Waiting for the Last Bus Read online

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Spiritualist movement in the United States formed itself into an organised denomination. Spiritualists believed that the souls of the dead were located on an etheric plane parallel to the physical universe, which was accessible to psychics like the one Saul consulted at Endor. A spiritualist service was a séance enfolded within a liturgy. There would be prayers and readings as in a conventional act of worship, but the real focus was on communication with the dead.

  Around the same time in Victorian England, some prominent members of society became interested in spiritualism for scientific reasons. They formed the Society for Psychical Research to examine paranormal phenomena to see if it could prove the existence of life beyond the grave. The method they adopted to gather proof of life on the other side was a system of automatic or spirit writing called cross-correspondence. The idea was that when members of the Society for Psychical Research died, they would use spirit writing to get back in touch with those still alive, and in this way they could cross-check any claims made. The philosopher John Gray said all their carefully designed experiments achieved was a reflection of their own subconscious longings. It turned out that the after-world was very like the one these Victorian researchers had left behind. And dying was like moving from one wing of a great English country-house to another.85

  The slaughter of the Great War gave added impetus to the Spiritualist movement in both its ecclesiastical and scientific modes. Most cities in the West will have at least one Spiritualist church. There are still some universities with departments that do research into the paranormal. And famous mediums still pack out theatres with their public séances and demonstrations of psychic power. Whatever we make of all this, it shows that in human experience the dead fascinate the living. One way or another they continue to intrude into our lives.

  ***

  And sometimes they appear unprompted. When I began pondering this, I went first to my Greek New Testament. I wanted to reflect on the meaning of anamnesis in Christian thinking about the dead in that passage about the Last Supper. Then I decided to check the Latin as well, so I went to my Latin New Testament. And a gate to the past opened before me. The Latin New Testament I consulted asserted its own past as well as incidents in my own. I remembered buying it in Lent 1969 from Thin’s bookshop on South Bridge in Edinburgh, just opposite the Old Quad of the University. Thin’s – as the bookshop then was – had a rambling second-hand book department in its deep, cluttered basement. That’s where I picked it up. It was a handsome, slightly scuffed, leather-bound volume with gilt-edged pages, small enough to slip into a pocket – vigesimo-quarto, in printers’ lingo. It had been published in 1911. And it had been a gift. On the inside cover, there was the autograph of Alexander Stewart, St Mary’s College, St Andrews – and then pasted on the flyleaf at the front was a card that read:

  WITH THE REV. H.J. WHITE’S KIND REGARDS

  And in Alexander Stewart’s handwriting on the bottom right-hand corner of the card was the date, Jan. 1912. It summoned the past from before the Great War. Who was Alexander Stewart, a common enough name in Scotland? Who was the Rev. H.J. White, whose address, as the bottom left-hand corner of his visiting card informed me, was 33 Lexham Gardens, W? Did that unattached W suggest a London address? The mystery is solved on the title page. It tells me in Latin that Henricus Iulianus White was one of the editors of this version of Saint Jerome’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into Latin. It also tells me that he was Professor of the Interpretation of the New Testament at King’s College, London – so my guess was right, a London address. My next guess is that the Rev. H.J. White had sent a copy of his new work of scholarship to Alexander Stewart of St Andrew’s University, tucking his business card inside as a ‘with compliments of the author’ slip. Alexander Stewart then glued it on to the flysheet with the date he received it. My third guess is that Stewart too was a theologian, and a quick bit of research proves it. And not just another theologian; he was a very distinguished one. At the time of the gift, he was Principal and Professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews and a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He didn’t live long after receiving Professor White’s gift in 1912. He died unexpectedly in the summer of 1915. H.J. White lived on till 1934.

  A dead world has been conjured to life on my desk by a hundred-year-old book I picked up for thirty-five pence nearly fifty years ago. How did it end up in Thin’s? I reckon that after his death in 1915, Professor Stewart’s library was passed on to his children. A couple of generations later, whatever was left was sold to a book dealer and some of it ended up in Thin’s labyrinthine basement. As I hold this remnant of Alexander Stewart’s library from 1912 and turn its pages to find the verses I am looking for, a card falls out. And another memory floods in. It was the requiem card for a beloved friend whose funeral I had conducted twenty-five years before.

  My memory of her had gone, yet there she was again, vividly present in my mind. Breast cancer had killed her. And it took its time. It had reduced her beauty to ashes except for the bright shining of her eyes. Her metaphor for death had been the train not the bus. She knew she’d have to board alone, but she wanted me there up to the last moment. ‘Make sure you buy a platform ticket,’ she warned me. Though platform tickets were no longer issued, I knew what she meant. Compartments in the old trains opened directly onto the platform, so tickets had to be checked before passengers boarded. And if you wanted to see someone onto the train, you needed a ticket to get through the barrier to the platform. It meant you could stay beside a friend till she opened the compartment door and went aboard. That’s where she wanted me, as close as I could get to her departure. I was there when the train drew in and she boarded. So how could I have forgotten her? I feel faithless and helpless. Time not only steals those we love; it even steals our memories of them. Their graves fill with the dust of the years, and we forget them. Then one day we come upon a card in an old book and a long dead friend steps through the door of memory into the present. And we mourn again.

