Readings: Song of Songs 8:6-7, John 20:24-29.
One of my favourite fragments of poetry is by Sappho, the 6th century BC Greek poet. She writes:
I confess
I love that
which caresses
I believe
Love has his
share in the
Sun’s brilliance
and virtue
(tr. Mary Barnard)
In my mind I imagine these words penned in the carefree nature of youth and leisure, in a time of myth and imagination. Though I do not know the context of her surroundings or her own mental images as she writes, when I stand in a meadow surrounded by trees under a hot summer sun, I, by my own experience can enter into the senses evoked by them; the peacefulness of presence, a gentle breeze touching softly the skin, breath and life flowing together, feet on the ground yet a mind soaring upwards as if only a feather in the wind.
In the emotional heat of first love, we realise we are not disembodied minds because as we think we also feel. But these moments of sensation are not to become the all of our being – for then the body rules us, yet neither are we to dismiss them and say that we can have pure knowledge apart from the body, for then in both instances we are breaking apart the person only to discover the individual within. The body is not an object belonging to a mind, for if this were true, we would exist like a ghost living inside a machine. Whatever we encounter solely as mind or imagination is then subject to our individual shaping and control, so then where is love, where is our humanity?
Love is not so small to be one thing or another but is wide enough to embrace all in all. Put simply, the particular of the finite body participates with the infinite spirit – neither consumes the other but belongs to a participation that protects that grounding we have in nature, yet at the same time widens and opens us up to a movement, and dialogue, with the infinite.
In our reading today, Jesus teaches us about the reality of His Love. Saint Thomas, who is like all of us, wrestles with the news of the resurrection, he says, and I paraphrase that ‘unless I experience what you have said [and have understood as its meaning], I will not believe it to be true.’
Jesus comes to Saint Thomas in the mystery of the resurrection, bearing the wounds on His body that are the memory of His and our humanity. Wounds, permanent marks, like a written note but upon His flesh and set as a seal over our hearts. His Love, tangible and real, is able to be touched, and this memory lives, carried to heaven on a cloud. In the tearing open of the world of appearances, Jesus establishes a highway to heaven that we will follow upon our death.
‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’
Saint Augustine says faith comes prior to understanding, and Saint Anselm says, ‘I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order to understand.’ It is within my own experience that understanding is often subsequent to an event, suggesting to me that God works in our unknowing perhaps more than He does in our understanding – simply because it requires a leap of faith – a merging of these real and transcendent realities which requires that first plunge into uncertainty so that certainty may then exist.
The doubt of Saint Thomas invites us into his experience, and in it, Jesus has invited us all to understand the nature of belief and the meaning of faith. Through the experience of the disciples, we ourselves are invited into faith and fellowship.
Yet, as I said earlier, the danger of encounter in the mind only is that it belongs to a part and not a whole, a part that if it desires power and control will seek only to do the same to another. Iris Murdoch said, ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’
Therefore, a love lived outwardly is to be a participation of our being together.
People in the Church so often discuss and disagree about ideas in our minds, yet whatever we are to say, these ideas exist as fragments of our attention and do not represent the whole of a person. A person is sacred, a person is a soul. If we hold on to ideas solely as the total of our reality, then they have become our rulers and our hearts have become like stones. The ideas become our identity and the ‘I’ then fights because the threat response to the question of ‘who am I in relation to you’ has been separated from our humanity, from the wholeness of being – our existence as souls.
When humanity wants superiority or control over things, he stops imitating and finds new ways to be over and above the other. If our desire is greater than our being, then we miss the extraordinary beauty of that which we are. So how do we respond to desire? Love is a pause, a holding back, a self-restraint, whereas desire consumes. Following desire is like becoming a boulder rolling down a mountain – it does not consider, it does not know, it only acts without thinking, without love.
It is love that terrifies and invites us into uncertainty, vulnerability and surrender. Approaching an other is like standing in front of an ocean of mystery. Fear and desire stir in the silent gap between two finite realities. God says the challenge of turning these into love and truth “is not up in heaven, so that we have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it, nor is it beyond the sea, so that we have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it, No, the word is very near us; it is in our mouth and in our hearts.” (Deuteronomy 30:12-14).
The movement of love is not to find the outward manifestation of the self, it is not to discover myself, but to discover them, and through this encounter I am known through them as they are known through me. Relationship is a bridge of light and love is its meaning. It is in love that we belong, with dialogue as an expression of being; as sacred and precious as we are – as precious as the gift of the moments we surrender ourselves to.
Love as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave is fulfilled in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. How do we live this life of movement, this dance of life that ebbs and flows like the tide? We must ask ourselves these fundamental questions: who am I without it? What am I without it? How do I live without it? Nature lives and dies, destroys and recreates; how does what exists now and could exist tomorrow fit with this reality in which we live? Could we let it go? If we cannot, has it not then consumed us like desire?
I have no doubt that when we ponder these questions long enough – we will see that the golden thread running through all nature and beyond is love, and that it is love that tears open our being in a world of appearances.
Therefore, when we are tempted to identify a part with a whole, let us pause and ask the question, ‘Who is our Father?’ and remember this; our Father is greater than any imagination, our Father is Love, an open house, that in the wideness of His mercy, our sin has been buried and we are raised and invited into a new life with and in Him.
Amen.