Copyright ©
This morning is a gift from God, and the dawn’s new light is a summons to be greeted with gratitude and thanksgiving. We give thanks that we can:
See the forms of creation,
Hear the call of creation,
Smell the fragrances of creation,
Taste the sweetness of creation,
And touch the warmth of creation.
We give thanks for the life we’ve been given; for the love that graces our days; and for the chance to assist in creation’s unfolding.
We pledge to walk together in the ways of truth and affection,
As best we know them now,
Or may learn them in days to come;
That we and our children may be fulfilled,
And that we may speak to the world,
In words and actions of peace and goodwill.
READINGS
The Gospel of John, Chapter 20: 24-29
Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Touching the Rock, John Hull, p 162ff
[I seek to understand] my blindness. In seeking understanding, I am seeking for meaning. I am already committed to the value that a unified life is superior to a fragmented life, and a full meaning is better than a partial one. Of course, the quest for full significance and for complete integration will never be ended.
This is the sense in which, in my opinion, it would not be a Christian act to accept blindness, or try to go on as if it had not happened, or to defy it through mere courage, although I cannot but have the deepest respect for those noble blind people who have responded in those ways. My desire is for coherence, a desire which impels me to probe the experience, to grapple with it, to strip off layer after layer from it, to find meaning within it and to relate that meaning to the other parts or aspects of living.
[I do not look] for any specific meaning peculiar to blindness itself as if ‘the blindness was sent for a reason’ or as if I would be interested in the answer to the question, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Since the meaning which I seek will be coherent, it will lie in the wholeness. My overriding attempt must be to have the courage to be faithful as a whole, that is, as a person in whose life blindness is one aspect amongst many others. Taking the thought still further, my own life is but a part of a still larger whole, and if I am coherent with that larger whole, I will again be a whole myself, but at a more universal level. This is part of what I understand communion with God to mean.
This means that, while I cannot simply accept blindness, I must not reject it either. I must integrate it.
SERMON
We live in a time and a culture that worships excess.
Words are in excess. Our time has television talk shows, radio sports talk shows and shock jocks who get in trouble over what they say. Free speech is such a uniquely complex issue in our time because of the excess of speech. It is a “tell-all” time of the abundance of words.
Touch is in excess in our time and culture. The fuller body contact of hugs has replaced the establishment of a proper distance between individuals through a handshake. Four razor blades are now needed to achieve desired facial smoothness, and washed clothes require a soft feel that itchy wool denied previous generations. Touch is in such excess in our time and culture that we struggle with the boundaries necessary to maintain the integrity of the individual, as evidenced by the sexual abuse scandals that rock our culture. Inappropriate touch is the shadow side of excessive touch.
The music of the Beatles is so original and appealing that if we turn up the volume it will be more original and appealing? If we place it in elevators and as background to shopping, and blare it before and during athletic contests, and in our places of work and our homes and our vehicles, will it be more original and appealing? Sound puts us to sleep at night and wakes us in the morning, and fills almost every moment in-between.
Our world smells like no other in human history. Fragrances are designed to cover all kinds of odors, until layer upon layer of smells hovers and there even arises a disease and bodily repulsion of smell.
And how ludicrous can it be to market a pill or a diet that claims one can taste as much of any food one wants and still lose weight!?
We live in a time and culture where every one of our senses is invigorated almost every moment. And we live in a time and culture where common sense has come to mean if senses are invigorated for delight and meaning, then invigorating them to excess will bring more delight and meaning. If empathizing with the suffering Christ is your spiritual practice, then bombarding you with a visual of blood, dismemberment, flesh torn from flesh suffering, in slow motion, for two agonizing hours, will somehow lead you to an abundance and excess of empathy that can’t help but redeem you?
The words of the prophet Isaiah echo down millennia to judge our time and culture of excess as surely as his words judged the excess of his own time and culture:
They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them.
So, let’s take another path. Not the path forged by the opposite of sensual excess, the path of abstinence or scarcity, privation, neglect, or want of our senses. Not the path that turns off the senses in a time and culture of sensual excess, but truly another path.
