Thomas: Reluctance Beyond a Doubt

I felt this cool, pudgy little hand worming its way into mine.  It was a practiced movement, it seems to me now, the fingers pursed into a kind of spongy spear, opening inside my passive palm to make room, making a place for itself inside.  Startled, I turned to see the smiling face of the little girl in the pew in front of me, smiling up at me, smiling the word…PEACE.

While we call Thomas “Doubting” and focus on the same hesitation that kept Moses from entering the promised land (“Go ahead, Moses, hit the rock with your staff and water will come out for your thirsty followers”) the little girl’s hand reminded me that perhaps the greater, though more subtle message of the story of Thomas and the risen Jesus is the reluctance to enter relationship. 

God is a God of relationship.  “Go ahead.  Put your finger into the wound in my hand.  Go ahead.  Put your hand into the wound here in my side. No, no, it’s OK, really.”   And hoping that the revulsion that is literally turning our stomach doesn’t show on our faces, we try to politely say to the God who just four days ago died out of love for us, “No, thank you.”

It was, so perfectly, at the “Kiss of Peace”, the ritual of greeting at the Catholic Mass after we say the Our Father and before we receive Communion.  Before we moved here to Traverse City, we spent 40 years of Sundays in Gesu Church in Detroit, where rather than the usual restrained, polite handshake with those within an arm’s reach, this greeting took several minutes.  We left our pews and walked around hugging, slapping backs, sometimes weeping momentarily in each others’ arms,  sharing some deep loss or great joy.  After years of sharing the same urban reality black and white, young and old, secure and poor, we had come to know each others’ wounds.  Tears come to my eyes as I recall walking all the way across the sea of people one Sunday to embrace Henry Bellaimey, the kind, gentle man who I had watched for those 40 years change from a ramrod straight-backed dark haired smiling business owner to a white haired old man bent to a right angle at the waist, but still with the same broad glad-to-see-ya smile.  One daughter lost to cancer, a wife sick with the same for years at home until her own death, a beloved son moved far away in geography and faith, here was Henry with his other daughter, opening wide the arm not bracing himself on his cane, opening so that I can enter and be embraced within that bent-over body of his, wrapped in his warmth and kindness and history. 

Here in our new parish, the greeting is more restrained, more proper and polite.  We maintain a certain distance.   Kind of like Thomas.  We just don’t want to go deep.  We don’t want to impose. 

Oh, I hope this little girl never loses this innocence, this freedom to enter, to make a soft little spear of herself and to gently find an opening in another’s envelope, into another’s soul. 

Next: entering the wound of the world: a lesson from Thomas and Moses