The story of doubting Thomas is very strange. After Jesus had appeared to the women, he appeared to the disciples, and they rejoiced when they saw him. They weren’t rejoicing until they saw him. But Thomas wasn’t there, and he said he wouldn’t believe it until he saw him too, which is reasonable enough. But he also added he wanted to touch his wounds. Now Jesus ends by saying blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. The disciples themselves hadn’t achieved this. They believed when they saw him. The contradictions continue. If we presume that the author of the first letter of John is the same as the author of John’s gospel, then we are surprised to read that this letter starts by saying, “we declare … What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands”. He doesn’t say “we declare what we have come to believe in our heads”. It was necessary to see and to touch. Now fortunately for John, all the Gospels in fact are riddled with contradictions. Just to take one, Jesus says, “take no thought for the morrow”, but in another place he criticises the man who didn’t take thought for the morrow, by not calculating the cost of building a tower before he built it. There are many examples like that. In fact, this is God’s masterful way of holding before us truths that can only dance between opposites. The German theologian Romano Guardini was fond of saying things that were completely contradictory, and he advocated this as the only way to get close to God’s truth. It can only hover between apparent opposites. There have been plenty of theologians, like Don Cupitt or Michael Goulder, who have had field-days showing the contradictoriness of the accounts of Christ’s resurrection. So many of the details in the different stories don’t match. However, it seems to me that this is rather God’s masterful way of holding before us a truth that we are incapable of fully grasping. God is determined to remain elusive, multifaceted, forcing us to try to feel our way into the cracks between these stories that don’t match.
And so we come back to seeing and touching. We are called to faith, pure, ardent faith. Of course we are. It’s just like love between two persons – that can’t be seen, can’t be put in a bag – love is real indeed, but can’t be seen or touched. But then we have to face the fact that without being able to see and to hear and to touch, no two people could ever love each other. A dance goes on, where the love that is born of seeing and touching reaches a point where it can pretty well survive without them, even if that experience is may be deeply agonising and clearly deprived.
What does this have to say about prayer? We have inherited assumptions about prayer that are a bit odd – we have grown up with the assumption that prayer is essentially personal, its basis is personal. And so a person struggling to pray can feel very inadequate. We feel it all depends on me. I’ve got to try and make this effort to feel that God is there. And so I feel like a mountaineer trying to climb Everest and not getting very far. And we keep looking at ourselves, and saying anxiously, “how well am I doing?” – And we feel, “Not very well today”. But we are never alone in prayer. We are praying with the Church, and the Church is carrying us in its wave of prayer.
There’s another bit to this. We’ve inherited an assumption that prayer goes on
inside my head. It helps to close my eyes, put my hands together, to bow, and to be quiet. Now these things are very good, and indeed necessary, but they are in fact only one part of prayer. There are other parts of prayer that we’ve lost an understanding of and need to get back.
Christianity is an utterly bodily religion. Archbishop William Temple said Christianity is the most materialist of religions. The gospel proclaims the incarnation, it is concerned with the material, the physical. With absolute genius it touches a fundamental truth about human beings. We are bodily beings. Think of a concert pianist. She sits there and concentrates all her energies, and then she starts. Her whole body, her whole self, is given to making the music. She doesn’t think to herself, “now I put this finger here, now I put that finger there …”. Something total is happening, in which her mind, her spirit, her body, the physical piano, her emotions and her insights, and so on all come together in a kind of “swooping”, with the whole of her physical and mental and emotional being. This musicmaking is not simply an activity of the mind. We talk nowadays about muscular memory. Our bodies remember things that our minds forget. We are incarnate beings. And so when we pray, when we worship, our whole human self needs to be involved, not just our head. That’s why we say that the foundation of Christian prayer is always the liturgy. The more we live the faith to the full with our bodies, and with the Church, the deeper will be our interior prayer.
Quiet interior prayer has always been part of the Christian life. It belongs on a circle, where quiet personal prayer is one of the things on the circle. Other things on the circle are our bodies, the church and so on. But in Western culture this personal understanding of prayer came to dominate in a way that was disproportionate, more and more excluding the other ways. So it has left us feeling that our whole faith in Christian life depends on how we engage with it “personally”. In our minds.
At the present time we are rediscovering the body and its place in our relationship with God. When we do the liturgy, it’s good to be able to engage with it personally, but we can’t expect that always to happen. Very often in our engagement with the liturgy, or with church buildings, or with postures in prayer, or with music, or a whole host of other physical things, that is enough. The mind doesn’t always need to be verifying it all. To act with our bodies can sometimes be simply enough. You just do it. It doesn’t need need to have the permission of our conscious minds in order to do its stuff. Our muscles, our bodies remember things that our minds haven’t.
This is a big subject, but getting back to Thomas, I would want to say, God bless him – for being a full human being. We need to honour the physical part of our relating to God, and to let all the aspects of our relationship with God find their proper place, so that mind and body and soul live together in a healthy balance. And finally, thank God for the incarnation.