All’s Well That Ends Well… Kind Of
As I made my usual faltering way along the corridor earlier today, a colleague standing on the threshold of his classroom called out to me. Nothing new there, you might say. And you would, dear reader, be correct as usual. Your Director is often the subject of such callings-out as he wends his way around and about the hallowed environs of Tiffin. Some of the names do not bear repeating in a family Column such as ours, but today’s one did give me pause for thought. My colleague addressed me loudly as, Lazarus.
Now, I consider myself fairly broad-shouldered when it comes to the nicknames hurled, or lobbed underarm in my direction as I move about the school. But Lazarus was a new one on me. New, and oddly apposite. Not because I was trailing my shroud along as I stumbled, or because I had inadvertently left a tomb ajar in the vicinity of the Maths corridor. The name struck me because ‘Lazarus’, unlike the usual terms of endearment that chase me along my way, is a name heavy with story.
It is, after all, one of the great comeback narratives of literature: a plot twist that even the most brazen Victorian novelist might have considered slightly over the top. Dear old Charlie Dickens could get away with long-lost sons reappearing, Wilkie Collins with mysterious strangers arriving in the night, but rising from the dead? Even they might have hesitated. And yet the Lazarus story is curiously un-showy. No divine fanfare. No heavenly stage lighting. Just a bit of a stinky man, unceremoniously stumbling out of a tomb, blinking into the sunlight, trying not to trip over uncooperative bandages.
It is a scene that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Samuel Beckett play: the shuffling figure, the bewildered crowd, the absurdity of it all. We could imagine Vladimir turning to Estragon, saying, “Well… that wasn’t expected.” But there is profundity hidden in that absurdity, no doubt as Beckett would have hoped there might be. And it is this that has lingered with me since I heard my colleague’s shout.
Because once you start thinking about Lazarus, you start seeing him everywhere.
Schools, for example, are full of Lazarus moments. They are rarely dramatic enough to make the local news, but they are, in their quieter way, every bit as surprising.
There is the student who reappears after a long absence, determined to hand in an essay once declared academically deceased. The exercise book that resurfaces after weeks in the wilderness behind a radiator. The staff initiative that was abandoned, buried, eulogised, and then without warning, springs up again like a crocus in February, accompanied by a brand-new spreadsheet and a renewed sense of smiley faced purpose.
Even this very Column has been known to rise again from the grave of my draft folder, blinking, brushing off digital dust and shouting, Miss me? (You my long suffering dear reader can be the only judge as to whether some of those Columns should have remained buried).
In literature, resurrection appears in forms both dramatic and domestic. This narrative of renewal is, of course, far older than the modern novel. It is a universal mythos: embodied by the Phoenix, the firebird whose death-by-flame is simply a precondition for its inevitable, glorious return; or echoed in the cycles of creation and dissolution found in traditions like Hindu mythology, where Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma govern the continuous, necessary renewal of the cosmos. These stories, across cultures and epochs, circle a shared intuition: that endings are inherently regenerative, and that finality is a rare visitor.
Virginia Woolf, in Mrs Dalloway, describes the moment when a room, long empty, suddenly feels peopled again by memory. George Eliot has characters who experience moral resurrections; those painful, slow turnings-back toward the light, stitched together from remorse and love. Shakespeare gives us multiple Lazaruses (Lazari?): Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, Imogen in Cymbeline, Lear’s cry that Cordelia shal’t come no more, never, never, and then she does, though not in the way he hoped. Tolkien, of course, gives us Gandalf the Grey’s transformation though, as any school leader will tell you, returning from the dead with upgraded robes is a perk sadly denied to most of us.
All these stories circle a shared intuition: that endings, however final they appear, are rarely the last word.
But it was a detail from the Lazarus story itself that truly stayed with me, one that often goes unnoticed in the retelling. Jesus performs the miracle, yes, but what he says next is far more interesting: Unbind him.
The resurrection is divine; the unbinding is communal. The miracle is performed for Lazarus, but the work of helping him return to life is given to the crowd.
This, to my mind, is where things get educational, literally. Because if resurrection is the dramatic moment of the story, unbinding is the long, slow, relational labour of bringing a person back into the world. In schools, most of what we do is unbinding work: helping a student disentangle themselves from fear, or disappointment, or the mistaken belief that they can’t do something; helping one another unpick the knots left by stress, expectation, or the occasional catastrophic IT update.
Iain McGilchrist writes extensively about attention as a mode of presence: how we bring the world to life not by controlling it but by attending to it properly: receptively, relationally. Resurrection, in his sense, is not an event but a transformation of attention: a re-opening of the self to the world. Lazarus is not just alive again; he is called back into the business of relationship.
