Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was merely the husk.
The evangelical pastor, an austere old sort with a cruel face who addressed us as ‘dear ones’ or ‘beloved’, clearly concurred with this view and trotted us quickly and unsentimentally through the service, starting with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. An old man with a comic’s face faced us from behind the keys of a portable electric organ. Perhaps 30 of us clambered to our feet to the sound of those familiar introductory chords.
I had a chapel upbringing and have sung hymns on and off all my life, but for the past few years I have been dwelling in the tents of wickedness and have fallen out of the habit. It’s certainly been a long time since I sang John Newton’s greatest hit. When I used to sing ‘Amazing Grace’, I never imagined the words applied to me — that I was once blind but now could see, was lost but now found. I was pleased for John Newton, and I relished his honest gratitude and the plain sincerity of his one-syllable words, but nothing as dramatic had ever happened to me and I was scrupulous about not pretending that it had.
This wasn’t arrogance. Goodness knows that a fortnight ago, with about 200 people in a toilet of a bar, I was singing a comic ditty about Avram Grant the West Ham manager paying a visit to a massage parlour with all my heart and soul. When it comes to committing myself to the words of a song, no matter how ridiculous, I’m not fussy. I hold back with ‘Amazing Grace’ because I fear the power of Newton’s words, convinced that if I made them mine as I sung them my life’s course might dramatically alter.
Singing ‘Amazing Grace’ at last week’s funeral service for my mother’s cousin for the first time in many years reaffirmed this conviction. The organist played it as slowly as possible, thereby ratcheting up the hymn’s power to maximum. Not everybody sang. Standing next to me was my uncle, who was tricked into attending an evangelical church service two years ago and hasn’t stopped complaining about the overblown language he was subjected to ever since. ‘All they kept going on about was blood,’ he said. ‘The blood of this and the blood of that. They were all mad.’ He didn’t sing. But after a ragged start, those of us who did soon lost all self-consciousness and blended our voices into a unity that seemed to lift us all out of ourselves and take us to a place where the meaning of the phrase ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’ becomes a little clearer. Though even here I found myself, round about verse three (‘through many dangers, toils and snares…’), entirely losing concentration and feasting my eyes on the form of a very attractive woman in the row in front.
We sang just one other hymn. After a few brisk, off-the-cuff prayers from the cruel- faced pastor, and a testimony from a family member, the closing number was ‘The Lord Is my Shepherd’. I’ve never liked that one. The tune isn’t bad, and I joined in, but the language is too lush and the whole thing too allegorical and triumphant for me to feel any meaningful connection with it. My uncle didn’t sing this one, either. He’s been in pigs most of his life. Not in a million years would anyone persuade him to compare himself to a sheep.
After the service we followed the coffin out of the hall and across the road to the cemetery where a hole had been excavated with a small mechanical digger. His shiny black shoes notwithstanding, the cruel-faced pastor hopped up on the mound of fresh earth piled next to the grave, as if he were Charles Wesley at an open-air revival meeting or something, and said, ‘Gather round, beloved!’ But we obstinately refused. We all stayed where we were, at a respectful or perhaps sceptical distance from the hole. Only later, when he’d done the honours, did one or two people venture forward to the grave’s edge to bowl a few handfuls of dry sand after the coffin. Which was only right, really, seeing as she might not have been there at all. And perhaps far from being dead was more alive than before.
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