Patience Toward All That is Unsolved
Second Sunday of Easter
In Letters to a Young Poet, Franz Xavier Kappus shares his correspondence with the brilliant mystic and poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In a letter penned to Kappus on July 16, 1903, Rilke writes,
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear Sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Jesus’ response to Thomas seems to me a pastoral word to John’s readers and to us millenia after: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Those who have not seen and yet have come to believe, that is to say, all of us, seem to be those who are “living the questions themselves,” as we are standing outside the locked room where the risen Jesus has appeared to the disciples in risen flesh and blood. And we are reading this book “in a very foreign tongue” as witness to this thing which we cannot verify with the kind of evidence demanded by modern ways of knowing.
We have often heard of “doubting Thomas,” so named for this story, and there is quite a harvest in reflecting on Thomas’s doubt and Jesus’ response to it. I stand with Thomas, asking the question, asking for proof. In this asking, the questions are lived. It is neither a shameful nor a faithless questioning that desires the goodness and truth of God to be shown. To paraphrase Willie Jennings, if we are going to claim that God is good “all the time,” then it must be shown.
But this showing does not have to be revealed as a definitive answer. It might be revealed in the living of the questions themselves. Perhaps this is what a life of resurrection looks like, whatever we might want to say about the hope of a future, bodily resurrection. To live the question of resurrection is to be attentive to the ways in which it is revealed to those of us who are struggling to believe because we have not seen. It is to grasp desperately for evidence of life’s victory amid a world enamored with death. What does it mean to live a life that demands what Thomas demands – to see the evidence of God’s faithfulness and deathless life.
Enumerating the counterargument and its evidence would be far too simple, as we see the tragedy and loss of war in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine, and so many others. We are far too familiar with the heartbreak of losing loved ones to disease and the death of a planet overburdened by our grave-like consumption of its life and ignorance of its delicate ecology. How does God find the audacity to say, “I am the God of the living!”
So, I find myself with Thomas in the wake of Easter Sunday, asking the question and demanding some evidence of the truth we proclaim against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
But I am also encouraged by Rilke’s advice to Kappus, that living the questions themselves, standing outside the locked room or wading through this foreign book, is itself a witness to resurrection. Why ask the question at all, if there weren’t some burning desire in the silent land that lies at the heart of our humanity, to see evidence of goodness and life? It is, as the author of Hebrews says, a hope against hope.
To be a people who witness to the resurrection might mean that we are people who demand with our lives the evidence of life’s victory in the world. It is to recognize that which is unsolved in our hearts and be patient with it as we wait with attention for the meekness of God to bear its gentle fruit in the world. After all, it was not trumpets and processions that revealed the resurrection to the first disciples. Rather, it was a faithful woman, a locked room, and scars.
Perhaps this means (and we can thank St. Thomas for helping us get here) that we must look at the scars of the world if we are to be witnesses to the life that claims to be victorious. It is counterintuitive, of course. But seeing through those scars, placing our hands in them, caressing whatever has been wounded, might be the place where we can come to the surprising exclamation, “My Lord and my God!”
I say “surprising” because that is what it must be. We cannot cling to any image of the resurrection, as Jesus says to Mary in the chapter before. Hope fulfilled must always be surprising because it, by definition, cannot be other than that which comes from God’s own freedom to break through the most obvious marks of pain and death. We have only to live the question without answer, so that the question itself can draw us into a dialogue that defies formula.
A faithful witness can then be lived in the question, “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” if such a question leads us to a life conversant with the Word of God that, to our utter surprise, speaks from the sites that first drive us to that question: locked rooms, books in a foreign tongue, and the scars that cry out to be seen, touched, and embraced.