Faithful Thomas?

The nineteenth century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a man of great faith and insight and his poems so often reflect this in his celebration of God's presence in the created order, and the sheer exuberance of his language and diction. We would expect as much perhaps from a priest, a Jesuit no less. But Hopkins is also a man of doubt, of unknowing and difficulty in faith, and his so-called "terrible sonnets" express another side of his journey. Dating from a time of depression and uncertainty, they evoke powerful images, such as this one, full of vertigo:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall,

Frightful, sheer, no- man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep.

For a time the things of God, of the Spirit, seemed to escape him, and he felt little sense of God's presence in his mind or heart. One of his other poems ends with the poignant cry: O thou Lord of life send my roots rain!

Doubt, the desert, the darkness are part and parcel of the journey of faith, and though Hopkins, as others, found the shadows lifting and the light shining once more we should not dismiss nor hold cheap the experience, not least because it is often the point of creativity, and even of resurrection.

"Doubting" Thomas is a case in point. Courtesy of some readings of John’s Gospel (John 20:24-31) Thomas has gone down in history and idiom as the supreme doubter, the one who could not accept the truth of the Resurrection, despite the witness of his fellow disciples. It seems to me rather unfair to single Thomas out over this, since the Resurrection accounts suggest that others had problems initially coming to terms with an Empty Tomb and the promise of a Living Lord (see for example Matthew 28:17, or Mark 16:11-14), but the unfairness goes deeper than that.

Yes, Thomas had his difficulties, and yes, he found accepting the testimony of those who had met the Risen Jesus hard at first, but I would want to say that the Thomas of John’s Gospel is actually a pattern of faith as much as of doubt.

For a start, although he had his problems, and though his walk was more in darkness than in light, Thomas actually kept faith. John tells us that a week after the Resurrection the disciples were together again in the Upper Room and met with Jesus, and that this time Thomas was with them. He did not stay away or give it all up as an impossibility. He may well have felt himself out of place, but he was there with the fellowship. At times our own Christian journey will feel as if it is in a desert or darkness, and that testified to by the writings of prayer guides such as St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avila - in those times, like Thomas, we need to keep faith in worship and prayer, being held and sustained by it until things begin to make sense again. In that sense Thomas is faithful.

But more than that, Thomas’ doubt and difficulty leads him into deeper faith and new understanding of who Jesus is. It is Thomas above all who comes to

the recognition that Jesus is more than simply a Holy Man - he is “My Lord and my God !” (John 20:28). He who doubted is brought through into richer and deeper faith and does so well before those who had never experienced the dark times.

A prayer for St Thomas’ Day begins: “Almighty God, who, for the firmer foundation of our faith, allowed the apostle Thomas to doubt the resurrection of your Son till word and sight convinced him......” Sometimes it is the times of unknowing, which are the most fruitful times as we move on into fuller understanding. Sometimes we have to let go in order to move on in faith - that can be true of many areas of our Christian lives, both as individuals and communities. It is the times of unknowing, when we keep faith in prayer and worship, though it feels as if very little is happening, that lead us to new understandings.

Nearly a century later than Gerard Manley Hopkins, another priest and poet, R.S.Thomas, himself well-acquainted with the dark times, wrote a poem entitled "The Belfry". In it he imagines a church in the depths of winter, and the cold silence of its single bell parallels the frost that can be upon the spirit. Yet, he says, even in winter someone is praying:

…whose prayers fall steadily through the hard spell

Of weather that is between God and himself.

Perhaps they are warm rain

That brings the sun and afterwards flowers

On the raw graves, and throbbing of bells.

To call Thomas “Doubting Thomas” is, I think, really rather unfair. We need his witness to remind us of the call into deeper faith and renewed understanding, and of the power of God to turn our darkness into dawn, and to kindle a fire within our seemingly darkest night. We call that experience Resurrection .......

Roger Clarke

May 2009