Mount Olivet Cemetery where Rev. Jesse Babcock Ferguson is buriedPhoto by David AntisThe story goes that, in 1855 Rev. Jesse Babcock Ferguson stood up in the pulpit at the downtown Nashville Church of Christ and proclaimed that, if his congregation wanted to know what Heaven is like they should throw away their Bibles and just ask the dead directly. Half the church objected, but half went along with him. You’ll be unsurprised to learn his church had some trouble staying not-on-fire after that.
I’m fascinated by him, though, because before this, Ferguson was highly respected, not just in Nashville, but throughout the Church of Christ. He edited The Christian Magazine and used his position as editor to argue complex theological topics that helped shape the early trajectory of the Church of Christ.
But there are things you just don’t do and remain in good stead in the Church of Christ: namely, you don’t encourage people to brush aside their Bibles. Ferguson was no idiot. (In fact, his writings are still surprisingly easy to read, considering their age.) He had to know what he was doing would torpedo his career, a career he loved.
So, why would he do it? I went to the library this weekend to look through Ferguson’s book, Spirit Communion: A Record of Communications from the Spirit-spheres, and it’s really fascinating. Sometime in the early 1850s he learned about the Spiritualist movement and he became curious about it. So, in the middle of 1854, he took off on a trip through Kentucky and up into Ohio with his wife and daughter to meet with and observe as many mediums as they could.
Along the way, conveniently, Ferguson’s wife and daughter discovered that they, themselves, were mediums as did Ferguson. It’s easy to be flip. Ferguson set out to find real mediums and, surprise, surprise, he did. And when they start talking to the spirit of an “Indian Chief,” you want to cringe in embarrassment at how stereotypical it is. (Later, Ferguson came to believe that his spirit guide was the then-dead William Ellery Channing and Northern Spiritualists teased Ferguson mercilessly because, for some reason, Channing, who was well-known for being anti-slavery in life, ceased to be bothered by it in death.) It does seem silly.
But Ferguson didn’t have just one experience. He had experience after experience, which he tested as best as he was able. And time after time, he found that the best explanation he had was that the weird, improbably thing--that he was communicating with spirits--made the most sense.
On Sunday, I went out to the Mill Creek Baptist Church cemetery, which is the final resting place of many of Nashville’s earliest families — Buchanans, Rainses, and Ridleys among them. It sits right across the interstate from Whittsett Park, and is a large open lot, sunny in some spots, shaded by large walnuts in other parts. A lot of the old graves are unmarked and the way the folks who invited me out have of locating graves is to dowse for them, to let wire shaped into an L hang loosely from their hands and, as one is walking, where the wires cross, there is the grave.
There are lots of reasons to believe that this is fake. It’s easy enough to see how someone could knowingly encourage the rods to cross and thanks to the ideomotor phenomenon, there’s good reason to believe that someone could make the rods cross without realizing she was doing it.
But it’s one thing to know these things. It’s another thing to stand there myself with the dowsing rods hanging loosely from my hands, pointing straight out, my elbows tucked at my side to keep my form correct and to see, as I stepped onto a grave, have the rods cross while I was being trained to use them.
I tried everything I could to explain it. I tested to see if the rods crossed only when I was going downhill, or only when I was going up hill. I shut my eyes and walked slowly and, when I felt the rods moving, I opened my eyes to discover I was on a marked grave. I also tried to make the rods move. They did not, which I felt complicated the ideomotor phenomenon explanation, since, if I was capable of moving the rods without realizing it, shouldn’t I be able to move the rods in the same manner while trying?
The people I was with believe that the rods respond to electromagnetic energy and are, in essence, responding to places the ground has been disturbed. I, myself, don’t have a good explanation. All I know is that I expected to find that it wouldn’t work for me because I was skeptical or that I’d find some explanation for why it worked that made mundane sense to me. And instead, I stood there, mind blown, seeing something I didn’t know how to understand.
That was me, one afternoon, one time.
Rev. Ferguson sat down with mediums, tested the spirits as rigorously as he was able for six months, found the spirit world leaking into his home life, his wife and daughter, and eventually himself. He knew the criticisms, but what were they compared to his own experiences?
Ferguson didn’t quit being a Christian when he became a Spiritualist, but he quit being the kind of Christian the Church of Christ was willing to recognize as a leader of their church. He seems to have gone on to have a happy, interesting life as a Unitarian. He’s buried out at Mt. Olivet. The Church of Christ also went on happily without him.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what things can change a city. The War changed us. The rise of country music changed us. The flood changed us. Battle, commerce, natural disasters. But there’s also this kind of thing — the moments of mind-blowing weirdness, the voices of dead loved ones whispering out of our spouse’s mouths, the tug of a wire that was hanging still the second before, the movement of our God or gods in our lives.
Rev. Ferguson was not the most important minister or theologian to make Nashville his home in the long-term. He’s mostly forgotten now except as a footnote in Church of Christ history and an oddity in Spiritualism history. But during his life, hell yes, he was an important man whose intellectual life shaped the intellectual life of the city. And when he came upon a Mystery, he examined it and ultimately let that Mystery move him..
Whether or not he was right to do so, I don’t know. But when I was standing there in that graveyard, the buzz of I-24 above me, the dead around me, watching the rods cross and uncross, I realized that any true understanding of Nashville has to include the inexplicable things we nevertheless come to believe are happening.
Photo by David Antis under Creative Commons 2.0 license