  It is the absoluteness of the loss we feel after a death that stuns us.

  At last I am alone . . . Now there is nothing left. All your papers have been taken away. Your clothes have gone. Your room is bare. In a few months no traces will be left . . . and never again, however long I lookout of the window, will I see your tall thin figure walking across the park past the dwarf pine, past the stumps, and then climb the ha-ha and come across the lawn. Our jokes have gone forever.86

  It is Carrington’s forever in that extract from her diaries about the death of Lytton Strachey that hits us. How can we bear such absolute losses, such complete disappearances? What we have done in our grief is to craft arts of mourning and remembrance to hold open the door before it closes forever on the beloved dead. Religion has its own memorial arts, and the phrase from Luke’s Gospel I was searching for when I found my friend’s requiem card captures both their strength and elusiveness: touto poiete eis tēn emen anamnesin. . . do this in remembrance of me.87

  Anamnesis is a profound word, deeper than the simple act of remembrance. For Plato, anamnesis lay at the heart of his theory of learning. Like the sages of India, he believed that our souls had been repeatedly incarnated, and, since we had all forgotten what we had known in previous lives, learning was a process of recall or rediscovery of what had been lost. You do not have to believe in reincarnation to go on finding truth in that idea. We let too much of what is good and beautiful sink into the unremembered past, even the lives of those we loved. And what we are doing when we use our imagination to remember the dead is to bring them to life again, if only for a moment. Not in a séance that magically summons them to appear in our midst, however unwillingly. But through an art of remembrance or anamnesis that is so lovingly felt we say of it that it isn’t about the person; it is the person herself.

  In Christianity, this idea of making someone present again after death was mainly applied to Jesus Christ in
the Eucharist, the service that commemorated his last supper when he told them to break bread and drink wine as his anamnesis. The Eucharist was not about Jesus; it was Jesus himself present in the forms of bread and wine. Jesus Christ also became the dominant presence in Christian funerals. The Church was more intent on proclaiming the future that awaited the departed in heaven than on remembering the life they had lived on earth. The readings and prayers were all about the life to come not the life that had just ended:

  Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity: We beseech thee that it may please thee, of thy gracious goodness, shortly to accomplish the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy kingdom; that we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory . . . 88

  Prayers of consolation were also offered for those who mourned, but the emphasis was on the prospects for the departed. Funerals did not look back; they looked forward. And the prospect could be forbidding.

  The most striking of Christian funeral services was the Catholic Church’s traditional Requiem Mass for the Faithful Departed. It was a special version of the normal Eucharist with subtle shifts of emphasis and tone. It was celebrated in the presence of the corpse, for whom it was a cry to God for mercy. And it was more sombre than the normal mass. The colour of the vestments was black, sometimes edged with gold to suggest the hope of resurrection; and instead of creamy beeswax, the candles were unbleached and dark orange in colour. But the most tremendous addition was the great choral sequence, Dies Irae or Day of Wrath, a dramatic meditation on judgement. As we have already noticed, this fear of eternal damnation hung like a funeral pall over medieval and late medieval Christian thought. The Dies Irae was a plea of the frightened soul to the merciful heart of Christ:

  Day of wrath and doom impending,

  David’s word with Sybil’s blending!

  Heaven and earth in ashes rending.

  O, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,

  When from heaven the Judge descendeth,

  On whose sentence all dependeth.

  Death is struck, and nature quaking,

  All creation is awaking,

  To its judge an answer making.

  Lo! The book exactly worded,

  Wherein all hath been recorded;

  Thence shall judgement be awarded.

  What shall I, frail man, be pleading?

  Who for me be interceding,

  When the Just are mercy needing?89

  It is not often heard in churches nowadays, but even in the concert hall when the great classical requiems are performed, it can send a shiver down our spines. Even if we do not believe in the doom the great hymn fears, there is something about death itself that summons us to consider the heedlessness of our own lives. It prompts us to self-reflection before it is too late.

  Even in religious funerals today the emphasis has shifted from the future that awaits the dead to the life they actually lived while on earth. That is certainly the style in memorial services for famous people, where they summon the dead to make their last appearance on the stage before disappearing into the wings forever. In humanist services – increasingly prevalent today – there is no focus on the future life because it is neither desired nor expected. The emphasis is all on re-presenting the life that has ended in a final anamnesis. And sometimes the dead are given the last word. In a non-religious funeral I conducted recently, the deceased had carefully crafted a message for me to read in her name. It was a song of gratitude for having lived and a message of love to her partner and daughter, both of whom were immensely comforted by it. Unlike the funerals I conducted as a young priest, where the form was strictly set by the Prayer Book, the ones I lead today are usually specially crafted to reflect the life that has ended.

