Lily Dale by Christine Wicker

Author:Christine Wicker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

19

Here is the short version of Lynn’s creed. People’s hearts are good. Love is in control of the world. People are on earth to connect with each other, with their own good hearts, and with the spirit of love around them. Connecting enables people to give their gifts, which is what humans are here for and what they want most. And, finally, people can trust the spirit of love to guide them. So people ought to follow their own inclinations, do what they like, and not do what they don’t want to do. They ought to trust their own good hearts and their good sense, no matter what anybody says.

Most of that, especially the last part about doing what you please, I found scandalous. Dangerous even. I wasn’t a Baptist anymore, but I still knew that people are bad and that you have to keep them tied down and trussed up. You have to curb their evil impulses. People can’t go around doing what they want. The world depends on us to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others, and it doesn’t make one bit of difference that doing so makes us miserable and ill-tempered and the kind of long-suffering cranks no one in his right mind wants to be around. We aren’t here to be happy. We’re here to be good. Most of us don’t have what it takes to be good, of course, which means we have to be guilty.

Lynn wasn’t the first person I’d heard espouse the idea that people such as Shelley, blithely confident souls who always listen to themselves, are on a higher track than the rest of us. Shakespeare said it: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Joseph Campbell advised following your bliss and said it would align you with an inner knowing. Edith Wharton talked about the “inmost self where the unknown god abides.” I’d heard it before, and yet to me Lynn’s ideas smacked of soft morality and the license to act with utter abandon. They scared me.

Lily Dale’s creed was informal, unwritten, and debated, but it matched Lynn’s, as far as I could tell. I would have never taken this creed seriously or given it much thought except that Lynn said it was true.

And something about Lynn made me hold my doubts in abeyance. I didn’t give them up so much as I set them aside while I listened to what she said. Why? I didn’t exactly know. Maybe it was her humility. Some people are convinced by bluster and bravado, by big stories and great deeds. I’m not. I suspect such tales, and the people who tell them.

Lynn hardly ever spoke unless someone drew her out. She was too shy to attend Shelley’s parties. If the crowd was over three or four, she would sit on the edge of the group, listening intently, fiddling with her hearing aid when she needed to.

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