There is a passage in Jenny Uglow’s book when Lords Wyndham and Rochester are talking a famous sea battle with the Dutch. They are discussing whether there is life after death and they say that if either is killed, they will come back from the dead and tell the other. Rochester, I think – but anyway one of them – is promptly killed by a cannonball. He never comes back.

The atheist would say that the fact that he never came back is proof that they can’t, but I often think that we hear an echo of their cries in a distant moment, which is there and is not. But of course they are there and they are not. They are but not here.

… and the angel of the lord appeared to him and said: ‘the Lord is with you, valient warrior!’ Gideon answered him: ‘forgive me my Lord, but if the Lord is with us, then why is it that all this is happening to us now?’

Judges 6:11 – 24

Why indeed?