, I trust God with all of it. And until that topic becomes, for some reason, a practical concern for me, I’m happy to let it remain out in the wilderness of mystery.