Read The Resurrection of the Body Online
Authors: Maggie Hamand
The Resurrection of the Body (7 page)
On Saturday it was fine so Harriet and I had the afternoon off and took the children to Clissold Park to ride their bicycles. As always, when we’d fed the ducks, looked at the peacocks and deer and been to the playground, we went for a cup of tea for us and an ice-cream for the boys at the café.
The children ran off in the sunshine and went to play a game jumping off the wall down into the shrubbery. I glanced over at the rose garden, then turned to Harriet, about to tell her what Mary had said to me the other day.
Harriet was staring very oddly in that direction. I turned and followed her gaze. There was a gardener there, dressed in old clothes and dirty gardening gloves, pulling
out the weeds. He was bent over and I couldn’t see his face. Harriet turned her head away and went back to drinking her tea without saying anything. Then she excused herself and went off to the loo.
I sat and waited for a few minutes. Then I got up and walked down from the terrace to enter the rose garden. The man was a few feet from me, bending right over. He looked up when I stood there and straightened up, putting his hand in front of his eyes to shield them from the sun.
I didn’t say anything. I was incapable of doing so. My throat felt dry, my legs felt numb and my heart began to thump in the most alarming manner. It was the same man. There was no doubt in my mind at all. I turned round and walked away from him at once, running up the steps, looking for Harriet. She wasn’t there, and her bag had gone from the chair. Unreasoning terror swept over me; I went round behind the café to the loos but she was not there either. I ran back on to the path; neither the
children
nor Harriet were in sight. They had vanished.
I felt a panic sweep over me that I had felt only once before, when Thomas had gone missing for twenty
minutes
in a crowded market on holiday in France. I looked around, began to run. As I hurtled down the path I heard a voice calling me, ‘Dad, Dad.’ I turned round. Thomas was waving to me. They were all standing further down the path, Thomas, Joshie and Harriet, waiting for me.
We got back to the car. My heart was still pounding and I felt sick. Harriet and I looked at one another but said nothing. It was only later in the evening, when the children were asleep and we were sitting in front of a fire,
probably the last we’d light now till the winter, that I asked Harriet if she had seen what I saw in the park.
She didn’t look at me at first. She said, ‘You mean the gardener.’
‘Yes, I mean the gardener.’
She seemed puzzled. She put down the pair of Joshie’s trousers she was mending and looked up at me. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you asking?’
‘I saw you staring at him.’
‘For some reason he looked familiar, that’s all.’
‘You didn’t think that he looked like the man who died?’
‘Richard, what on earth do you mean?’ She stared at me, her face showing confusion, almost shock.
‘Well, did you?’
‘You’re not thinking straight. You forget that I never saw him.’
I had indeed forgotten this. It shocked me for a moment, as if I were losing my grip on reality. I said, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’
She picked up the trousers and went on sewing. ‘Richard, what are you thinking about?’ There was a slightly sharp, nervous edge to her voice.
‘I’m thinking that first Mary thought that he looked like the dead man, and then me.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything at the time, in the park?’
‘Oh, I didn’t want to bring it all up because of the children. I didn’t want to put any ideas into their heads. Harriet, you don’t think I’m going off my head, do you?’
‘Oh, Richard, of course not.’ She said this promptly,
but I thought she sounded hesitant and unsure.
I wanted to talk about it, wanted to share my feelings. ‘I thought that on Monday I would ring the council and ask about it. Mary saw him as well, you know, last week, and she thought the same thing. She thought perhaps we should tell the police, in case it was a brother or some relative.’
‘But the picture has been in the papers. Surely if it was someone they would have come forward.’
‘Not everybody reads the papers.’
‘But everybody knows somebody who does, don’t they? Well, why don’t you tell the police? Let them follow it up.
‘Because I don’t like the police.’ I had to admit, if I was honest, that the deep distrust between me and Detective Inspector Stone was growing. I doubted very much if they would follow up anything I suggested to them. I got up from my chair and went to the window, drew back the
curtain
and stared at the dark shadow of the church across the street. How would I get the information out of the council? It would be easy for the police, difficult for me. Or I could go and talk to the man directly. Well, why didn’t I? There was nothing to stop me.
Harriet’s voice was sharp, alarmed almost. ‘Richard, what are you looking at?’
I turned back to look at Harriet, let the curtain drop. ‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’ I was tired; I was becoming
over-wrought
, seeing shadows where there were none. I turned and went across the room, kissed the top of her head. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s go to bed.
In fact I did nothing about trying to find out about the gardener. The next few days were very busy, and on top of everything else I had to do, Chris Shaw rang to remind me that he urgently needed my letter for the next issue of the parish magazine, which was otherwise ready to go to the printer. I told him he would have it the next day, and in the evening shut myself up in my study, conscious of my promise to Tessa.
What do I believe? How could it be that I don’t know the answer to this simple question? Here I was, an
Anglican
vicar, and people came to me for answers. Could I not even begin to answer this?
I sat at my typewriter, fidgeting in irritation, forced myself to start. This is the letter that I finally wrote.
Dear friends,
When I was a child I believed in God because my father did. Even after my mother’s tragic death his faith did not fail him. I grew up with daily prayers and the promise that God would love, God would forgive, God would make everything all right. But manifestly he did not make everything all right; my mother would never come back. So, as I grew up, my faith gradually altered. I stopped believing that God would answer my prayers in a direct way. Rather than ‘God, please let me have a new mother,’ my prayers changed to ‘God, please help me to not mind about not having a mother.’ But I couldn’t help noticing that my prayers seemed to have no effect, either outwardly or inwardly, and that around me people continued to suffer and die and God did not seem to do anything about it. Eventually I stopped praying at all.
