Catholic and Enjoying It!
Various questions arise in my mind. For instance, why is an article on ghosts in the “Love and Family” section of Beliefnet?
Second, when somebody tells me they are a “real-life paranormal investigator” what does that mean and why should I take it seriously? Am I a “real life paranormal investigator” due to the fact that I try to discern the will of God in my life along with millions of other people? Is “real life paranormal investigator” something you study for somewhere or is it just some phony label you slap on in order to sound official (like my favorite marketing ploy: “professional tanning lotion“, as distinct from, you know, amateur tanning lotion). I rather suspect it is. And I rather suspect that an “ordained Interfaith minister and spiritual counselor” is likewise not especially likely to be terribly rigorous in the old critical thinking department with credentials as wooly as all that.
Anyway, the guy gives a rundown on ghosts which whipsaws between the unsubstantiated and the obviously dangerous and stupid, concluding with instructions on how to violate the First Commandment (which is what necromancy, seances, divination and attempts to “contact the dead” are). So he fails the “fruit test”.
That doesn’t mean I “don’t believe in ghosts”. I am inclined to think there is something in ghost stories, largely because I a) see nothing in the Tradition that forbids it (the apostles, after all, thought Jesus was a ghost, so they seem to have shared in the common human belief in such tales) and b) I have a very high regard for human traditions which are shared across all nations, cultures, languages, and ages. Ghost stories are one of the most universal phenomena in the world. So I suspect there is something to them. And I have (like you) known people whom I trust who have had… odd… encounters with things they couldn’t explain. Things best described as ghosts or poltergeists. I’ve even known priests who have gone and blessed homes in order to clean them of, well, “presences”. These have included things like polergeist activities, stuff moving, etc. My own mother had a rather uncanny occurrence shortly after my Father died. And I will likely hear, right in my comboxes of people who have either had similar experiences or of friends and family of readers with sundry Tales of the Unexplained to tell.
The thing is: we don’t know what we are dealing with here, which is exactly why the Tradition forbids us from screwing around with it, trying to summon it, or trying to control it. Ghosts might be (and perhaps often are) the psychic remains of humans who may be working through some purgatorial suffering. We are invited by the Church to pray for them, but forbidden by the Church from “summoning” them. That’s because it’s also quite possible that we are dealing not with a human spirit at all, but with a fallen angel. The devil is a liar and the father of lies. Trying to ride the tiger by inviting such evil beings in is just asking for a world of hurt. So instead, all dealings with the dead are allowed to happen only in and through Jesus Christ in the communion of saints. The “psychic investigator” who counsels otherwise is, from the perspective of the Tradition, a fool. For further discussion, go here.
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