Hope and transformation

I wrote in my last entry about seeing Jen once more in God's new creation. I want to admit also that I have no idea what that will be like, other than that it will be different to what it was. This morning I was rereading C. S. Lewis's book "A Grief Observed", about his grief after the death of his wife from cancer. In it he remarks:

But don't come talking to me of the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore', pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back.

and at the end of the book he writes

There is also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

I have my reservations about C. S. Lewis as a theologian, particularly in his writing about purgatory after death, where I think he is misguided. But I fully agree there is a great mystery that surrounds God's plans for new creation and resurrection (see Tom Wright's "Surprised by Hope"). There are hints in the Bible of course -- the body of the risen Jesus, recognisable yet different, substantial yet also not always conforming to the physical 'laws' that we understand. It does seem to me that something of our will and memory must survive, else who are we? What would it mean to be resurrected but have no memory of the life we had lived?

Equally clearly, some things are lost forever. I'm not married to Jen now that she's dead, nor will I be in God's new creation. I've lost the extra decades of marriage we might have had, and I'm never getting them back. She has lost what it is to be a mother and see her sons grow up. They have lost the experience of having their mother love and guide them through that process. So it goes on to friends and family - each with their own unique loss. Our hope is that we have not lost the end for which we were created, to paraphrase Lewis - that what matters most, beyond the outward circumstances of our lives, does survive and is transformed and perfected. To end with a quote from 1 John 3:2

Dear friends, we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.