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Spiritual Sunday
The story of doubting Thomas is fertile ground for poets and novelists since grappling with uncertainty is what literature does. For instance, to Jesus’s declaration, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus he is setting impossibly high standards and not accounting for human weakness.
Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.
And:
Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him forever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein…I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter.
In “A Doubting Thomas Sort-of-Sonnet,” Jill Alexander Essbaum finds a way to dismiss miracles of any sort and, with them, God. And then, unexpectedly, God enters. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who is the creation of the intellectually brilliant brother Ivan and who believes in human manipulation, doesn’t acknowledge this possibility.
A Doubting Thomas sort-of sonnet
By Jill Alexander Essbaum
Sometimes I think belief is obsolete.
The sky is empty. God does not exist.
That there’s no point to life, and wishing it
won’t make it true. That miracles and feats
arrive by way of science. Cures and healings?
Just suave doctoring. And soul’s a quick
and nitwit way of naming all the tricks
our hocus-pocus human brains complete.
And death’s the end of everything, full stop.
And heaven’s ever-after is a ruse.
And we’re no more than broken, bloody dopes
who pray to ghosts. But. Sometimes something not-
myself pervades the walls of my heart’s room,
goes boom, then wracks and blacks and blues my bones.
The stone is rolled. I’m whole. I’m held. It’s hope.