The truth is this. My family had no interest
in visiting historic churches, my musical tastes rarely extended beyond the
latest pop music charts and my school’s RE provision was restricted almost entirely
to our infamous grave-rubbing excursions in an attempt to avoid causing offence
to parents who were afraid to expose their children to any intellectual
stimulus that might challenge their child to think critically about their
(often parentally-enforced) belief systems. My real interest in theology was
prompted by an incident that took place when I was a young child and - although
I am willing to concede that my impressionable age may have contributed heavily
to my interpretation of the events of which I will now relate - upon reflection
as a rational adult I can assure you that every sight that I witnessed and every
sensation that I experienced that evening was very real indeed.
It was a bitterly cold day in
December, the kind of miserable mid-winter day when the light of the morning
lasts for only a few hours and the darkness of the evening creeps in around
mid-afternoon. I was nine years old and easily excited by the time of year;
Christmas was almost upon us and I spent my afternoons watching out of the
classroom window in the vain hope that it might snow and, if I was
exceptionally lucky, that school would be cancelled the next day.
It was already getting dark
by the time that I arrived home from school with my best friend in tow and I
succeeded in persuading my parents to allow her to stay at our house for the
night (this was a regular arrangement since her family bothered very little
with her and she stayed whole weekends with us on occasion). My mother insisted
that it was too cold to play outside and so we were confined to the house and
amused ourselves by telling ghost stories under the bedcovers in my parent’s
bedroom. I recall the bedroom even now with an unsettling unease. The house had
previously belonged to my grandparents and I once overheard my mother telling a
neighbour over coffee that her father was terrified of hospitals and he had
chosen to die at home, presumably in the main bedroom. Discovering this fact
only served to compound my existing anxieties about the room.
My parents did not have the
time or funds to redecorate the house after my grandparents died and so the
bedroom had retained that ‘old person’ smell of carbolic soap, lavender and
floral perfume. On the farthest wall was a disused fireplace and whenever I
crawled into the bed as a young child to sleep alongside my mother I would lie
awake and watch the fireplace for fear that someone or something would climb
down the chimney while we slept. In addition to the creepy fireplace, two large
antique walnut wardrobes stood at the side of the bed and each was large
enough, I would convince myself, for a fully grown man to hide inside. The
lighting in the room was another cause for concern because, although there was
a central light fixture in the ceiling that worked perfectly adequately, my
parents used the bedside lamp as the main source of light in the room and the pathetically
poor light that came from it was quickly swallowed up by the impenetrably thick
burgundy material of the lampshade. Each time I entered the bedroom I was
afraid that I might catch sight of something in the dark recesses of the back
wall and so I would switch on the main light, which always led to a scolding from
my father. But a sharp telling off was entirely preferable to braving the brooding
darkness to hunt for the tiny switch on the bedside lamp.
On this particular night my
friend and I had been frightening one another by sharing ghost stories beneath
the bedclothes and we had succeeded in whipping ourselves into the frenzy of nervous
hypersensitivity that inevitably results from an exchange of tales about ghosts
and demons (and in later years from watching a particularly disturbing horror
film). I was aware of the sound of a strong wind blowing up outside and it was
only a background noise at first, but then a fierce gust of wind caught the
house, causing the timbers to contract and creak loudly. The strength of the
wind was not unusual since it was a corner house and often bore the brunt of
the bad weather, but within seconds the swell of wind had grown in ferocity to
the point that it sounded as though a dreadful beast was raging in the street
outside and poised to rip the roof off the house and steal us out of our beds. To
make matters worse, earlier that evening I had opened one curtain halfway to
allow a little light from the street to fall into the room and the strong gale
was causing the branches of the oak tree outside to sway violently and cast
wild and fantastical shadows onto the bedroom walls and onto the sides of our
makeshift tent beneath the bedclothes.
We stopped talking and lay silently
under the covers, listening nervously to the eerie whine of the wind and the laboured
creaking and groaning of the house. These noises alone were far more disturbing
than any ghost story that we had told. My parents were watching television
downstairs and I knew that a desperate dash to the safety of the front room
would not only expose me as a pathetic coward but it was also completely out of
the question given that I would have to brave the darkness of the bedroom,
stairs and hallway in order to reach them, so I swallowed my fear and lay motionless
on my back as my friend rolled onto her side and curled up into a tight ball,
neither one of us daring to speak while we listened to the screaming winds and watched
the dark shadows dance all around us like tiny demonic figurines.
Unrelenting
gusts of wind continued to strike the house until we were completely enveloped
in a high-pitched turbulent whine and, just when I honestly thought that the house
could not withstand one more second of this persistent battering, the wind suddenly
ceased and there was absolute silence. It was an eerie and anesthetised silence
as though every living creature on the street outside had been frozen to the
spot and there was no sound whatsoever, except for the occasional sobbing gasp
of air coming from my terrified friend beside me. I waited patiently for the whine
of the wind to resume and I was beginning to adjust to this unnatural silence when
my nerves were once again set on edge and I was gripped by the alarming sensation
of a third presence in the bedroom. At first I thought that my mother was
checking on us, but I knew that I would have heard her footsteps in the hallway
and she would have spoken upon entering the room. Although my heart was
pounding in my chest and I was sure that I would be confronted by someone or something
as soon as I emerged from the safety of the bedcovers, the compulsion to peek
out was too strong to resist and so I bravely snaked my hand out from beneath
the sheets and peered over them into the darkness of the room.
