Journal

Stairway To Heaven Spiritualists in San Francisco

28 October 2007

Jenny and I have a strong fascination with magic, spirituality and all things of an ethereal nature. I have always been intrigued by the human desire to connect with the human soul and the questions regarding the it, for example: if it exists, where does the soul go when we die? Those kind of apparently unanswerable questions.

Jenny told me about a Spiritual Church, nearby her house and suggested we go together some time. I had never been to a Spiritualist church before but as a seeker of experiences, I jumped at the offer of our friend to take me along with her.

It was a beautiful San Francisco, sunny Autumn day, we jumped into Jenny’s little black car and zipped up and down the hill roads of this wonderful city and eventually found the Spiritualist Church.

Jenny hadn’t been to the church for many years and we were both incredibly shy and sheepish as we entered the austere white building. We were guided through the main room and into a small ante-chamber where a row of red velvet cushioned chairs lined the wooden paneled wall and in the centre of the room, people were sitting peacefully whilst three spiritualist healers went through various meditative processes of cleansing their parishioners.

The healers looked like all the native San Franciscans, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so far a little bit quirky and friendly as hell. There was a lady with a bright flowered dress and very chic hat, who looked like a lady I’d seen in a picture of a fortune teller from Mississippi circa 1950, I wanted her to cleanse me but Jenny got called over by her and I got the white haired healer who turned out to be the reverend of the church. I took a seat beneath his hands and closed my eyes, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I could feel the slight movements in the air as the healer performed his cleansing exercises around my seated body.

The unfamiliar sensation of a stranger, invited into my close personal space and the idea of them messing with my soul matter, was simultaneously unnerving and fun.

The spiritual cleansing didn’t take long, maybe five minutes or so. I found it impossible to relax for those five minutes, as the healer’s hands moved over my head and about the air, I wondered how clean his own soul was and what qualified one person to clean another’s soul, the whole time my mind weighed up the odds of all this being a load of baloney and mulled over the likelihood that this pleasant camp reverend was actually cleansing my soul was about as great as my being able to turn the Golden Gate Bridge into spaghetti.

When Jenny and I had been spiritually cleansed by the healers, we returned to the main church, where we were invited to write a question each, on a ticket which would be drawn out by one of the spiritualist healers and hopefully answered by a wandering helpful soul.

We took a seat inconspicuously, centre right and both noticed that our hands were very warm. I already felt pretty good as I’d downed a bottle of kombucha before entering the church. (Kombucha is one of my favorite drinks in the world, it’s not alcoholic, it’s healthy, like a special tea drink but it is so good, makes me feel super!) So we settled down and smiled as the service began.

The healers took to the platform and the camp white haired reverend commenced his sermon.I enjoyed listening to his words of wisdom regarding compassion and being less materialistically influenced amongst other commendable lessons.
The sunlight filtered through the lace curtained windows and the reverend acquired a feint but nonetheless heavenly halo, as he spoke of spirituality. 

We are not so much human beings on a spiritual journey, rather we are spiritual beings on a human journey.

To mine and Jenny’s utter delight the reverend finished his sermon by reading the lyrics to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zepplin. He read them in such a stately manner that they could indeed have been words from some holy hymn book and the way he accented the lines, ’ And she’s buying her stairway to Heaven’ and ’ Oh and it makes me wonder, it really really makes me wonder’ was so magically comical and rock ‘n’ roll, that it was cosmic.

It is times like these that spin a golden thread through life’s tapestry and make me thoroughly glad to be part of the human race with all its flaws and horrors,inadequacies and corruption, it is times like these that I realize that we’re all just lost children trying to make some sense of a situation that makes no sense and total sense at the same time. Times like these that I feel love for every single atom and flower and rain drop.

The Reverend’s recital of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was definitely the highlight of my experience at the Spiritualist Church but I’ll describe the rest of the service for the benefit of those of you who may be interested in the communicating with wandering souls part of the afternoon.

Each healer took a turn in picking people from the crowd with whom they felt some kind of connection. I felt an immediate distrust of one of the spiritualists on the platform, he seemed intent on coercing whomever he picked, into going his way and to my objective eyes, it seemed that the people he ‘connected’ with were simply part of his act, to be pushed and prodded (mentally, there was no physical contact between the audience and the healers during the service) into saying what he wanted them to say.

He would say stuff like ‘I have a man standing beside me right now, he says he’s your….... father’ (embarrassed shake of the head from the lady he is speaking to) ‘Not father, grandfather…..’ (The lady looks vaguely interested, her grandfather, or one of them may have passed over to the other side) ‘He says that it’s not your fault and he understands why you had to go’ (Lady looks really non plussed but nods and smiles her thanks for this apparently meaningless message from the other side).

Anyway, it was a lot of fun seeing the spiritualist healer squirm as absolutely all of his messages from the other side were so obviously fake that even the other healers began to sense the growing air of embarrassment in the room and eventually put him out of his misery (and us out of ours!) and moved on to another healer.

A pleasant grey haired lady healer gave a few messages of hope to some of the people in the room and then chose me to ‘connect’ with. I had the eerie sensation that she really was telepathically focused in on me and the rest of the room seemed to fade away. I was incredibly guarded and hoped that she wouldn’t see too deeply into my life or see how much I missed my father and others who had passed away. I felt if she gave me a message from my dad, i would just about burst into tears and freak right out.
So I put a big wall around my thoughts and heart and indeed the grey haired healer said that she saw a barrier.

She then said that she saw a dark haired girl, might she be a sister? I said that I didn’t think so but looking back, my dad did get around and I knew I had a few half brothers and sisters out there for sure, maybe one of those had passed on and was now standing next to this healer in San Francisco trying to give me an important message.

The message that she had for me from the dark haired sister was that i was looking at things in the wrong way and that the barrier would fall away, light as lace, I just needed to change the way I was looking at things. I thanked the lady healer and was very relieved when she moved on to someone else. My friend Jenny looked at me and smiled ” Did that make sense to you? ” she whispered. ” Maybe” I said.

Later the white haired reverend, connected with Jenny and told her that a little boy would come into her life and she would be asked to take care of him. At the end of the service, a sweet lady came up to us and said to Jenny that when the boy came into Jenny’s life, as prophesied by the healer, if she didn’t have the desire to care for him then she, the kind lady would be more than happy to take him off her hands. Jenny smiled a sweet thank you and I began to wonder if human beings would ever find any answers to the questions of life and death when we were still unable to solve even the simplest puzzles of our own loneliness.