Not Even Fools

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Isaiah 35: 6-10

I suppose a good number of my readership have enjoyed The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever, so I won't dwell on its contents except to highlight its main message -- that miracles come from unlikely, dirty-faced refugees -- that the first Christmas itself probably looked like that.

I've always liked the idea myself -- never felt like it was a betrayal of my faith to picture its origins as far more shabby and far less liturgically appealing than what we do Christmas Eve 2,000 years later. I like the stories in the Hebrew Bible about younger sons making good, getting the blessing whether by merit or trickery. I like the idea of the underdog, the prole, the untouchable getting their turn.

The reading for the third week of Advent this year came from Isaiah 35 -- a passage I have always loved. But I noticed something new in the translation that was used; it differs from the translation I find in the Revised English Bible, and I don't have any way of knowing which is more correct. But I suppose there is midrashic precedent for lighting upon a piquant bit of translation and riffing on it, as I am about to do. The lectionary translation reads: "...no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray" -- while the REB has it: "...it will become a pilgrim's way, and no fool will trespass on it." The parallelism is complete with the second translation, but I like the first one for a very simple reason: God's holy road of pilgrimage, according to it, is idiot-proof; something I consider rather essential in a holy road of pilgrimage.

It ought to be fairly clear that when it comes to getting closer to God, and to all the desirable by-products of a close relationship with God -- peace among one's people and inward cleanness -- we are our own worst enemies. Yes, other people do often muck it up for us, but we do the best bang-up job of all, and it gets disheartening at times.

But God's plans can't be mucked up. God's way of pilgrimage is idiot-proof.

I got so mad a few years ago when I heard a very slanted radio commercial urging us to call our congressman and urge him to pass the free trade agreement with China so that the Lord's missionary work be done there. As if the Lord's work were so dependent on our piddling legislation that God couldn't get done unless we stepped up to the plate. (The fact that said free trade agreement was good mostly to offer dubious benefits to corporations wishing to hire cheap Chinese labor shall be left aside.) And yet many people, many good Christians and diligent missioners, probably bought this line of complete hooey.

I'm not trying to make a Candide-like argument that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds -- it's all too clear, both in Isaiah and in our experience, that it is not the best of all possible worlds going on here. Nor am I stepping up to pitch an argument for universalism; that is more than I know. But I do know that God takes special care of us fools and children, and it is very very hard to get lost on the pilgrim way, even if we feel completely lost most of the time.

On the night God came God's own self to share our vagabond state (I wonder as I wander out under the sky), we read these promises and take comfort, and joy. There will be streams in the desert, and a road not even fools can get lost on.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Paean to St. Thomas

Today is the Feast of St. Thomas, known as the Doubter. I'd almost call him my patron saint, except that I think that calling him "Doubting Thomas" shortchanges him. Thomas had as much courage as any of his brother disciples -- which is to say, the normal amount -- and as far as we know, no more or less intellect than the others. His nickname was Didymus, or "the Twin"; who was he supposed to be a twin of? Did he have an actual twin brother, or was it a comment on his character? And if so, what comment?

It seems odd, too, that Thomas's day is also the shortest day of the year -- though as a friend pointed out, calendar changes are more responsible for that than the canonization of saints way back when. The shortest day, followed by the longest night, after which the days come out of their bottleneck of light and begin to grow again. Odd, I say, because as his nickname indicates, Thomas is somehow not even -- he represents one member of a disrupted pair, at once solid and shadow, light and dark.

In my experience Thomas is spoken of mostly to malign, or a nail to hang an apologia on. But I like him for more than that, just as I like faith for being more than the opposite of doubt. In fact, I do not believe faith has an opposite: doubt is the mother of faith; doubt is what faith is made out of; doubt and faith have more to do with each other than either has with certainty. Doubt and faith have a love relationship, and if you cut one apart, the other dies.

It isn't so much that Thomas knew that, as that Thomas was that. I like this in a person, which is why I like most of the disciples as presented in the Gospels: unscripted provincials who just happened to be there that year -- empire and culture war and poverty and hate and religious exclusivism going on all around, and here these guys were, fishing and collecting taxes and meeting with secret zealot groups and basically just trying to make a go of it. And becoming disciples of Jesus Christ didn't change any of that; in fact, that is why we say Christ came -- to be mundane with us, since obviously just urging us to be heavenly was never going to cut it. And I rather think God more than capable of grasping the obvious, however slippery a grip we seem to keep on it.

In the old poet's phrase, "I know whom I have believed" -- not what I have believed, but whom. And Thomas knew whom he believed; he just thought that that person was dead, and was unwilling to credit his brothers' hysteria -- who in their turn had been unwilling to credit the women's hysteria. Thomas's doubt puts what passes for faith these days to shame: a determination always to go to the source, to keep to the point, not to allow anyone or anything else to get in his light.

One of the readings for St. Thomas's day is from Job -- Job's answer to God's answer: "All right, you've answered my question -- shutting up now." The story of Job doesn't end there, however; it ends with Job, at God's request, making sacrifices on behalf of his friends, who "didn't speak rightly of [God], as Job did." Huh? Job spent most of his eponymous book berating God, accusing God, complaining about God, questioning God's justice: his friends reiterating that anything that's wrong is wrong with him, not God, and to complain is not to "honor" God.

The longer I live, the more I am convinced that complaint is holy. As C.S. Lewis puts it in his novel, "How can we see face to face till we have faces?" To complain is to unmask oneself before God, and therefore to do God a compliment we rarely do even for one another. (In fact, very often we insult both God and each other by complaining to everyone except the one to whom it matters.) It is the complement to the Eucharist, in which we dress up and play an age-old, meaning-drenched part. The temptation of this modern age (and by modern I mean at least since 1790) is to switch the two: we strip our liturgies naked and clothe ourselves in our closet. We mure up our complaints and take wrecking balls to our cathedrals.

Thomas, who knew no Christian liturgy -- it hadn't been invented yet -- and had forfeited the Temple, still could do the one thing that has always been holy, throughout all ages: he lifted up his voice and insisted on talking to the manager.

So was Doubting Thomas's twin Faithful Joe? No, Thomas was (at least in this case) his own twin: the spokesperson for both doubt and faith, shadow and light.

On the shortest day of the year, so close to the Feast of the Incarnation, we become our own twins too -- waiting for what we already have, groaning in pain and crying in joy, repenting what has been forgiven us, dying and being revived, living in shadows, celebrating light.

And so indeed I lift my cup of tea in salute to St. Thomas the Doubter, whom I love.