Thomas is my favorite apostle. I must love a guy who, whatever the subtleties of the situation, when they offer the opportunity, I will plunge his hand-dating into the side of the resurrected Lord because he needs to live a God who is real.
I am certainly a great supporter of doubt, who qualifies me both a progressive Christian and conventionally faithful. But I do not think that doubt adequately describes Thomas’ problem, and does not describe the assurance of his solution. Doubt is brain (Do I remember having turned off the stove? Is his house on the left or right? Do these pants look big at me?). And see to believe to believe mainly to confirm something outside or posterior, as the case may be. What my favorite apostle seems to me to ask, however, is a more visceral experience.
Thomas reaches his hand on the side of the body of Jesus because he needs to know in his own body that this God is real. Because if Jesus was really resurrected, then Jesus East God, and if Jesus is God living again and here, in his body, in this upper play, then Thomas can believe that the evil work of the Empire – all lies, violence, ignorance, demagoguery, death and subterfuge – even if it lasts until the end of time, even if it vanquented until the end of time, even if it vanqua himwill not win. And this is exactly the kind of fierce hope that we all need this year, not only intellectually, but in our bones and muscles, so that we have the energy to get up and continue to do the work of proclamation of the Gospel (or to save the world, for the good of Pete) in a dark era. But first of all, we must believe that this God and this resurrection are real.
I read a book by scientist, historian and former atheist Nancy Abrams, called A God who could be real: spirituality, science and the future of our planet. Abrams is married to the astrophysicist Joel Primack, who has helped to quantify dark matter and theorize something illegible called the dark double universe. Abrams and Primack are experts in the kind of science which is impossible to visualize, inspires very visible Marvel films and which is not relevant for our daily life but is nevertheless surprisingly true.
Abrams is also a successful professor and writer. But, she writes, she has a problem. She has a food disorder and lives in hell. Having tried almost everything else, she finally enters a 12 -step program and, when she was astonished, begins to improve. It is however blocked by the third step: “We have made the decision to transform our will and our life to God’s care as we understood.”
Awarely ignoring the insult of the male pronoun, she rationalizes that, since it obviously does not matter for her group in 12 stages how she defines her superior power (as long as she identifies one), she turns her life to her own self – himself, as she calls her, something intensively real for her. That works. For a while. But ultimately, without reason that she can understand, she begins to sabotage herself. When his best self is the place of power, there is nothing bigger than she, nothing more reliable than she can love her more than she can love herself, nothing outside the authority of her own mind to turn around. She backs up. She is back in hell.
After having woven for a certain time, it begins the long process of trying to define for itself a God who could be real, who exists independently of his own mind and does not come into conflict with the precepts of modern science and quantum mechanics, which are its beliefs of the foundation. Although Christians do not recognize his understanding of this God as a biblical, it’s wonderful, it’s great and it’s real for her.
God, she writes, is our co-creation. This God could not have come out of anything but was born from and for the people of this earth, although we do not control it. God evolves as we evolve, but during countless centuries, has accumulated independence and the agency outside of us, fueled by human aspirations as innumerable as the stars of Abraham. This God is like (I am in one of her conferences now and she has trouble for the right image) “A mound of African termitite: still growing, toring, 90 feet wide and 3820 years old, built over centuries by a crowd of blind termites of three millimeters.” In his analogy, God is the living building. The blind termites would be us.
His passion, his anxiety, his struggle, however, reminds me of any more than Thomas, pushing his hand on the side of the living God. It took courage to Abrams to go beyond the God of his childhood and to reach through the walls, since the Enlightenment separated the science of religion. It took courage to plunge your hand-dating into the side of the universe and reach a god that could be real.
I think it was a similar desire that forced thousands of people through this country to jump in cars, to complete the planes and to travel great distances a year ago to stand outside on April 8, 2024 and look at the burning belly of God. Ok, call it the sun. But it was more than the sun. It was the absence of the sun (a miracle) and the return of the sun (another miracle). This is what our body has registered, even if our minds had cognitive control.
What attracted us? What desire? A desire, perhaps, to feel simultaneously eclipsed and anchored by something enormous that was not us. And we knew that this superior power was real, because without our special glasses, it would have married her eyes.
After the eclipse, people had trouble finding words for their experience, often describing it in quasi-religious terms. It was . . . I don’t know . . . cosmicsaid a person. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seenHis wife was breathing. In a post-starting world of ever more particular parts, we aspire to a whole. Sick of divisions always fracturing, what a blessing it was, last year, to turn in the same direction and to look up and to see.
I know two people who went to Austin, Texas, to see this miracle, and a woman who flew to California, and a priest couple who went to Mexico to be assured of a clear sky. I found myself in a cabin in the woods distant from the northeast kingdom of Vermont with a child of childhood, now a soufi, which I had not seen for 20 years, and her friend, who is partly Amerindian. We sang. We supported. We tripped in circles. It was perfect.
It helped it was limited. We had to abandon the control of the planet for three and a half minutes. I tried to take a photo, but my iPhone immediately corrected the image, which destroyed it.
There is 54 years further before the next totality of my neighborhood. If I haven’t died by then, I will have explanations to do. Which reminds me why, despite everything – termitite, puny, grateful, social, amazed that I am – I go to the church. Together, we turn to face the altar. As people, we look up. “Peace be with you,” said someone. And then we go home.
The moment of planetary conviviality last spring now seems almost picturesque, looking at it while we are faced with increasingly intractable divisions, many deliberately manipulated by a newly autonomous demagogue. Reality seems to wobble like a mirage on a defective highway or television signal. But for a while last April, we stood together on our individual mountains, also overshadowed by what was happening above. It was a moment of unity, simultaneity, humility and fear. Like Thomas, we plunged hands to the elbows and experienced real.