What are ghosts?
I have been pondering the supernatural and the unseen for most of my life, but I still have no idea what ghosts are. Many assume they are the spirits of the departed who for some reason are stuck here. Some consider them a weird quantum signature left by individuals that may have walked down the same hall ten thousand times and left a type of energy residue. Some think it is all nonsense and there is no such thing as ghosts.
This last position seems the least likely to me. I have never had an encounter with an apparition or a spirit, but I have heard too many genuine stories from too many reliable witnesses to dismiss them all. To consider so many people either liars or fools because they have seen or experienced something you have not is at best uncharitable and, at worst, arrogant. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I feel sorry for the hardcore skeptic. They live in such a disenchanted world. For them there is only lab coats and star dust and ashes. If it cannot be measured or weighed or counted, then it is not real. There are only ones and zeros, all else is fiction. To believe in a disenchanted world is live a disenchanted life, a colorless one-dimensional life. Life is magical because of all that is unseen; if there is no unseen, there is no magic.
The other extreme is to be overly attracted to ghosts. To pursue them; to engage with them. I am not referring to the silly ghost hunting shows on tv. Have any of those ever been worth watching? Why does it have to be dark? Why would you think you could detect spiritual goo with some electronic thing-a-ma-jig? Why do you have to dramatically cut to commercial whenever you hear some mysterious sound or whisper? Why did I just waste a half-hour of my life? Boo.
Interacting with ghosts or “familiar spirits” is strictly forbidden in the Old Testament. And the few times we see someone talking to the dead in the New Testament it is usually Jesus, and he is telling them to stop being dead, which they immediately do. I am not here to badmouth mediums or psychics or anyone else. But trying to interact with whatever these things are seems ill-advised to me. You cannot know who, or what, you are contacting. There is no reason to expect that we could control the encounter. You may be opening yourself up to all sorts of hell. This is not our turf, and we should not be playing with spiritual dynamite.
Christian teachers do not like to talk about this. Most of us have a reductionist view of the unseen realm. There is God, Satan, angels, and demons, that’s it. We have no categories for things like ghosts. I guess I would just refer us to the Shakespeare quote above. We fully acknowledge the existence of spiritual beings. We even refer to God, in the old English, as The Holy Ghost, yet we want to limit all the things that might exist in that world. Why? What are we afraid of? Not having an answer to everything? Who do we think we are? Preacher, don’t be afraid of the dark.
So, what are ghosts? I do not know. But whatever these phenomena are, there is no reason to conclude they are all the same things. If we divide reality into the seen realm and the unseen and we imagine a veil between the two, we know for certain that on our side of the veil things are messy; we have a hundred categories of the good, the bad and the ugly. Why would we think it is different on the other side? Because God is there? God is on this side also. God is everywhere, he is not restricted by the veil, we are. So why does he allow such a mess on both sides? That is a question for another day, he allows a lot of things that haunt me, ghosts are the least of them.
The important thing to remember is that there is someone in charge of both sides who is not a ghost. After Jesus rose, he told his disciples “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me…” that means both sides of the veil. That means all things, seen and unseen, answer to this very physical man, because he is also God. The veil gets thinner every day. One day it will dissolve, and all will bleed together, and everything that haunts you in this world will have to drop to its knees and call him Lord. He is the thing that gives demons nightmares. He is the thing that haunts the ghosts. He is the one unseen person you should always be pursuing.
“Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Jesus