At the age of about fourteen I announced to my father that I did not believe in God and went through my agnostic phase. I rejected Christianity, but I still took an interest in spiritual and religious matters. As I grew older, I toyed with Buddhism, read about Hinduism and Sufism, and read the works of Jung. I did not really need God at this time; I was quite happy in my work and my
relationships
and, like many young men, it did not
really occur to me that I would ever become old or ill, or die. Whether there was a God or not didn’t seem to be of either emotional or practical importance; rather it was a matter for intellectual curiosity.
Then, in my late twenties, when Harriet and I were first married, we went to Jerusalem and I had my conversion experience at the Garden Tomb.
I was determined to find out what Christianity meant. Starting out in a new direction, I began a three-year theology course at King’s College. The study of theology proved a gruelling time for me. The Anglican tradition has always given freedom to people to doubt, has even encouraged them, because doubt forces people to think, rather than accept things on blind faith. But now I realise that this process of questioning made it singularly difficult for any sensitive and intelligent person to go through the course without their capacity for faith being altered and, in my case, undermined. I
sometimes
wondered if it were not the very worst kind of training that a priest could have.
One of the major problems of Christian theology has always been trying to marry the historical figure of Jesus with the Christ of faith. Is Christ God in human form – the Docetic heresy – or is he human but inspired by or adopted by God – the Adoptionist heresy? If he is both fully human and fully divine, the answer which the Council of Chalcedon came up with in AD 451, how are these two opposites
combined, and what happens where they seem to be contradictory? For example, Christ died on the cross, but God cannot die, so how can Christ be God?
I had thought that in going back and trying to understand who Jesus was, I would understand more. But we cannot know more than a tiny amount about the historical Jesus, the records do not exist, and it is all too long ago. And even if we did know a great deal more, how much difference would this make? There would still be the problem of interpretation. As soon as we look at Jesus and study him, it becomes clear that he was an itinerant Jewish preacher, who believed that the end of the world was about to come, who rejected the dogma of the Jewish religion, and who preached many things that are contradictory. He does not say that he is God, only refers to himself as the enigmatic ‘Son of Man’. I could not see how this fitted in with the Christ, the man without sin, the Son of God, who is one with God, and whose death redeemed our sins.
Studying theology, it becomes clear that all these beliefs about Christ were worked out much later, by men, in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. The early schisms or heresies within the church were the process by which men decided what they should believe. Many beliefs were drawn up to dispel the many heresies which arose in the early centuries of the Church. For example, in our creed we say ‘The
resurrection of the body’ because the early church was countering the influence of the gnostics, who rejected the world of the material as evil, and focused on rebirth of the spirit. We studied the
arguments
by which the beliefs of the church came into being, the doctrine of the incarnation, the nature of the Trinity. Look at the titles of some of the essays I wrote. Did Jesus foresee his death, and if so, what significance did he attach to it? Was Christ a
pre-existent
being who became incarnate? What does the gospel evidence tell us about the resurrection of Jesus? Is God omnipotent? Discuss.
How was it possible to examine these questions honestly and still believe?
And as if this isn’t enough, we also cannot deny that our beliefs have changed over the ages. When I became ordained as a priest, I had to assent to the thirty-nine articles of faith, as laid out it the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The thirty-nine articles were agreed at a convocation held in London in the year 1562 ‘for the avoiding of diversities of
opinions
’. Technically these form the doctrine of the church, but in practice many of them now seem antiquated and few would be able to believe in them as fact.
Nobody but a handful of extreme
fundamentalists
now believes in the literal roasting of bodies in hell, in heaven as a physical realm or in the resurrection of our own material bodies after death. Now people talk about hell as ‘separation from God’ and
heaven as being ‘united with God’, and other such vague concepts. Yet the loss of Satan as a real figure also creates problems in trying to understand why evil exists. And how much sense does it make to accept a non-realist view of Satan, saying he is a personification of the idea of evil, and yet keep a realist view of God? In fact, the loss of Satan seems to have had much the same effect as the collapse of the communist bloc and the end of the cold war – we are left puzzled and confused, not knowing how to act.
So where do I go from there? I certainly do not feel ready to reject religion altogether. There is no doubt that the story of Christ’s birth, life and
passion
still exerts a powerful influence on us. But it works at the emotional, intuitive level, not the rational. I believe that theology has backed itself into a corner. It is impossible to use logical or rational thought to explore the intuitive and
emotional
truths of myth, symbolism, and mystery. I believe that rational thought can have no place in examining these questions.
So, what do I believe in? I believe in the truth of the myth, the importance of its symbolism.
Therefore I must go on in faith, remaining open to what comes.
Harriet came in just as I was finishing, carrying a mug of coffee. ‘The phone kept ringing for you,’ she said, ‘but I
said you were busy and asked them all to call you back in the morning.’
‘Thank you.’ I took the mug from her gratefully. ‘What do you think of this?’ I asked her, handing her the
type-written
sheets.
Harriet read the letter through slowly and carefully. ‘Well, I think it’s very honest,’ she said. ‘But are you sure you want to say this? You don’t think it’s going to upset people?’
‘Tessa thought that I should be clear about what I believe … people want to know what I think.’
‘Tessa isn’t always right, you know.’
I thought I detected a trace of sharpness in her voice, but perhaps I imagined this. She handed me back the pages. Harriet’s negative reaction didn’t particularly alarm me; I was pleased with what I had written, and thought that on the whole it would do more good than harm. ‘
Anyway
, it’s too late, I can’t write another one,’ I said, anxious not to prolong the discussion any further. ‘I promised it to Chris in the morning.’
‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Harriet briskly, and left the room.
