By A N Wilson

(10/04/2004)

It would be a very bleak England in which, as during the 11 years of Cromwell's Protectorate, there was no celebration of Easter. This year, as we have done for several years now, my little family will be going to a windswept medieval stone church in Cornwall, knowing that, if we do not reach the place a good half hour before the service, we shall have no hope of getting into the building, let alone finding a seat. We shall sing the Easter hymns, and make our communions, and think of the dead.

We've lost several close friends in the past 12 months, and two of our four parents. For me, it is the first Easter since my mother died, aged 91, clutching her worn old copy of the Book of Common Prayer. She was not high church or low church. She was faintly anti-clerical, in the English way. But to this book, and what it represented, she clung to the last.

Like many Anglicans, she believed that her Church had been mad to discard its old liturgy. And she also wondered, as do most reasonable human beings, whether there was any truth in it all, the whole extraordinary Christian story. The last time she wrote to me about it, in a long outpouring, she wondered whether it was still sincere to receive Communion when she believed so little. It is, of course, a question any honest person asks at every churchgoing.

Many nowadays, including those who regularly go to church, have a sense that Christianity is on its last legs. As the numbers of regular churchgoers plummet, and multi-culturalism proliferates, there grows up a second or even a third generation in our country, the majority of whom have almost no consciousness of Christianity. Far from doubting the story of the Resurrection, they do not even know what it is.

Three things make me want to stay with the Church, for all its follies, and for all of mine. The first reason is that it is the Church. My own doubts - often so extreme as to be outright denials of the whole Christian religion - are merely the thoughts passing through my head at any one particular time. There is a bigger thing than me: Christianity itself, the whole Christian history of the past 2,000 years.

Should I, by going to Church, submit my intellect to all the teachings of that Church? Ideally, yes. But even if I cannot put my hand on my heart and swear that I do, in truth, believe "it all", I can at least submit myself to the collective Christian experience from AD 30 to AD 2004 and say: "I want to be part of this. I do not want this to die. I do not want the story that began so mysteriously in Palestine 1,970 years ago, and which has been like the imaginative and moral lifeblood of Europe for the past 1,500 years, merely to stop. I do not want the churches to be museums. For all the difficulties faced by the churches at present, they very visibly are alive, and I want to be part of that life."

Secondly, I want to be part, not merely of the Christian thing generally, but of the Church of England in particular. It is very easy to catalogue the idiocies of contemporary Anglicanism. Whether we mock the bigots who would drive out the homosexuals, or the exhibitionistic homosexuals who wish to change the injunction to live chastely; whether we dislike the holy rollers of the Evangelical wing or the Walsingham Matildas of the Catholic side, there is much to mock.

And yet Anglicanism remains, in spite of all its current difficulties, a gently attractive, subtle take on life, appealing alike to simple people and to complicated people.

It is very much not just cathedral evensong and gay curates, admirable as these both are. The defeat of apartheid in South Africa, and the extraordinary peacefulness of the transition, was very much an Anglican story. The newspapers see only its camp American bishops, or its self-appointed clowns. But in thousands of parishes all over the world, unselfish, kind people are quietly doing good, usually in beautiful old buildings, against the background of Anglican worship.

I belong to that perhaps eccentric category of person who thinks that its new liturgy in Common Worship is a book full of riches, so long as it is taken alongside, rather than instead of, the old Prayer Book. Now is a good time to be an Anglican.

If one reason alone had to be found for wishing to hold on to Anglicanism, it is our new Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is infinitely the most interesting person to emerge into public life in our country for a generation. After decades in which all public figures indulged in soundbite utterance on every subject, we hear at last the lilting, clever voice of a man who thinks before, and while, he so mellifluously speaks.

Some of his words are, like those of the mysterious angel in Tennyson, hard to understand. Some of them are poetry. Sometimes, they cut to the heart of our contemporary concerns. He speaks of very old things, such as the human hunger for God, in new, but not in trendy or toe-curling ways. He is probably a saint, but he does not seem like a man who has cut himself off from the darker experiences. He is neither one of those lovey-bishops who constantly woo the headline-writers by saying "controversial" things, nor is he, like some Christian leaders of recent years, pathetically apologetic for his Church or his creeds. He is smilingly confident without being cocky.

When I hear him talking, I think - I'd like to hear more of this. Living a life based on this set of propositions would be a good thing to do. Moreover, imaginative unselfishness of the particular kind embodied in Dr Williams's Christianity would be a good antidote to many of its alternatives: to rampant consumerism, to overconfident social Darwinism, to the hate-filled paranoias of Judaism and Islam and the smug pessimism of the atheists.

This brings me to the third reason for wanting to go to church this Easter, and it is a reason that grows naturally from the first two. Some people, and they include many Christians, assume that faith asks us to subscribe to sets of propositions. These propositions often sound pretty unconvincing, especially when crudely expounded by those who would perhaps better be silent.

The Christian Easter, as expounded in church this Sunday, is not a set of proofs, designed to persuade us that there really is a life after death, or that there really is a Trinity, or even that there really is a God, though obviously it depends on, and includes, those things.

Easter is a story, linked to a collective experience. The collective experience is our shared knowledge of death, our experience of seeing those whom we love die, and our knowledge that we ourselves are shuffling forward in the queue that stretches down cemetery road.

To be a fully fledged Christian, no doubt, is to feel some inner certainty that death has itself been conquered, swallowed up in victory. There must be many of us who cannot really claim any such conviction. It is not so much that we think that the resurrection of the body is impossible, and spiritual survival meaningless - though such thoughts do, of course, flit in and out of our minds.

It is that we cannot use the word "death'' unless it means just that: death, the end. Yet we can recognise that a life lived permanently under death's shadow can turn into one of negativism, cynicism, death-in-life. The yearly return of spring seems to belie the emotional burden that death-consciousness imposes. Even Larkin, gloomiest and most negative of poets, could hear a message from the trees as they came back into leaf: "Last year is dead, they seem to say./ Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

The earliest Gospel, Mark's, does not end with a sermon, nor even with a miracle. It ends with a group of people finding an empty tomb, and fleeing, "for they were afraid".

From the literary point of view, it is one of the most paradoxical endings to any book, since it is not really an ending. For the book would not have been written if all that had remained of these people had been fear.

Later Gospel writers could tell of Resurrection Appearances, and of a risen Christ who could pass through walls, and show his wounds to his doubting friends.

The most primitive Easter Gospel, however, is perhaps the most eloquent. Whereof it cannot speak, it is silent. But its silence allows many churchgoers, or would-be churchgoers this Easter, to turn again to the old words, the old stories, and find in them new meanings, new resurrections.

Daily Telegraph