Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later.
    I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

    And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
    You are unhappy. Things get worse.
    It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
    And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’
    In fact, they told you nothing.

6
    Church

    ‘T
HAT’S NOT A CHURCH – THAT’S two terraced houses knocked together.’
    Elim Pentecostal Church, Blackburn Road, Accrington, was the centre of my life for sixteen years. It had no pews, no altar, no nave or chancel, no stained glass, no candles, no organ.
    It had fold-up wooden chairs, a long low pulpit – more like a stage than the traditional box on stilts – a pub piano and a pit.
    The pit could be filled with water for our baptismal services. Just as Jesus had baptised his disciples in the River Jordan, we too fully immersed believers in a deep warm plunge pool which had to be slowly heated up the day before the service.
    Baptismal candidates were given a little box for their teeth and spectacles. It had been spectacles only until Mrs Smalley opened her mouth underwater to praise the Lord and lost her top teeth. The pastor couldn’t swim so a member of the flock had to dive down and pull them out – we all sang ‘I Will Make You Fishers of Men’ as an encouragement, but it was felt that while losing one set of teeth was a misfortune, to lose two sets looked liked carelessness. And so baptism happened without dentures – if you had them, and most people had them.

    There was a fierce debate 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