Reflections of A Modern Thomas
What would it be God, to find you here?
Right here, right now
In the midst of the mundane and the ordinary.
To find you even in my resistance of this very moment:
In the midst of my longing for something ‘more’.
What would it be like to let go into ‘enoughness’
To let go of this restless pursuit of…
… of what?
Fullness? Satiety?
Really? What then?
A momentary respite before it all begins again?
No, that’s not enough
I long for something more than that –
I long to dwell forever in the ‘Loving Real’
– whatever that might mean.
Can you show me God?
Can you show me if that’s true?
Can you let me know somehow if it’s possible
To know your Love with every atom of my being?
Can I please
just touch your hands
or your side?…
In this creative reimaging we hear a version of Thomas’s longing that I think many of us can relate to. There is a promise in our faith that is so appealing, fulfilling – to live in the full freedom of Love – the Love that is real. A love that is so attractive that part of us thinks, ‘is it too good to be true?’
Like Thomas, longing for something he didn’t think was possible, why would we risk believing only to be disappointed? Thomas had seen people live and die, he knew that people do not come back from the dead – he needed some kind of new experience to break him open and show him that Jesus’ resurrection and love was possible.
I think that is also true for us – we all need experiences that challenge our world views, in order to begin truly believing and living into something new about ourselves, God and the world. But, how do we as Christians now, without Jesus’ physical presence, learn to believe something new is possible? How do we, who like the modern Thomas, have no physical person of the Risen Christ which we can touch or see – how do we come to know and feel the presence of God, so that we too can be reshaped and transformed?
Can we experience the presence of God more closely, more often?
17th century spiritual writer, Brother Lawrence suggests that we can, and that this experience of God’s presence is both a choice and a practice.
Suffering a long-term leg injury from the Thirty Years’ War, he joined the Carmelite monastery in Paris, working in the kitchens and eventually becoming head cook. Given his responsibilities, he didn’t have the luxury of the study time and contemplation of other monks and so amid the chaos of food preparation and the clanging of pots and pans, Brother Lawrence began to practice a simple method of prayer that helped him return to an awareness of Divine presence. He called it the practice of the presence of God, and described it as “The most sacred, the most robust, the easiest, and the most effective form of prayer”.
Brother Lawrence’s practice is to simply to cultivate our awareness and to hand it over to God in every moment, in whatever we are doing.
As a prayer method, it is easy to understand – it is much harder to do, and so Brother Lawrence recommends newcomers to this type of prayer use a phrase to recollect their intention toward embodying the Divine presence. Phrases such as “My God, I am all yours,” or “God love, I love you with all my heart,” or “Love, create in me a new heart,” or he says, “any other phrases love produces on the spot.” These phrases serve as reminders to turn again to God, as we inevitably slip away from that awareness. As we notice that our minds have drifted, we call ourselves back to God’s presence with our chosen phrase.
He goes on that: “We continue to apply ourselves so that all our actions, without exception, become a kind of brief conversation with God.” Nothing is too mundane or ordinary – all things hold the presence of God. For Lawrence, God was in the kitchen as much as the chapel; the hours of his work, were also his worship and his prayer.
Sometimes, practice of the Divine presence simply means taking brief pauses to “savour grace” and to “love God deep in our heart”, which helps us develop a surrendered and resting trust in God, to which we are then invited to return at all times.
While this practice might appear simple, and in many ways it is, it also requires commitment and practice in order to see its benefits, and a faith in its effectiveness that keeps us turning up to it. Faith here is not something we know and then do, it is something we do and then know.
In practicing this type of prayer we become like Thomas in that we seek to cultivate an experience of the presence of God in each moment – in each here and now. Unlike Thomas we need to have faith that God is indeed present and waiting to be found.
As we step forward in that faith, we pray:
Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end,
You break through the locks of gated communities and hardened hearts:
Accept our doubts, heal our desire for certainty,
And, by your Spirit’s gentle touch,
Make us a people forgiven and forgiving;
Through Jesus Christ, the Giver of Peace. Amen.