  This can be hard if the life being remembered was incomplete or unfulfilled. That said, it is probably the unfulfilled life that speaks best to those of us who feel we didn’t make the most of ours either – and now it is too late. Thinking about lives that didn’t quite happen helps us remember that, although we didn’t deal the hand, we had to play the cards life gave us. The death of a friend who had been Director of Music at Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh when I was Rector there in the 1970s gave me a chance to reflect on the grace of the apparently unfulfilled life:

  The novelist Rebecca West claimed that artistic genius was ‘the abnormal justifying itself . . . those who know that they are for whatever reason condemned by the laws of life . . . make themselves one with life by some magnificent act of creation’. West was saying that creativity had one of its roots in a disconnection between prevailing conventions and the reality of the artist’s life. That dissonance was the grit in the soul that became the pearl of great price: wonderful art.90

  I don’t want to romanticise Alistair, but I have a strong feeling that all the turbulent and conflicting elements in his character were reconciled when he sat himself down at an organ console and emptied himself into the music. Not being a musician, I can only guess at what that must have felt like. But I too have had moments in my life when I was emptied into something larger, something that cancelled or absorbed the clamours of my own nature and gave me a rest from myself. The technical name for this is ecstasy, which means to get out of or off your own ego with all its needs and posturing and dissonances.

  I can remember many occasions in this church when we’d got to the end of a great hymn, and Alistair would zoom or lift off into a piece of breath-taking improvisation. And you sensed that the awkward, abrasive yet intensely kind man on the organ stool was far away from himself and had become music and resolution and beauty. He had been ‘justified’, to use a word with a strong redemptive echo in Christianity, a word that promises that our struggles and self-loathing are destined to be caught up into an enormous mercy and grace that says yes to us just as we are and accepts us even though we feel ourselves to be unacceptable. I don’t know if musical theorists would agree with me on this, but it seems to me that Fauré’s Requiem captures and expresses that same experience of human reconciliation, which is why it is the right setting for Alistair’s farewell. It reconciles us to all the dying and going forth that is the human lot, and brings forth beauty from loss: it justifies us, brings meaning out of brokenness and carries us home.

  Maybe his genius for improvisation is the clue to understanding Alistair and his conflicts with authority over the years. Improvisation is the art of departing from fixed rules and making up new music now heard for the first time; and this is something the authoritarian personality hates. Authoritarians like rules and regulations; they like things done the way they have always been done; that’s why when they get control of institutions they resist change. Their motto is: do nothing for the first time. It is improvisers like Alistair who bring necessary change to moribund societies. Blessed are the improvisers for they make all things new.

  ***

  So those we love leave us. We see them no longer, but we try to hold on to them as long as we can. In their funerals and memorials, we do our best to contain and express the meaning of the lives we have lost forever. Before the service, we sit in our chairs thinking about them, trying to compress their essence into a few hundred words before closing the curtains on yet another life. Like Dora Carrington, we remember their jokes, the way they walked, their shape. We don’t hide from their flaws. In fact, we discover that they were part of why we loved them. They touched the incomplete places in our own souls. Suddenly we realise that what annoyed us about them is what we’ll miss most of all – their quirks and absurdities. And we wonder all over again if we told them how much we loved them.

  It is a great pity we don’t know

  When the dead are going to die

  So that, over a last companionable

  Drink, we cou
ld tell them

  How much we liked them.

  Happy the man who, dying, can

  Place his hand on his heart and say:

  ‘At least I didn’t neglect to tell

  The thrush how beautifully she sings.’91

  Then it’s the day after the funeral. Our friends have gone back to their lives. We want to go back to ours but no longer know where it is. Its meaning has gone. We are no longer living as we did before. We are grieving. We have known grief before, of course. There have been other losses. But none like this. No other loss prepared us for the loss of death because there is no loss like it. Our jokes have gone forever! Death is an absolute loss. Because she realised she could not live without Lytton Strachey, Carrington killed herself – clumsily, with a shotgun. Grief can kill. Quickly, as in Carrington’s case, or in the slow emotional death of enduring sorrow that takes the life out of life.

  What is grief, this x that hits us like an express train? Answering that question in writing is like trying to put the experience of music into words. It doesn’t easily translate into the language of definition, though we can glimpse it in the experiences of others. We heard it in David’s lament for his son Absalom: Would God I had died for thee. We saw it when Carrington pressed the shotgun against her stomach and reached for the trigger to silence grief forever. Grief has as many layers and textures as there are individual circumstances, but its essence is a stunned and sorrowing bewilderment that ‘somebody was here and the next minute there is nobody here at all’. It is not only the experience of loss; it is bafflement at the loss and a sense of its impossibility. This cannot be happening.