IN THE days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, one image — shared thousands of times online — caught my attention. A simple pen-and-ink drawing, it showed the retreating figure of the Queen, corgi in tow, holding the hand of Paddington Bear. The caption read: “I’ve done my duties, Paddington — please take me to my husband.” It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, of course. Some found it twee, mawkish. “This suggests that Paddington is Charon the ferryman?” one bemused commentator observed.

Confronted with such popular evocations of life after death, Christians will often offer gentle correction with reference to scripture. It is not a kindness, such responses may suggest, to indulge such thinking. I am reminded of a Daily Telegraph column that appeared in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the historian Tom Holland argued that the country’s churches should be “explaining to a grieving and anxious people how the dead will rise into the blaze of eternal life”, and, in doing so, embrace “the risk of being odd”. “Yes, but. . . ”, I found myself thinking.

IT IS not that I do not hold tightly to scripture, or theologians’ attempts to grapple with eschatology. I was gripped by N. T. Wright’s account of “life after life after death” in Surprised by Hope, and by Fleming Rutledge’s marvellous Advent sermons on the Last Things. Lord Harries has observed that that it’s rare to hear a sermon on the Christian hope for life after death, and that’s true in my experience.

We cannot, therefore, be surprised if the wider population reach for comforting cartoons, or shudders at what they believe to be the Christian vision of heaven (the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, speaking to The Tablet recently, having been diagnosed with advanced cancer, quoted from the Pete and Dud sketch featuring white sheets and harps: “Ooh, it’s lovely here. . . Yes, but does anything ever ’appen?”).

In any case, you don’t have to push very hard at pictures such as the Paddington cartoon to arrive at some awkward questions. Is more of the same all that we really want from heaven? Is reunion mandatory, even for those for whom separation has wrought relief rather than anguish? My own mother died in her forties when I was 12, and of late I’ve started to reflect on how strange it would (will?) be to encounter her, not as a child, but as a mother myself.

AND yet I find myself reluctant to dismiss the cartoon out of hand, recognising in it my own longing for reunion, my instinctual grasping for the familiar. “We shall not all die, but we shall be changed,” the Dean of St Paul’s read from the Cathedral pulpit at the opening of the service of thanksgiving for the Queen on 9 September. “The trumpet shall sound and the dead will rise immortal, and we shall be changed.” Less Peruvian Bear, more Stanley Spencer.

I want to draw comfort from these words, from the “odd” promise of eventual bodily resurrection. But, on some level, I am afraid of their strangeness; of the way in which the Bible seems to withhold more straightforwardly comforting promises. And I wonder how they sound to someone unversed in Christian theology. C. S. Lewis would surely have found the Paddington picture mortifying (family reunions pictured in entirely earthly terms were, he wrote, “all out of bad hymns and lithographs”). And yet “the happy past restored” is what we should all like, he admitted in A Grief Observed. “And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.”

AS ALL SOULS’ DAY approaches, I have found myself wondering again about that cartoon, about our desire for connection to one another, and whether the strange can cohere with the comforting, the ordinary. I am certainly not qualified to pronounce with the confidence of Oxford professors on the possibility or nature of reunion (although I was interested to learn from Professor Alister McGrath that Cyprian of Carthage encouraged fellow third-century Christians facing persecution that “a great number of our dear ones is awaiting us”).

I only know that I have always felt powerfully that my mother continues to love me, and that it is through unexpected encounters with others that I have most deeply felt assurance of God’s reality, and, with that, the confidence that “all shall be well”.

To describe such episodes risks inviting scepticism, or even disappointment (“Is that it?”), and yet I believe that many people would understand what I’m getting at. It is the sense that some greater, powerfully good agent lies behind — is working through— an encounter. Shortly after my second son was born, I was taking him to meet my husband and our toddler. I was praying as I walked, tired to my bones, and fearful that I was somehow letting everybody down.

Before I reached our destination, I bumped into a couple, and an older woman walking a dog. All three were friendly, but the older woman was particularly solicitous. Having complimented the baby, she asked carefully, her gaze penetrating yet kind, “And how are you?” It sounds silly, perhaps, but in that moment the car park around us felt holy; I felt utterly sure of God’s care.

IN A recent book, Baptists and the Communion of Saints, the theologian Richard Kidd writes about a handful of his own “strange happenings”: a tourist handing him a poem scribbled on a scrap of paper shortly before he stands to read the New Testament lesson at evensong; a sense that he has been called to serve as a sort of “guardian angel” to a vulnerable traveller at a deserted Stockport station.

Such moments of connection may be “tiny foretastes”, he suggests — “the stuff of a more fully realised humanity, the kind that might also be known by those who are fully and finally ‘in God’, beyond death”. As the years have passed, it is these moments that have continued to shape his thinking about what meeting one another “in Christ” might look like.

I like this idea of foretastes. The biblical picture of the life beyond this one is undoubtedly strange — now we see through a glass darkly — and I do not know what the nature of our relationships to one another will be. “The best is perhaps what we understand least,” as C. S. Lewis put it. But the rush of recognition I have felt in strange, yet ordinary, encounters with others suggests to me that being caught up with God, with one another, may yet have a faint tang of the familiar.

Madeleine Davies is Senior Writer at the Church Times, currently on maternity leave. Her book, Lights for the Path: A guide through grief, pain and loss, is published by SPCK at £9.99) (CT Bookshop £9); 978-0-281-08356-5).