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.
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