In fact liberal theology struck out on its own, away from orthodoxy, over just such a prospect, the one of another path. Late nineteenth century German theologian Friedrich Schleierrmacher identified feeling as the highway that connects human being to God; not church doctrine, not believing rightly or morally or ethically. We feel a deep unity to existence, in moments of grace and profundity experienced. All kinds of different experiences can elicit that feeling. Who has not had an overwhelming sense of their oneness with existence either at night looking at the stars, at the beach hearing the rhythm of the waves, at home tasting the fellowship of family around the Thanksgiving table, on a farmer’s land smelling newly mown hay, or softly touching the shoulder of the one we love? It is this feeling, deep and unutterably incomprehensible, that is the source of all the religious beliefs, theologies, moral and ethical pronouncements we make. It’s why the prophet Isaiah long ago had the Lord despise humanity’s feasts and rituals and rites, because we forget this primary connection with God in favor of the ornate religious and cultural and historical forms we give to it. We praise the ritual, the doctrine, the product of the experience, and forget the experience itself.
And paradoxically it is even easier to forget the experience in an age of sensual over-abundance! To get back to where we once belonged is to get back to human experience by another path. If we go to those who somehow have been deprived of a particular sense, we may see this other path to a sense and taste of the infinite.
“Seeing is believing” we are told, and in a very real way it is our sense of sight that outlines what we think and believe to be real. Our era has been called the most visual epoch since the Renaissance. Television images are everywhere, huge videotrons and big screen TV’s, computer generated images, video games, a proliferation of visual arts and visual stimulation bombard the eye and the brain with an abundance of new images in milliseconds. There is so little visual subtlety in our world that it is almost incomprehensible how dependent we are on what we see. If we cannot visualize it how can it be so?
But what if we were we plunged into a living darkness. What would “human” and “divine” become if our experience no longer included what we could see with our eyes? Close your eyes and imagine humanity and God through newly awakened senses.
“Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow,” wrote poet and Unitarian T.S. Eliot. In his book “Touching the Rock” spiritual seeker John Hull describes how his gradual descent into permanent blindness, from his 20’s to his 40’s, left him devoid of the connection between image, and reality and belief and identity:
It distressed me considerably when I realized that I was beginning to forget what [my wife] Marilyn and [my oldest daughter] Imogen looked like. I had sworn to myself that I would always carry their faces hidden in my heart, even if everything else in [my internal picture gallery] was stolen…
There is a further development. Not only do I not know or care what you look like, I am beginning to lose the category itself. I am finding it more and more difficult to realize that people look like anything, to put any meaning into the idea that they have an appearance. I am now trying to remind myself that there is something about this person, something which means little or nothing to me, and to which I have no independent access, yet something which is as true about this person as anything else. This person looks like something.
To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel I am a mere spirit, a ghost, a memory? Other people have become disembodied voices, speaking out of nowhere, going into nowhere. Am I not like this too, now that I have lost my body?
I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like.
-Touching the Rock, p 19-25
It’s not what’s on the outside, but the inside, sighted people say because they struggle with the difference between appearance and essence in human being. But, what if the struggle was not resolved for you, but taken from you? So much of individual identity is involved with appearance that the sighted don’t necessarily confront anything deeper.
And, Hull discovers:
Sighted people can bend time… [it is] sometimes slow and sometimes rapid. They can make up for being lazy by rushing later on. Things can be gathered up quickly in a few minutes… In this way, you force time to your will. Time, for sighted people, is that against which they fight…
I press my clock. It says that the time is 5:45 PM. This is an abstract measure of time. It is a fact, spoken by a synthetic voice. I do not perceive the rise and decline of the day.
-IBID, p. 78
For the sighted modern life is characterized by an expansion of space, the whole world is a village and you can fly to London today. Whereas to the sighted time is compressed because you can fly all that way in a handful of hours. To the unsighted space is compressed because one has lost the expansive feeling sight gives you. And time expands, as Hull explains, because “You are no longer fighting against the clock but against the task… no longer think[ing] of the time it takes.” (IBID, 80)
It may very well be that it is the time-compressed quality of modern life that keeps the human imagination confined and compressed, too, in imagining the infinite. We can grasp the expanding universe because we can look at the stars and see so very, very far, but we struggle to grasp what could last from the time of creation’s beginnings through our own time to the universe’s demise!
