Message #179645

[Sandra]

The summer assembly meets in the tree-girt camp with its two hundred buildings on one hundred and seventy-two acres at the side of Lake Cassadaga, the village's narrow streets lined with houses of a vintage of the late nineteenth century. As with camps of a revivalist past, there is a Forest Temple set among the trees, a path leading through a small forest of majestic birch and hemlock trees, some more than one hundred feet tall. The path leads to a clearing in a glade where benches face a huge stump, the Inspiration Stump, which speakers can mount by means of steps to provide inspirational talks near the healing tree in the Leolyn Woods. Later in straight-backed chairs in the sprawling timber Assembly Hall, it is possible to listen to Psychics whose lectures offer information on altered states of consciousness and other esoterica concerned with Spiritual Intelligence. Later, after lectures, healings are ministered in the Healing Temple to those with spiritual or physical ailments while hands are placed on the afflicted one's head, face, back, and chest to the sound of gentle organ music.

Christianity centuries ago split into various major units, and the same is true at Lily Dale. In 1977 a group broke off from the parent "National Spiritual Association" which has its headquarters here, and the new group formed the "Christian Order of Spiritualist" reputed to have some one hundred members.