One of Benjamin Britten’s best settings of a Hardy poem is the Choir Master’s Burial. It tells of a man who requests that at his burial the choir musicians should sing and play
‘The psalm he liked best –
The one whose sense suits
“Mount Ephraim”.
That is a tune which we now sing to the words ‘For all thy saints, O Lord, who strove in thee to live’, written by Benjamin Milgrove who died in 1810. What Hardy may have had in mind, however, was the metrical setting of Psalm 137, ‘Your harps ye trembling saints, down from the willows, take’. But whatever it was the choir master wanted – he didn’t get it. A modernizing vicar thinks that a read service is quicker than using instruments out of doors on a frosty day. ‘That old fashioned way requires a fine day.’ He is the sort of vicar who would probably also have brought in an organist and got rid of the west gallery instrumentalists altogether. So
‘To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.’
The Vicar, however, gets his comeuppance. At the dead of the next night he looks out of his window and sees
“A band all in white,
Like the saints in church glass,
Singing and playing,
The ancient stave
By the choir masters grave.’
Or at least so ‘the tenor man told when he had grown old.’
The poem is quintessential Hardy; like the Christmas poem, The Oxen’ it speaks of a belief which the poet looks back on with deep regret from an alienated world. In the Oxen, he remembers the rural belief that on Christmas Eve, the animals all kneel.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,
In lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
In the same way Hardy remembered from his early days the West Gallery Choir and musicians who represented a way of life and believing and worshipping which had gone and his own faith had gone with it. All he has left is a deep nostalgia, a wish that things could still be the same, that he could still rest his hopes on something solid.
When the women come to the disciples with the news that Jesus has risen – their words seem to them as useless chatter, a kind of delirium. Though they have been Jesus constant companions for three years, though they have come to know and love him, though he has spoken to them of this rising from the dead, the disciples cannot believe. These are the words of women. Only Peter goes to see for himself and is left wondering.
What the disciples are shown to be suffering from, is both prejudice and a failure of memory. They refuse to accept the witness of the women, though the women have also been Jesus traveling companions. And their present circumstances, their grief and fear, and perhaps also their anger and self pity, close their minds off from the resources of memory. From the Gospel writer’s perspective, the disciples have the resources of scripture – the themes of suffering and vindication in the Jewish Scriptures – and they have the teaching of Jesus and the depth of their relationship with him to guide them. The witness of the messengers at the tomb and the empty tomb itself should lead to a dawning realization that God is vindicating Jesus, that life is stronger than death, but they are slow and hard of heart.
Now I am not suggesting that there is any simple comparison to be made between the doubts of Thomas Hardy and the doubt of the disciples. Their doubts are quite different. What concerns us in both cases is the fact of doubt itself. In all the stories of the resurrection there is the presence of doubt, doubt of what the event itself might mean, doubt in Jesus, doubt in God.
Hardy’s early experience of faith in the country churches of his youth, was beaten down by the writings of Darwin, the recognition that scripture could not literally be true, and the experience of disappointment, suffering and evil. Eventually he came to believe only in a first cause, a kind of universal consciousness, growing gradually more aware of itself and ‘ultimately it is to be hoped sympathetic.’ His loss of faith was not helped by the Victorian image of God nor by what he felt to be the moral insensitivity of the church. All he had to combat such doubt was a kind of poetic nostalgia for faith – kept alive by the warmth of particular memories.
The character of doubt has of course changed. But what can we learn from these examples – from the resurrection stories and the life of Thomas Hardy? Though doubt is still heavily with us, as Archbishop Rowan noted in his Easter sermon there are at least signs that the recent aggression towards faith may be abating. There is occasionally the recognition that the church has something to offer to the debate about the financial and social and environmental insanities of modern society. The church has a voice when it comes to thinking about the meaning of our humanity. There is something here to be taken seriously and that at least is one way of combating doubt. There is much that the church still says and does which undermines its worthiness to be taken seriously. But at least the way ahead is less unclear than it was. Children must be taught well, they must be given something worth remembering – for as we have seen a clear memory is a strong element of faith. All who come must be embraced by worship that has human warmth to it and a seriousness of purpose – a sense that there is something of immense importance to be encountered here. In this way perhaps the wall of doubt can turn into a window of dawning recognition. Here is something that can work itself out in me; here is a place where God can work in me so that I may know something of the meaning of this risen life, a life not just for Jesus but a life shared with all through the power of the Holy Spirit. As Abp Rowan says, ‘we learn and assimilate its truth by the risk of living it.’ Doubt is not answered by nice knock down arguments – doubt gives way only to the loving invitation to take a risk and share a vision, not banging one’s head against a brick wall but catching a glimpse through an open window.