FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’

Published: 21 April, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

If you get to Heaven before I do just drill a hole and pull me through 

IT is time to raise a glass or better still crack an Easter egg. Like snakes in spring we slough off our skin and renew and regenerate ourselves. 

Time to see off the bigots and the prejudicial and to give the sap time to rise.

God is in the atmosphere but not in Edna’s: “I am not an agnostic,” she asserts. “I am an incorrigible and inflexible atheist.” At 85 I think she has a mindset.

Death is losing some of its traditional features. We commemorate it now by thanksgivings, memorials or celebrations. The last is an ambiguous word so there can be joy as well as sorrow.

There are dozens of words for Heaven but it seems we’ve been to the adman and we’re all bound for the afterlife. Perhaps that’s where Dorothy ended up in Oz.

What do we wear or eat when we get there? 

Lenin still lies in a splendid tomb in spacious Red Square, Moscow. He has a new suit every 18 months and is constantly being re-embalmed. He’s never looked younger.

Lenin, the driving force in the 1917 revolution, died in January 1924.

I last saw his body in 1956 when Generalissimo Joseph Stalin lay by his side – a reluctant companion.

Lenin’s funeral was on March 28, 1924, and then a remarkable thing happened. The Funeral Commission suddenly became the Immortalisation Commission. The old mysticism of Russian religion and Marxism began to coalesce.

An essential figure in the new regime was Leonid Krasin. Krasin believed that science could conquer death and three years before Lenin departed he announced at another funeral: “Soon we will be able to keep every party leader alive for ever.” Not even Boris Yeltsin was able to get Lenin’s remains shifted elsewhere.

The state encouraged the pulling down of churches and formed the League of the Godless.

Lenin, like Walt Disney the cartoon king, was placed in cryonic suspension. In the post-Frankensteinian era I relished Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi transplanting the heart of a vicious criminal into a polite, solid citizen. The consequences were very bad for American suburbia as the new man took on the wickedness of these new hearts.

It took until the 1960s before Dr Christian Barnard actually succeeded in doing the job.

Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marx’s dialectical materialism blew a hole in biblical truth. Creation was hidden behind a spring. 

Now as we approach the successful dream of eternal life, what is going to happen to the euthanasia clinics? 

“Compelled to live” is a despondent prayer and a pessimistic chant.

As a Catholic schoolboy I relished the theatricality of Holy Week. Death and darkness were dispelled. Statues and paintings uncovered, Easter blossomed and the 40 days of darkness were over.

I learnt later how the Church had adopted the tricks of ancient Greece and the symbolism. 

I cried for the passion of Christ, but on Easter Sunday, my Irish grandfather painted Easter eggs for us.

When I got to 18 I read George Moore’s prophetic early 20th-century novel The Brook Kerith when Christ is taken alive from the tomb to join a communistic settlement.

I say prophetic because that is one of the unsubstantiated trails indicated in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Irish Catholic children like myself were encouraged to view the dear departed. 

My grandmother lifted me up to say goodbye to my dead grandfather. He was displayed in an ill-fitting brown shroud. In her reassuring brogue, she said: “Have a look because the next time you see him he’ll be in Heaven.” They closed the coffin and took it to St Illtyd’s Church and in the morning to a windswept mountain-top cemetery.

How, I wondered, would he get from there to the celestial city? Was he an early form of traveller in space? Irish people loved a wake and during the ritual, the vigil the drink flowed and the craic sparkled, while the corpse was propped up in the corner. One ribald song talks of the corpse getting so excited at the conviviality that he got up and joined in.

On a higher plane the fraudulent Labour MP and publisher of the Daily Mirror Robert Maxwell was drawn from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and hurriedly buried in a state funeral outside Jerusalem.

The graves there point diagonally to the bricked-up gates of the old city. It was none other than Yitzhak Rabin who explained to me that the returning Messiah will come through that gate. So therefore it makes sense to have the rich pointing towards him so that they can be first in the rush.

I do not doubt the power of the wish for eternal life but I do wish some of my friends  would stop dabbling in spiritualism. 

It’s no use telling them about Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling who became almost unhinged at the death of their sons in the First World War.

HG Wells tried to educate us about the future, but Dr Who has no problems of space and time.

Watching, listening and reading the thoughts on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s trip in space, I could hear the echoes of old Russia. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. We are on the edge of a cosmos which not even Dr Brian Cox can smile away.

Take comfort  from William Wordsworth: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”

Even my godless octogenarian friend Edna the atheist loves Henry Vaughan’s 17th-century poem: “My soul, there is a country far behind the stars.” 

Perhaps there is – or God is a mischievous and perverse personality.