Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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 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 –