But, space itself and our place in this great creation, is also recognized and distorted by sight. The sighted grow so accustomed to the spatial appearance of the world that we see it in predictable ways unbeknownst to us. When cataract surgeries were first performed, and blind persons were given sight for the first time, their observations were dramatic. The saw trees for the first time and marveled at the “lights” that were in them, because it was the sunlight shining through the trees that caught their eye more than the dark branches and leaves that the sighted see. For many the sheer size of the world was so far beyond their ability to comprehend that many lived out their days with their eyes closed. And squared-off ends of objects, previously tongued by the blind and experienced as “tinglely,” could not be conceived of as sharp. In managing our space by sight, though, the sighted miss deeper contours of existence that are always evident, but not experienced:
As long as any sight at all remained, I was not aware of experiencing echo location. It was after the first few months of complete blindness that I became aware of it. I first noticed that walking home in the quiet of the evening I had a sense of presence, which was the realization of an obstacle. I discovered that if I stopped when I had this sense, and waved my white cane around, I would make contact with a tree trunk… I gradually realized that I was developing some strange kind of perception. I could actually count the number of these trees which I would pass along the road.
The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known… When I come to the end of a block, I can often tell… There is, somehow, a sense of a more massive presence… One is simply [more] aware of becoming aware.
-IBID, p 25 ff
Sight gives us color and shading and bright and dark and size and beauty. Sight can elicit such deep joy and unfathomable sorrow. But, it only captures part of our world because it is only part of the way we experience our world. But sight has such power that it often is thought to confer existence to something; seeing is believing. Sight has such experiential power that it fools us into thinking we have experienced existence in all of its perceived depth, when in actuality we are only experiencing a part. And if we do not grow, think all existence is complete and absolute, and has been from the time God created it, we will let our sight become our strictest limitation. “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (I Corinthians 13:12)
In the Christian story of the risen Christ, told through the imagination of the redactor of the Gospel of John, Jesus has appeared to Mary and some of the disciples. But Thomas was not among those who had seen Jesus, and said he will not believe unless he sees. Jesus appears, Thomas sees, and as Thomas proclaims his belief that there is something larger than death, Jesus asks, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
The story has been used to chastise those who possess the will and willingness only to believe what they can see. It has been used to justify believing what the sighted know is not true: that dead men come back to life, that the molecules that make up the body can reform themselves after death, and dead flesh can be seen walking again. That was the belief in ancient, pagan Greece, recounted many times in Homer’s classic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey. That is the sighted world’s confusing faith, one that was in my life torn asunder when a young child, attending his father’s funeral, watching the lifeless body in the open casket as the preacher claimed the father was alive in heaven, said loudly and truthfully his own version of the declaration that the emperor has no clothes, “No, he is not alive! His body is right there!”
Maybe the story of Doubting Thomas has nothing to do with the limits of “seeing is believing,” or to believe what sight and reason tells us just isn’t true. Dead men and women do not walk again. But, what we see is not anywhere near what all there is. Maybe the story is about expanding what there is in this world to believe in, by seeing with more than the sense of sight, by seeing with touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Maybe it is about expanding our experience of the world through “spiritual sight,” that doesn’t deny death occurs, but ushers one into seeing and experiencing deeper more than death. There are other dimensions to existence, other regions we can experience when we are not so sight dependent. For the death of the body is real. But the life of the spirit is larger than death and even what we can see with our own eyes. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe!
I opened the front door, and the rain was falling… rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.
I hear the rain pattering on the roof above me, dripping down the walls to my left and right, splashing from the drainpipe at ground level on my left, while further over to the left there is a lighted patch as the rain falls almost inaudibly upon a large leafy shrub. On the right, it is drumming with a deeper, steadier sound, upon the lawn. I can even make out the contours of the lawn, which rises to the right in a little hill. The sound of the rain is different and shapes out the curvature for me…
This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world…
When what there is to know is in itself varied, intricate and harmonious, then the knowledge of that reality shares the same characteristics. I am filled internally with a sense of variety, intricacy, and harmony. The knowledge itself is beautiful, because the knowledge creates in me a mirror of what there is to know. As I listen to the rain, I am the image of the rain, and I am one with it.
-IBID, 31
AMEN.