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Shortly after Jim's death, Pike returned to Cambridge, where he was suddenly afflicted by a series of inexplicable experiences. Clocks in his apartment kept stopping at 8:19—the hour when James Jr. had died in New York. Books and cards kept toppling over to an angle that matched that of the hands of a clock at 8:19. Eventually, Pike consulted an Anglican cleric who was interested in psychic phenomena; he suggested that Jim was trying to get in touch with Pike from the beyond and recommended the bishop to a "sensitive" named Ena Twigg. It was in her London sitting room, Pike says, that he first got in touch with Jim. "I am not in purgatory," the boy told his father, "but something like hell, here." He mustered enough wit, however, to remark: "Remember our discussions about life after death? Well, I guess we settled that one."
Jesus Was a Seer. In the many meetings since, according to the bishop, things have improved: Jim reported back to his father that he was "genuinely happy" and had been assigned to help other suicides. Pike reports that he has also spoken with his old friend and teacher Paul Tillich, and even with the late medium and spiritualist writer, Edgar Cayce. He has also learned a little more about Jesus: "They talk about him—a mystic, a seer, yes, a seer." According to Jim, Jesus is "triumphant," but "they don't talk about him as a savior" but as "an example."
Thanks in part to his conversations with young Jim, Bishop Pike now accepts the idea of a life after death—a belief that he at one point had abandoned, along with faith in the virgin birth, the Trinity and other major Christian dogmas. Still, not all readers are likely to be convinced. They may ask why a bishop who has been so skeptical of the received Christian tradition should so readily accept the assurances of assorted spiritualists that there are cats in the afterlife and that husbands and wives will experience a new kind of nonsexual spiritual relationship. As for the dead Jim, he appears in the book to be so vague and formless as to seem nothing more than a loving father's wish fulfillment.