Read Online Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeanette Winterson
Ads: Link
people; Bible study worked their brains. They met after work in noisy discussion. The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
We shall have to find new ways of finding meaning – it is not yet clear how this will happen.
But for the members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, life was full of miracles, signs, wonders, and practical purpose.
That was how the movement had started in 1915, in Monaghan, Ireland, though the founder, George Jeffreys, was a Welshman. The name Elim comes from Exodus 15:27. Moses is trudging through the desert with the Israelites and everyone is miserable, tired and looking for a sign from God, when suddenly, they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters .
If a hen wasn’t laying – pray over her and an egg was sure to follow. Our Easter services always blessed the hens, and a lot of people kept them; ours were in our allotment, most were in people’s backyards. A visitation by a fox soon turned into a parable about the sneak-thief ways of Satan. A hen that wouldn’t lay however often you prayed over her was like a soul who turned from Jesus – proud and unproductive.
If you pegged out your washing and it rained – get a few of the faithful to pray for a good drying wind. As nobody had a telephone we often turned up at each other’s houses asking for help. Not Mrs Winterson – she prayed alone, and she prayed standing up, more like an Old Testament prophet than a sinner on her knees.
Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain.
For the rest of us, for me, the certainty of a nearby God made sense of the uncertainty. We had no bank accounts, no phones, no cars, no inside toilets, often no carpets, no job security and very little money. The church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility. I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped or hopeless. What did it matter if we had one pair of shoes and no food on Thursday nights before payday? Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you . . .
Good advice – if the kingdom of God is the place of true value, the place not bound by the facts and figures of the everyday, if it is what you love for its own sake . . .
In a world that has become instrumental and utilitarian, the symbol of the kingdom of God – and it is a symbol not a place – stands as the challenge of love to the arrogance of power and the delusions of wealth.
Monday night – Sisterhood
Tuesday night – Bible Study
Wednesday night – Prayer Meeting
Thursday night – Brotherhood/Black and Decker
Friday night – Youth Group
Saturday night – Revival Meeting (away)
Sunday – All day
The Brothers’ Black and Decker nights were practical meetings to fix up the church building or to help one of the brothers at home. The Saturday-night revival meetings were really the highlight of the week because that usually meant a trip to another church, or, in the summer, a tent crusade.
Our church had a giant tent and every summer we went up and down with the Glory Crusade. My mother and father had remade their marriage in a Glory Crusade tent on a piece of spare land under the Accrington viaduct.
My mother loved the Glory Crusades. I don’t think she believed half of what she was supposed to believe, and she made up quite a lot of theology. But I think that the night in the tent crusade when she and Dad found the Lord stopped
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
We shall have to find new ways of finding meaning – it is not yet clear how this will happen.
But for the members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, life was full of miracles, signs, wonders, and practical purpose.
That was how the movement had started in 1915, in Monaghan, Ireland, though the founder, George Jeffreys, was a Welshman. The name Elim comes from Exodus 15:27. Moses is trudging through the desert with the Israelites and everyone is miserable, tired and looking for a sign from God, when suddenly, they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters .
If a hen wasn’t laying – pray over her and an egg was sure to follow. Our Easter services always blessed the hens, and a lot of people kept them; ours were in our allotment, most were in people’s backyards. A visitation by a fox soon turned into a parable about the sneak-thief ways of Satan. A hen that wouldn’t lay however often you prayed over her was like a soul who turned from Jesus – proud and unproductive.
If you pegged out your washing and it rained – get a few of the faithful to pray for a good drying wind. As nobody had a telephone we often turned up at each other’s houses asking for help. Not Mrs Winterson – she prayed alone, and she prayed standing up, more like an Old Testament prophet than a sinner on her knees.
Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain.
For the rest of us, for me, the certainty of a nearby God made sense of the uncertainty. We had no bank accounts, no phones, no cars, no inside toilets, often no carpets, no job security and very little money. The church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility. I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped or hopeless. What did it matter if we had one pair of shoes and no food on Thursday nights before payday? Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you . . .
Good advice – if the kingdom of God is the place of true value, the place not bound by the facts and figures of the everyday, if it is what you love for its own sake . . .
In a world that has become instrumental and utilitarian, the symbol of the kingdom of God – and it is a symbol not a place – stands as the challenge of love to the arrogance of power and the delusions of wealth.
Monday night – Sisterhood
Tuesday night – Bible Study
Wednesday night – Prayer Meeting
Thursday night – Brotherhood/Black and Decker
Friday night – Youth Group
Saturday night – Revival Meeting (away)
Sunday – All day
The Brothers’ Black and Decker nights were practical meetings to fix up the church building or to help one of the brothers at home. The Saturday-night revival meetings were really the highlight of the week because that usually meant a trip to another church, or, in the summer, a tent crusade.
Our church had a giant tent and every summer we went up and down with the Glory Crusade. My mother and father had remade their marriage in a Glory Crusade tent on a piece of spare land under the Accrington viaduct.
My mother loved the Glory Crusades. I don’t think she believed half of what she was supposed to believe, and she made up quite a lot of theology. But I think that the night in the tent crusade when she and Dad found the Lord stopped
Similar Books
