But he found that the course actually undermined his faith, as "all those beliefs about Christ were worked out much later". So, although he became ordained, he was left not knowing what, if anything, he could really believe. He admits, "I, like many other Anglican clergy, do not believe in the physical resurrection". But he is quite popular with his congregation, and is happily married with two small boys.

Maggie Hammand is a London journalist and author of many non-fiction books (mostly on health and child care issues) as well as short stories and two novels . She teaches creative writing at Morley College and at The Groucho Club. In 2000-2001 she was a writer-in-residence at Holloway Prison, and from 2004–07 was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at London University of the Arts.
She and editor/designer Jane Havell set up the new small independent publishing house, Maia Press, in 2002.

Resurrection of the Body (1995)
Resurrection of the Body, the author explains, "was originally written during a competition held in London in March 1994 to write a novel in 24 hours under examination conditions. It was the outright winner of the World One-Day Novel Cup." This original version was just 23,000 words long, and was subsequently expanded to twice that length for publication by Michael Joseph in 1995. "In expanding it, I left alone the existing text, just adding here and there where necessary and correcting any errors. Twenty-one chapters in this book are therefore much as they were written for the competition, while eighteen are completely new." She subsequently republished the book with her own company, Maia Press, in 2008.

The story starts with the vicar, Richard Page (who is the narrator throughout), conducting the three-hour Good Friday service during which he hears shouts outside, then is horrified to see a man, looking like a young immigrant, staggering in, bleeding from knife wounds. There is no identification on him. He later dies, but no-one comes forward to claim the body. Then it disappears from the mortuary, leaving the police baffled and suspicious.

But a church member, and later Richard Page himself, see a gardener who closely resembles the dead man. "Don't you remember me?" the man asks. And the man seems to have a remarkable likeness to the painting of Christ in his church. Determined to find out what is going on, Page is drawn into an obsessive search which brings him into conflict with the police, his superiors, his congregation and even his wife. As the trail gets odder and odder, he even finds himself behaving like a Peeping Tom and starts to doubt his own sanity.

This is a fast moving story told in very short chapters that make it very easy to read, but it raises profound questions about Christian belief. Page tells a journalist that he belongs to the liberal wing of the church: Liberals "on the whole believe in change, in reinterpreting Christianity to make it more relevant to our age .... I believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection didn't happen in actual fact, but they have an important symbolic meaning. They are important because of what they reveal about ourselves and our relationship to God, and about the nature of God, revealed in Jesus Christ."

"So, what do I believe in? I believe in the truth of the myth, the importance of its symbolism." Yet, as he comes to realise, "Emotionally I was not ready to accept this. The tragic loss of my mother and the presence of a father who cared for me only in a cool and distant way had created in me a desire for unconditional love from somewhere else .... So strong was my inner need for this personal God, the Christ of faith, the worker of miracles, that I had created him out of my imagination, and projected him on to this poor young immigrant whose face was sufficiently like that of Jesus to accept him." Or could there more to it than that? Recommended.

There is an interesting description about the author her publishing house in the Publishing News archive.

New copies of this book are readily available. A good source of used books is abebooks. They feature the stock of 13,000 booksellers from all over the world, and I have always found them to be very reliable.

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