Spiritual Healing Fills Void
Of Declining Mainstream Religion[Original headline: Spirits in the material world]
With the decline of mainstream churches, supermarkets for the soul are offering a range of new ways to fill the spiritual void.
There's some spiritual healing going on and the crowds are pushing in to watch the laying on of hands. The healers are standing, eyes closed, palms outstretched towards each of their assigned "patients". And despite their part in the spiritual floor show, the people receiving the healing vibes are seemingly oblivious to the curious stares from the crowd.
A woman yells out across the heads of others watching, "I have a sore wrist, can you heal it?" She holds out her arm to proffer tangible proof that, yes indeed, she has a wrist.
Patiently, one of the Victorian Spiritualists' Union members explains the procedure to the crowd here at the Mind, Body and Spirit Festival. "This is a spiritual healing, it's an overall healing, it takes five minutes. You're welcome to try."
The pain in the woman's wrist is obviously affecting her hearing, she doesn't seem to grasp the concept of "overall healing". "Well, I go to a chiropractor for it," she counters. The healer perseveres. "You're welcome to take a number," she says, handing over a small slip of paper.
Numbers are a big part of the festival - a national roadshow for natural health, personal growth and, most importantly, spirituality. There's the number 65, for example. That's how many dollars it costs for an artist to sketch your spirit guide in pastels. The $65 doesn't seem to be an issue for many at the show: it's early afternoon and all the bookings for the day are taken. The woman seated watches as her artist sketches a man in shades of orange and red; he looks a little like my newsagent.
Then there's the number 30. That's for a Polaroid of your aura, complete with colour analysis by one of the aura team. A line snakes into the thoroughfare for the photo op, taken in front of a neutral backdrop with hands placed atop small boxes that resemble external disk drives. At a table, a woman surveys her photo, her head and shoulders almost completely shrouded in a blue mist - nice one. According to the chart, this represents "peace". Happily, all the possible colour combinations are positive - red (vital), green (healing), purple (magical). Wouldn't want to see a veil of puce (taxes) or fuchsia (overtime).
Then there's the interpretation of numbers to help explore your destiny. For $25, Your Number's Up stand, practising Mudra Yoga Indian numerology, will draw up a personal numerology chart. A combination of your name and birthdate is used to "calculate the pathways and influences in your daily life and why they are happening", according to the brochure.
The numerology stand sits conveniently next to a glamour photography display, disproving the theory that it's what's inside that counts. There's treatments for every part of the physical body on offer - from orifices (ear candles and colonic irrigation), to the joints and muscles (reiki energy healing and feldenkrais, a type of muscular movement technique).
But for many of the 20,000-odd visitors to the festival, this is more than an opportunity to buy a crystal and hear what pressing message their grandmother has to impart from the other side - this is a supermarket for the soul. With many mainstream religions failing to attract newcomers as their old vanguard dies off, these festivals serve up the alternatives to a new generation who want to believe but just don't know where to look.
The proof, again, is in the numbers.
"During the '60s and '70s, there was a major walking away from mainstream religion and there was a real decline in numbers," says Dr Ruth Powell, a member of the research team that has been tracking church attendance as part of the National Church Life Survey. "That was obviously a period of massive social change across the whole of society and every institution bears the mark of that change."
While the religious haemorrhaging slowed down in the '80s and '90s, bringing a relative stability to numbers, the move into the Noughties has brought, what Powell calls, "an absence of certainty". There's a new generation of us, raised without Sunday school and strict religious dogma, looking towards celebrity, the film world, even reality TV for guidance. But we're also more time-constrained, hard-pressed finding time to spend with friends and family let alone making time for religious devotion.
"It's not, 'I don't believe in God any more'," says Powell. "It's 'I'm neutral and I don't know - tell me what you've got'."
Those making the most noise - or at least making the most impact - are more sideline affairs like the charismatic movement, particularly Pentecostal churches, a movement generally known for its members' propensity for speaking in tongues. This garbled free-form speech "enables the person praying to focus on God without worrying about finding the right words," says one charismatic website (could this explain Molly Meldrum?). The 1996 census reported a staggering 60 per cent increase over 10 years in the number of Australians who call themselves Pentecostal (although the numbers are still small in relation to mainstream religion).
So, why are some opting to go down the charismatic path rather than join a good old-fashioned religious service with a dour priest at the helm? For one, there's the hook for the young crowd looking for a more interactive faith - NCLS's research shows that, in some churches, more than twice as many young adults are more likely to speak in tongues than their older attendees.
And for another, says Powell, the Pentecostals are throwing aside musty old services with coma-inducing hymns and replacing them with modern services.
There's another hook, too. Paradoxically, despite the indiscernable speech of some of its members, the charismatic movement knows exactly what it's saying. "When nobody quite will believe in anything, it's attractive to have people say 'we know where we stand, we know what we think about things'," says Powell.
So, despite the fact we are painstakingly taking the first step to colonising space with the construction of the International Space Station, people are still looking for the answer to that old chestnut, "why are we here?". And where the avenue for answers was once widely accepted to be mainstream religion, now new generations are acknowledging that there's a diverse range of theories and practices on offer - from speaking in tongues and communing with spirits, to spiritual healing.
At the Victorian Spiritualists' Union headquarters in Melbourne, spiritual healing is just a portion of what this particular spiritualist movement offers its attendees. There's clairvoyant sessions, discussion groups, workshops, but central to their tenet is the existence of "spirit", says Reverend Ken Lee Tet, president of the VSU.
"People who have lost loved ones, who want to know that they're OK ... they'll come seeking answers," he says.
At sessions, trained clairvoyants will pick out audience members, delivering them messages from spirits. And during spiritual healings, hands are placed on or near the person to channel energy.
"We teach people how to be in communication with spirit, who feel that energy come through them. It's coming from spirit and they are just the instrument who is delivering the hands-on healing," says Lee Tet. While the medical community will not vouch for the efficacy of spiritual healing, Lee Tet says his battle with rheumatoid arthritis was quelled about five years ago through months of self-healing.
About 15 new spiritualist churches have popped up in suburban Victoria in the past 10 years, says Lee Tet, and there's a host of spiritualist churches in NSW, including the Hills Spiritualists Centre in Seven Hills. "People are becoming more acceptant of people talking about spiritual things," he says. "The orthodox churches haven't been so vocal in talking them down and maybe that's because so many more people are not going to orthodox churches."
Orthodox or not, many are still looking for some sense of spiritual direction - they just may be shuffling through a deck of tarot cards instead of rifling through pages of the Bible. Ruth Powell acknowledges that the eternal search is just that - eternal. "What is evident is there is a hunger and a searching out there and so people are looking to see - the material stuff is not enough, there is a spiritual dimension that we're trying to engage and we're trying to find ways to engage that."
• Story originally published in •
The Sun-Herald via Sydney Morning Herald / Australia | Janelle Carrigan - July 15 2001
