By ERIC SHACKLETON
(CP) - Ever since she was a kid, Lori Kuffner has been curious about the afterlife - do you just die and that's it, or does a channel remain open to the living?
But she had never felt any urgent need to actively seek to communicate with her father after he died a few years ago. That is, until reading a book about Lily Dale, one of the largest centres of Spiritualism in the world, near Buffalo, N.Y.
Kuffner found intriguing its mediums' claims that they could communicate with the dead.
Ellen Vourn, head of the board of directors that manages the village, said life after death and communication between the living and the dead are at the heart of Spiritualism.
Kuffner, a film producer and president of Regina-based Cooper Rock Pictures Inc., has been there twice now, once out of curiosity and then to produce a documentary on the religious centre, recently aired on VisionTV.
She said she received "messages" through a medium from her father, in particular one for her son who was close to his grandfather. The medium said: "you have a son ... is he blond?"
The medium "gave his nickname 'the golden boy,' the name my father had given him," Kuffner said.
She said the medium picked up on her son's hair colour without any prior knowledge whatsoever - "so that connection is still there ... for me an affirmation ... life is very full in the afterlife."
Lily Dale has three dozen or more registered mediums, some of whom hail from Canada. The village board puts candidates through rigorous testing for accuracy, and they must achieve a passing grade of 80 per cent before they're allowed to reside in the village.
Kuffner said she has "seen people that have been given messages from loved ones really be able to move on with their lives," especially in cases where someone died suddenly without being able to say goodbye.
Membership in the Spiritualist churches has increased over the past few years, said Vourn, president of the Lily Dale Assembly - the name the board of directors goes by.
She attributes the uptick to people being spiritually dissatisfied. "People feel incomplete in some way with conventional religious practices," she said. It is "a modern angst kind of thing."
Today, there are more than 400 Spiritualist churches in the United States and Canada, according to the website www.lighthousespiritualcentre.ca/Church ... anada.html.
Turning to mediums for closure appears to be "a phenomena of people needing things that the contemporary practices of the churches are not offering," said Rev. William Kervin, professor of public worship at Emmanuel College, a United Church facility affiliated with the University of Toronto.
The churches' ways of dealing with death and dying have changed over the years, he said.
"We've lost the tradition of the wake, where a family and a community would come together for three days and tell stories and sing songs and remember the dead and grieve and laugh," he said.
It "helped people feel a sense of closure," said Kervin. It also provided a sense of comfort for grieving relatives by surrounding them with a community of family, friends and neighbours.
Vourn, who is also a medium, said the wake is still a very prominent practice among Spiritualists, who seek to achieve another level of closure through mediumship.
She said a yearning to communicate with loved ones who have died draws huge crowds every summer to Lily Dale, a gated community that charges a small fee to enter and whose roots go back to the birth of the Spiritualist movement - a mixture of religion, science and philosophy-in the 1840s.
Although Lily Dale is open all year, the official season of lectures, healing sessions and meetings with mediums runs for 10 weeks through July and August.
Vourn said they get around 25,000 people from around the world, including Canada, from all walks of life. During the first weekend in August, there's a festival devoted exclusively to things Canadian.
Do Spiritualists believe in God?
"Yes," said Vourn.
"They also believe that communication between all planes of existence is a reality," she said. "That's one of the tenets of the church," which goes by various names including the Spiritualist Church of Canada.
The mediums appear to act like "spiritual guides ... almost counsellors," said Darren Marks, assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Huron University College, an Anglican Church of Canada facility affiliated with the University of Western Ontario in London.
He said they seem to "give people not only affirmation that maybe their loved ones have gone on to a better place, but also guidance for this life." It's all based on the idea that "much of our physical and social ails are connected to our imbalance with ourselves and with the cosmos."
Spiritualists, he said, share some tenets with churches like the Episcopalians (Anglican) and Presbyterians, such as the immanence of God and rejection of strict Calvinist interpretations on the idea that God is a judge. Like mainstream Christianity, they see human beings as progressive and liberal.
While mainstream religions also have the concept of everlasting life, Kuffner said that what's different with Spiritualism is that "they can confirm that. There's someone with you ...and they are watching out for you."
Communicating with the dead through a medium is not something Kervin finds attractive. "I see within the traditional resources of Christian history other ways of meeting that need that make more sense to me because they're more communal," he said. "I'm always leery of truly individualistic practices."
Vourn said not everyone who visits Lily Dale is seeking to communicate with the dead. Some people turn to mediums "looking for what college they should go to, should they marry a particular boy - all the big questions ... that they're seeking answers to," she said.
Paul Ottmann, a director on the board of a Spiritualist church in Cambridge, Ont., visited Lily Dale a couple years ago because he felt he needed some direction in his life. He chose to see a medium who does spirit drawings.
"Eerily she goes back four years in your life and then comes forward four years and interprets the drawing that she does," he said. "She very quickly gives you a sort of sixth sense of feeling because with your past she was very accurate in content, detail and time."
Then, he said, "she went forward in the next four years about what my life will contain." Interestingly, "my journey will probably be into the ministry of the Spiritualist Church of Canada. That was one of my questions that I had been struggling for awhile with. It was answered during that appointment."
Vourn said she knew by the time she was eight "that I could see and feel spirit." When she was 13, she said she discovered there was such a thing as extra sensory perception, or ESP.
And how does she feel after a medium session? "Exhilarated, energized and inspired," she said.
Source: http://travel.canoe.ca/Travel/News/2006 ... 49-cp.html
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