The Sauntering Pilgrim

Almost every year since I finished seminary, on the first Sunday after Easter, I’ve written a letter to the disciple we know as “doubting Thomas.” This is another of them.

Dear Thomas: Last week we heard the familiar story again, how some women went to Jesus’ tomb following his crucifixion. They went to complete his burial, but when they arrived, nothing made sense, and they were afraid.

Fear is often what happens first when nothing about life makes sense, when your basic understanding is shaken and there’s nothing to take its place, when nothing turns out the way you expected and what you valued most is no longer where you believed it should be. It was fear that filtered the news they were not expecting and had no way of comprehending at first. “He is not here, for he has been raised.”

Was that what you felt, Thomas? Was it fear that drove you into solitary retreat after the crucifixion and fear that later drove you to catch up with the others behind locked doors, fear that the life you had known and the promise of life you had come to depend on were in real danger or might have evaporated completely? Or was it simply the deflated numbness of uncomprehended loss? I wonder because I have sometimes had those feelings, too, and I realize today that I may not have them as entirely at bay as I believe.

I wonder because the world today seems as dark as ever. As my grandmother used to say, we’re in a “mell of a hess,” and sometimes it can be tough to imagine a light that shines in the darkness and that no darkness can overcome. The nation I live in is governed and the world we share is intimidated by a man and his disciples who stand against almost everything Jesus and his disciples stood for.

I don’t mean to spiral into a depressive rant. What I mean to do is get around to expressing genuine gratitude for the enduring hope you and your struggle give me. You surely felt all the things I’m feeling – who wouldn’t? – and you must have craved the safety of pulling the blinds and hiding with your friends behind locked doors. You must have felt pessimism about the future. Sometimes I’ve also wanted to run away to a safe place and pull the blinds and lock the doors, and I’ve wondered if I would ever feel what you felt when the light finally dawned on you and you confessed with such faith, “My Lord and my God!”

While I’d like to tell others convincingly about the new life you and your companions came to tell about – and in my own way I do try to tell about it – what’s going on in the world these days has me feeling pushed into a corner where I doubt I can be very convincing to those who desperately need to be convinced, those whom the powerful push aside and trample on like so much detritus. Maybe I doubt my ability to convince others of the resurrection I preach because of the skepticism that’s yammering away from the dark corners of the world.

Anyway, what now sustains me is that evening a week after the resurrection when you returned to your own little community of faith with your baggage of skepticism and doubt and were swallowed up not in others’ testimony about resurrection but in your own experience of resurrection, when you somehow coughed up the confession, “My Lord and my God!” That’s maybe enough to give me hope even in a world like this.

I’m not alone here in the intermingling of doubt and faith. It turns out to be a pretty common condition. I remember John Wesley, in whose line I was ordained and who sparked a revival that still sends healing ripples around the world. Long after his ordination, after his conversion upon hearing someone read Luther’s preface to the letter to the Romans, the same year he published his doctrine of holiness in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, he expressed his own doubt about the most basic element of faith in a searingly honest letter to his brother Charles.

He wrote, “In one of my last [letters] I was saying that I do not love God. I never did. I never had any other evidence of the eternal or invisible world than I have now; and that is none at all. I have no direct witness of anything invisible or eternal. And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. I am borne along, I know not how, [and] can’t stand still. I want all the world to come to what I do not know” (letter to Charles Wesley, 27 June, 1766, abbreviated).

Somehow Wesley was able to carry on living a faith he sometimes doubted deeply. I don’t know how he did it, and certainly I don’t know how you did it, Thomas, but I’ve learned this, that some things, like this present darkness, are not meant to be bypassed but have to be walked through so something deeper can be formed in us. The dark night of the soul, I’ve heard, comes just before revelation, and the feeling that everything seems lost often comes right before a breakthrough, transformation, or new understanding emerges.

So I’m encouraged – you encourage me, Thomas – to face doubt and darkness with patience. To a fellow who bemoaned the state of the world, E.B. White once advised holding on to whatever hope he could muster and attending to the little consistencies he could control. “Hope,” White wrote, “is the thing that is left to us in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness. [T]hings can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly.” White ended with this advice, “Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day” (letter to Mr. Nadeau, 30 March 1973).

And I believe it’s best if we do it together. In advising how to stay grounded in a broken world, the Lutheran Faith Community Nurse Association suggested small things like talking to your neighbors; paying attention and applauding the good you see around you (Mr. Rogers advised looking for the helpers); being a helper yourself and donating what you can in a creative and caring effort; letting yourself grieve (with others); lingering over lunch or dinner with friends; and loving one another as deeply as you can. It may turn out that these aren’t only things that help us get through tough times; they may turn out to be the solutions we’re looking for. So I, too, will wind the clock and hang on to the hope I have.