How might other friends of the Column have put it? Well, Anthony de Mello, might say that Lazarus is awakened, a return not simply of biological function but of awareness. Rowan Williams might call it a re-entry into the relational fabric that constitutes a human life. Alan Watts might shrug, smile, drink some tea, and note that before Lazarus was called out, he was probably having quite a peaceful nap. And Kierkegaard, naturally, would insist that the real miracle is the leap: that faith begins precisely where certainty ends, in the absurdity of stepping forward when you don’t yet know what the next step will reveal.
To be called ‘Lazarus’ in a school corridor is, admittedly, a little dramatic. But most of our real-life resurrections are small, hesitant, and honestly a bit awkward. They are the kind of comebacks that involve missed deadlines, second attempts, take-two explanations, and the humility of returning to the room after having left in rather a sulk.
But this is how life works. Resurrection, in its broadest sense, is not really about death at all; it is about the possibility of renewal. It is about the astonishing, stubborn human capacity to try again after discouragement. To stand up after a fall. To return to the fray after a period of, shall we say, strategic retreat.
The novelist Julian Barnes wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even past. And while he meant it in a somewhat melancholy sense, there is comfort in it too. Our former selves do not vanish. They linger. They wait. They offer themselves back to us, like drafts to be revised. We resurrect versions of ourselves daily: the kinder one, the more patient one, the braver one, the one who actually reads their emails.
Even our failures, inconveniently, are resurrected from time to time, not to haunt us but to remind us that life is iterative, not final. In education, and therefore in everything, we are always beta versions of ourselves, stumbling out of one tomb only to find another door rolling open ahead.
Which brings me, naturally, to the question that often lurks behind all this talk of resurrection: Is it literally true?
CS Lewis argued that myths become more, not less, meaningful when they are lived rather than merely understood. A myth, in his view, can be both a story and a truth, where the two categories are not mutually exclusive but mutually illuminating. Joseph Campbell said something similar: myth is what never happened and always happens. That is to say, myth describes the deep patterns of reality, whether or not a particular event conforms to journalistic reportage.
Which is why, dear reader, the real truth of resurrection may lie precisely in its doubleness: literal and metaphorical, historical and ongoing, narrative and experiential. We see resurrections all the time, be they relational, emotional or intellectual, long before we get to anything as grand as the so-called defeat of death.
Even in cosmology, the ultimate field of literal truth, there is a powerful resurgence of the resurrection story. While the prevailing theory of the universe’s origin is the Big Bang, some serious thinkers are now exploring cyclic models in the wonderfully named theory of the Cosmic Bounce. In this view, our Big Bang wasn’t a beginning, but a rebound. Maybe the universe is stuck in a never-ending rebound relationship, where the previous cycle and the next can’t quite let go of one another. We’ve all been there. It turns out the universe has too.
Poor relationship decisions aside, this suggests that the greatest event of all: the birth of the cosmos, may itself be an infinite, literal resurrection: an eternal cycle of death and renewal. It means the universe is not defined by its collapse, but by its unyielding capacity to try again.
So if pressed about the possibility of a resurrection, I would say that this Mythos is so great and so true, that it would be some kind of fundamental flaw if it were not to have literal truth as well as metaphorical truth. And as you know dear reader, your Director is of the fairly firm belief that metaphorical truth is far more important than literal truth. The Mythos of resurrection isn’t great because it might have happened; it is great because it bloomin’ always happens; in the stubborn, daily possibility of renewals wherever we are, and perhaps, on the grandest scale of all, in the very fabric of time.
Literal truth is best thought of as a subset of metaphorical truths in which the potential in the metaphor has been collapsed into an actuality. Which leads us into our usual brief pitstop into the world of quantum physics…
Here, the wave is not less real than the particle; the particle is what the wave becomes when forced to hold still long enough to be measured. The process of the wave form collapsing doesn’t make the particle greater than the wave function or the field. In fact the field is greater than the particle. Perhaps we should discuss this in further columns…
To be called ‘Lazarus’ in a school corridor is, admittedly, a little dramatic. But the real miracle is what happens next: the unbinding, the starting over, the simple, awkward, wonderful human capacity to try again.
Now hang on there, I hear you say, I want a literal truth, not a metaphorical one about resurrections and so forth. I want to know literally whether I am going to live beyond the death of my body.
To which I would humbly suggest that since our bodies are literally still there after death, the loss of one’s body at death may be a metaphorical rather than a literal truth.
And on that cheery note, I shall metaphorically take your leave.
Until next time, Happy Reading / Resurrecting.
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
- My friend Miss Bathpole loves salmon but hates pilchards. She ‘simply adores’ octopus but ‘cannot abide’ plaice. She likes trout but not pike. She can’t get enough of kippers but detests herring.
Will Miss Bathpole like halibut?
- I don’t know, I never asked her. And we’ve kind of lost touch.
This week’s fun question to answer:
Is ‘No’ the answer to this question?