I was relieved to find no
ghostly figure, but I was equally shocked by the sight that greeted me. My
attention was drawn to the window at the foot of the bed and, as my eyes
adjusted to the dim light, I could clearly distinguish the side profile of a
woman’s head against the windowpane. The profile was in shadow and it appeared
to be female as a head covering - a veil or similar decoration - protruded out from
over her forehead. Since the bedroom was on the first floor I knew that this
was not a figure peering in from the street outside and my heart convulsed in
my chest when I realised that it was an apparition in the glass. I could hear
the faint hum of voices from the television downstairs and I wondered whether
my parents would hear me if I screamed, but my tongue was like lead in my mouth
and my legs were frozen to the mattress. Pointing towards the window with a
shaky hand, I whispered to my friend who was huddled in a foetal position
beside me and coaxed her out from beneath the bedcovers. She shifted alongside
me and as she surfaced I asked whether she could see the woman’s profile at the
window. Her sharp intake of breath confirmed this, but no sooner had I spoken
when the ghostly image began to change.
We both watched, completely transfixed,
as the outline of the woman’s head started to lose its shape and gradually implode
into itself, while at the same time glowing increasingly brighter until it had
become an intensely radiant ball of light that pulsed and undulated like a ball
of molten lava suspended in the air. It burned with a deeply golden glow
against the darkness of the night outside and the centre shone with a piercing white
light that was unbearably bright and impossible to look at directly. The ball
of light then began to slide diagonally across the window frame and onto the bedroom
wall and we watched as it poured slowly like molten liquid up the wall and onto
the ceiling, leaving shards of burning white light in its path. At first I
thought, grasping at what little rationality was left in me, that the light was
coming from the headlights of a car outside. But no sound of an engine could be
heard. Just a deafening silence and the laboured breathing of my friend beside
me. When the bright shape reached the top of the wall it began to stretch
itself across the ceiling towards us and it continued to chart its steady path
until it had formed a column of blinding white light that almost divided the
ceiling in half, at which point two further columns of light shot out from the
centre and stretched in opposite directions from left to right until it had
taken on the shape of a Latin cross directly above us. And then, to my absolute
horror, this bright cross of light began to slowly descend downwards from the
ceiling onto the bed.
I still curse myself to this day for my cowardliness and I wonder what
the consequences would have been if I had been brave enough to endure a few
more seconds of the vision, but, rather than hold our nerve, we both screamed
with fright and buried ourselves deep under the bedclothes where we remained
sobbing for some time, far too afraid to come out. We were severely traumatised
by the incident and made a promise not to tell anyone about what had happened
to us. My friend – unsurprisingly, given her naïve and impressionable nature
and her neglectful parental situation – believed that we had received a sign
from God and she later joined a Christian youth group and became a regular worshipping
member of the congregation at her local church. She described her ‘calling to
faith’ in the parish magazine and, although she did not divulge too many details,
I presumed that she was referring to our shared experience that night. I, on
the other hand, remained deeply disturbed by the incident and I was haunted by
the memory for some time. I deliberately avoided any contact with religion until
my mid-teenage years, but I was forced to overcome these fears when, following
a chance encounter with the choirmaster of St. Bartholomew’s Church when attending
a family wedding, I was offered the opportunity to put my musical talents to
good use and earn a modest income at the same time. Shortly after accepting the
position of organist I found myself spending whole evenings alone in the dark
organ loft practising hymns for the Sunday Eucharist and almost daring
something to appear to me again. But it never did.
By the age of sixteen I had developed a passionate interest in the study
of religion and I found myself becoming increasingly involved with the life of
the church, but any blossoming seeds of faith were crushed when Daniel, my
thirteen-year-old brother, was killed while crossing the road on his way to
school. I spent the remainder of that year swinging viciously between a melancholy
desire to be with him and a formidable and indignant anger towards God and I
developed an overwhelming and entirely irrational fear that everyone I loved would
suddenly die without warning. Fortunately rather than turn my back on the
church I had the presence of mind to channel these bitter emotions into practical
study and I joined a church-based discussion group in an attempt to understand
why God would allow such terrible tragedies to take place in the world. I also sought
distraction in my organ playing but I was forced to relive the memory of
Daniel’s death when playing for funeral services, each committal reopening the
painful wound that God had ripped into my soul. Even now I sit on my organ
bench like the great Archangel Azrael, presiding over the interments of the
victims of mindless violence, unfortunate accidents, cruel illnesses and desperate
suicides and adding each wretched name to a list of grievances that I fully
intend to raise with God upon my entry to heaven....
So these are the genuine reasons for my interest in the study of
theology. A little too intense, as you can imagine, for a pleasant chat over
orange juice and sandwiches on a wet and dreary Friday afternoon with an
elderly man who I barely knew. Hence the well-crafted response involving choral
music and my grandmother that I had prepared for precisely this kind of occasion.
