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Authors: Jeanette Winterson
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about burial/cremation with or without the dentures.
Like most evangelical groups, Elim believed in the resurrection of the body at the Last Trump – Mrs Winterson did not, but kept quiet. The question was, if you had had your teeth removed, and that was a fashionable thing to do until the 1960s, would you get them back at the Last Trump? If you did, would the falsies be in the way? If not, would you have to spend eternity with no teeth?
Some said it didn’t matter because nobody would be eating in the afterlife; others said it mattered a lot because we would want to look our best for Jesus . . .
And on it went . . .
Mrs Winterson didn’t want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day. But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army – it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn’t believe in mass any more, it was all about energy.’ This life is all mass. When we go, we’ll be all energy, that’s all there is to it.’
I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the ‘things of the world’ that would pass away, ‘heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll’, were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother’s beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.
But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.
Baptismal candidates wore a white sheet, either sheepishly or rakishly, and were asked this simple question by the pastor: ‘Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your saviour?’
The answer was: ‘I do.’ At this point the candidate waded into the water and, while held on either side by two strong men, was fully submerged – dying to the old life, surfacing into the new day. Once upright again and soaked through, they were given back their teeth and glasses and sent to dry off in the kitchen.
Baptismal services were very popular and were always followed by a supper of potato pie and mincemeat.
The Elim Church does not baptise infants. Baptism is for adults, or those somewhere near adulthood – I was thirteen. No one can be baptised by Elim unless they have given their lives to Jesus and understand what that means. Christ’s injunction that his followers must be twice-born, the natural birth and the spiritual birth, is in keeping with religious initiation ceremonies both pagan and tribal. There has to be a rite of passage, and a conscious one, between the life given by chance and circumstance and the life that is chosen.
There are psychological advantages to choosing life and a way of life consciously – and not just accepting life as an animal gift lived according to the haphazard of nature and chance. The ‘second birth’ protects the psyche by prompting both self-reflection and meaning.
I know that the whole process very easily becomes another kind of rote learning, where nothing is chosen at all, and any answers, however daft, are preferred to honest questioning. But the principle remains good. I saw a lot of working-class men and women – myself included – living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated
Like most evangelical groups, Elim believed in the resurrection of the body at the Last Trump – Mrs Winterson did not, but kept quiet. The question was, if you had had your teeth removed, and that was a fashionable thing to do until the 1960s, would you get them back at the Last Trump? If you did, would the falsies be in the way? If not, would you have to spend eternity with no teeth?
Some said it didn’t matter because nobody would be eating in the afterlife; others said it mattered a lot because we would want to look our best for Jesus . . .
And on it went . . .
Mrs Winterson didn’t want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day. But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army – it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn’t believe in mass any more, it was all about energy.’ This life is all mass. When we go, we’ll be all energy, that’s all there is to it.’
I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the ‘things of the world’ that would pass away, ‘heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll’, were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother’s beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.
But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.
Baptismal candidates wore a white sheet, either sheepishly or rakishly, and were asked this simple question by the pastor: ‘Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your saviour?’
The answer was: ‘I do.’ At this point the candidate waded into the water and, while held on either side by two strong men, was fully submerged – dying to the old life, surfacing into the new day. Once upright again and soaked through, they were given back their teeth and glasses and sent to dry off in the kitchen.
Baptismal services were very popular and were always followed by a supper of potato pie and mincemeat.
The Elim Church does not baptise infants. Baptism is for adults, or those somewhere near adulthood – I was thirteen. No one can be baptised by Elim unless they have given their lives to Jesus and understand what that means. Christ’s injunction that his followers must be twice-born, the natural birth and the spiritual birth, is in keeping with religious initiation ceremonies both pagan and tribal. There has to be a rite of passage, and a conscious one, between the life given by chance and circumstance and the life that is chosen.
There are psychological advantages to choosing life and a way of life consciously – and not just accepting life as an animal gift lived according to the haphazard of nature and chance. The ‘second birth’ protects the psyche by prompting both self-reflection and meaning.
I know that the whole process very easily becomes another kind of rote learning, where nothing is chosen at all, and any answers, however daft, are preferred to honest questioning. But the principle remains good. I saw a lot of working-class men and women – myself included – living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated
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