A Reflection for 2nd Sunday of Easter St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Nags Head, NC
April 24, 2022 Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Thomas On Second Sabbath
Today I want to focus in on my namesake, Thomas. I was never given a good reason I was named Thomas. My father told a story about being at a bar near the hospital at St. Louis while my mother was in the hospital in labor with me and I was taking my time. The nurses told him to go out for awhile, out of the waiting room. He suggested that a guy at the bar next to him was named Thomas. I seem to remember that my mother rolled her eyes, sighed and shook her head when he told me that story.
In John's Gospel, the writer three times (11:16, 20:24, 21;2) has the phrase “Thomas, called Didymus” (Θωμᾶς ὁ λεγόμενος Δίδυμος). Usually, if someone tells you the same thing three different times, they are either poetic or trying to say something. His, and my, name is Thomas and he, and I, have a twin. We all have twins. It is not a biological twin but rather there are two parts of us, the me on the surface, whom my ego spends a lot of energy to keep bright and shiny. Then, there is, unconsciously, in us, the me that is my, what Carl Jung labels, “shadow”, and with whom my ego spends a great deal of energy keeping from coming to the conscious surface and hidden. I have hints of my shadow when I come into contact with people, places or things and I have unexplainable feelings, positive or negative, towards them. It is called projection.
We see positive projection and we call it “love at first sight” and have fantasies that this other person, place or thing could meet all of my needs. “ At last sweet mystery of life I've found you!” This is called “Falling in love”, which is not love but a psychological malady. It is a fantasy that you have twin souls. I wonder if the other disciples called Thomas “the Twin” because they saw his intense connection to the man Jesus, even more intense than they themselves had. When I do pre-marital counseling and the couple talks about how they “fell in love” and I see projection at work, I usually assign them an assignment to bring in a disagreement, I call it a “fight”, to the next session. I want to see how they can deal with each other when the projections are challenged and how they can still embrace the less than perfect fantasy person.
The Roadside Wedding Chapel Business is booming and divorces are high because positive projections are so powerful but they do not stand up to reality long before being replaced by negative projections..
We have negative projections: when I come into contact with traits in someone else, that my ego has been working overtime to reject in me and then unconsciously I project anger, blame on them and shame on me. Those things that our egos have tried so hard to reject; I start to project onto others. It is the reason we want to keep having villains in plays, movies and stories, whose actions we boo and hiss, in the made up stories, or even news accounts, we tell. Every dream that I have which has a villain, and they all do, he or she is really the side of me I don't want to acknowledge. If I keep having variations of the same dream with similar villains; it is my soul telling me to wake up and deal with it in real life. If you choose not to remember your dreams and you want to shadow work; watch the evening news and pay attention to what most grabs your negative energy. Then it is “Me and My Shadow” time.
I want to focus on the fact that this second Sabbath, the first Sabbath after the Resurrection was a story of Thomas' entry into a Spiritual Life, by withdrawing his projections. Thomas Merton, another Thomas, was in charge of orienting, or helping the novice Monks at Gethsemane Abbey get a Spiritual Life. He had an opening line; “Gentlemen, the first thing about getting a Spiritual Life is for you to get a life.”
A Spiritual life is one of integrity. “Integrity” is a word that comes from the Latin “integer”, When used as a noun it is “Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code” and as an adjective “integral” defined as “Constituting a whole together with other parts or factors; not omittable or removable.
During the first week of Sabbath, Thomas chose not to be present, he chose to be “omittable and removable”. He had spent a lot of time before Jesus was arrested bragging that he would be with Jesus wherever he would go. Thomas' positive projections on Jesus were as the strong man who could speak one word and destroy all enemies. But Jesus had the sword put up and goes peacefully into his arrest and death. Jesus went to the cross and Thomas, his projections on Jesus in tatters, went to hide out. I don't think he was “Doubting Thomas” as much as he was “Divided and Damaged Thomas”. Filled with shame, which he does not want to admit, over his broken allegiance, he tried to deny responsibility for missing the first meeting of the Friends of Jesus on the Sabbath of the resurrection. Thomas said that unless he could put his fingers in the wounds of Jesus and his hands in the slashed side of Jesus, how could he, Thomas, be expected to believe? Thomas implies that it was not his fault but the fault of Jesus that he could not believe.
Again, as you have heard me say before, the word “believe” does not mean the acceptance of a proposition, but a commitment to the reality of it in ones own life. For instance, to “believe about” means something like “I believe there is an Omaha, Nebraska “, means only that your mind accepts a possibility of an existence of a city in Nebraska; but so what, what does it matter? Whereas the phrase “I believe in Omaha, Nebraska!” means that one is committed to Omaha being of vital importance in one's life, regardless of all its' shortcomings.
What happens is that Thomas makes a decision, to bring all of his doubt, all of his failure of nerve, all of his cowardliness; his whole being. His integral being - the light and the shadow, the good and the bad, his love and his fear, and brings all of it to Jesus. One's spiritual life begins in integrity of bringing one's whole being into relationship with the Risen Lord.
The Thomas story is, yes, the story about the resurrection of Jesus, but it is also the story of the resurrection of Thomas, who comes to new, and whole, life. It is like any relationship facing the times of difficulty. Wholeness begins when, we drop our projections on each other, bring our brokenness to the other and forgive even before we are asked to forgive. Resurrection is not just a one time historical event but a daily event when we live our lives with integrity. Thomas Merton in his autobiography Seven Story Mountain writes about that kind of moment
When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God's infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace.
Often we approach God with the things that we have done right; suggesting that God owes us for being a “good boy or girl”; God owes us one. We want God to fall in love with us. God does not fall in love with us, the love was alive long before we were born. But God calls us to come forward, broken as we are, as Thomas was, and trust in God's love, not God's reward. That is the beginning of a spiritual life; bringing our whole self , shadow and all, into the hope for resurrection to new life.
Thomas On Second Sabbath
Thomas, and whoever else; just be still.
Take a deep breath; breathing in, hold,
then hold more, until your mind's bold
enough for you to dare to build your will.
Your will to love, leaving behind your guilt
about letting me down, or agreeing to betray,
even after bragging that with me you'd stay
all the way, and beyond whatever evil built.
You don't have to ask; you were forgiven,
long before your feet stopped running
away from the guards and their cunning
laying their hands on me, the one given.
Open the eyes of your heart to see my risen love,
ascending from death, descending like the dove.
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