The idea – a beautiful one – is that dead pets go to a
meadow landscape where they are restored to health and wholeness, where there
is always water and food, and where they play. They wait for their owners to
arrive and, when they glimpse them on the edge of the meadow, leave the other
animals and run to meet them. Human and pet then cross the Rainbow Bridge
together into eternity. Sentimental, maybe, but as I age I'm more reluctant to dismiss sentiment.
The motif of Rainbow Bridge comes, improbably, from a scrap
of paper written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish girl who’d just lost her Labrador.
It, and she, were chased down by Paul Koudounaris whose book about the spectacular
‘catacomb saints’ distributed across Catholic Mitteleuropa in the 17th
& 18th centuries, Heavenly Bodies, I have. She was Edna
Clyne (later Clyne-Rekhy), and when Mr Koudounaris found her in 2023 she had
literally no earthly inkling that her words, originally handed to a few friends
in typescript, had, via a 1990s US magazine advice column, found their way
around the world - handed to grieving pet owners in vets’ surgeries, shared
between friends, carved into stone and placed in pet cemeteries.
Edna disclaimed any direct spiritual influence on her
imaginary picture, but the imagery of the rainbow as a sign of hope and its
link with animals seems subconsciously to link to the story of the Ark. The rainbow
now carries additional meanings, of inclusion and togetherness. But can the
motif be accommodated within orthodox Christian thinking in any way?
Even within its own terms, Rainbow Bridge begs questions.
What happens to animals humans have wronged, and whose relationship with us is marred
beyond repair? The picture clearly imagines dogs as the beloved pets, not surprisingly,
though it can easily be extended to cats; where do other animals fit in? And dogs
and cats are carnivorous. As far as Christianity is concerned, the idea of
Rainbow Bridge is clearly based on popular misconceptions of Christian views of
postmortem experience, one of spiritual survival (‘we die and go to heaven’) rather
than the resurrection to a new, physical life. Traditionally Christians have shut
down discussion about what happens to animals when they die by saying that they
have no souls – no soul, no survival – but that seems to fall into the same
error. More to the point, the question of what happens to animals is linked to
what happens to humans. We participate in the resurrected life not because some
immortal part of us survives, but because we acknowledge our sins and turn to
Christ; animals have no sin, and so are not redeemed.
But Edna Clyne was only inventing an image, not devising a
theology, and if that’s true of her, very substantially the Bible is little
different. You’d struggle to define a clear idea of what the soul means – other
than being ‘not the body’ – from Scripture, and nothing about the process
of what happens to us after death is very clear either. The greatest clarity we are given, the vision
of the Heavenly City, comes in the form of an image, not details about how we
get there or what we will do when we arrive. And we know that animals are part
of it, because it was part of what Isaiah glimpsed seven centuries before Christ,
a renewed world where the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the child place
its hand in the adder’s den and not be harmed. None of the ambiguities are insoluble.
You can’t offer a requiem for an animal which has no sin, but you can say as much as that, and maybe that’s all you need to say. We humans have black vestments and unbleached candles to commend us to divine mercy, the tremor of knowing what we are: the beasts, bold and unaware, have the rainbow.
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