Easter 2 2007 | John 20:19-31
When my dog Clare was dying a couple of years ago, Flavio and I, and
Lawson and his girlfriend at the time gathered around her. We placed
her on her bed before a cheery fire and in the hour that passed before
the Vet arrived, we sang to her, petted her, cried a lot, and told
stories to each other about her life.
When the Vet arrived and was ready to give her the injection, I just
didn’t want to let her go. I looked into her eyes and demanded
something rather irrational. I told her, “When it’s my time
to go, honey, I want you to meet me. You got that? You meet me. You
meet me…” She looked into my eyes and in the way that only
long-time animal and human companions can do, an understanding passed
between us. We all said our final goodbyes, the Vet did her work, and
my Clare was gone.
Some of you will have heard about what happened next. We put
Clare’s bed up in the attic, and after a few months, Flavio and I
decided we had healed enough to hear the patter of little paws in the
house again, and we decided to dog-sit.
A friend of a friend’s dog came to stay with us, and we pulled
Clare’s old bed out of the attic for him. But to our surprise,
the little dog wouldn’t go near the bed. He would cut a wide
swath around it, in fact, going out of his way to cross the room
without having to go near it.
We thought this was odd, but had no explanation for it. A few weeks
later, we dog-sat for two dogs belonging to a parishioner. Once again,
neither of the dogs would go near Clare’s old bed. This freaked
us out a little. A month later, we sat for Gina Rose’s dog, Luna,
who, once again, would not go near the wicker dog bed.
I told my spiritual director about this, and was stunned at her suggestion. “Why don’t you ask Clare to move?”
I had to think about that one for a while. But I decided it
couldn’t hurt, and there was no one around to look foolish in
front of, so I sat on the floor across from Clare’s bed
and…talked to it. “Clare, honey,” I said, “You
know you’re always welcome, here. You can hang around as long as
you want to. But the other dogs need this bed right now. You can lay on
the couch or on any of the human beds, but right now you need to
move.” Then I felt like an idiot, so I went into the kitchen to
make a cup of tea.
I dropped the teacup when I came back into the living room, because there was Luna, reclining contentedly in Clare’s bed.
I am still flipped out by this story, but whenever I tell it people
just nod their heads and say, with all apparent sincerity, “Of
course,” as if this kind of thing happens all the time.
And…maybe it does. In another age we would not have thought
twice about such incidents, but in our culture, which is driven by
rationalism and hard science, this story has all the earmarks of an
urban legend. The only difference is, this story happened to ME. I
can’t just pass it off as heresay or legend. You can, and feel
free, but I know different. I know what happened to me.
Something even more mysterious happened to those frightened disciples
who huddled in an upper room two millenia ago. The man they had seen
crucified and dead appeared to them alive and told them to be at peace.
He seemed to walk through walls, and when he breathed on them, they
felt somehow inspired and ennobled.
And again, there is no rational explanation for this. It is tempting
for us to simply say, like Thomas, “I don’t believe
it.” Now, Thomas gets a bad wrap in Christian history for his
lack of faith, but personally I like Thomas. I relate with Thomas. The
world is filled enough with crazy stories of supernatural happenings. I
want proof, dammit! Don’t just tell me about these things, show
me! Thomas is the voice of reason, the voice of our own culture,
skeptically inquiring of us, “Yes, that’s all very nice,
but is it REAL?”
And that’s a pretty fundamental question, isn’t it? What is
REAL? What does “real” even mean? The Gnostic Treatise on
Resurrection reading today tells us that Jesus’ appearance
“is not an apparition; rather it is something real.
Instead,” it says, “one ought to maintain that the world is
an apparition.”
What if? What if it is not the so-called spiritual reality that is the
figment of our imaginations, but the world we see around us? What if
the insights of Plato, and the Upanishads, and the Buddha, Jacob Bhome,
and Swedenborg, and nearly every other spiritual teacher in the past
5,000 years of human history were right? What if they weren’t
just spouting crap, and were actually onto something? What if the
spiritual world is the real one, and this world merely the dim shadow
it is casting?
I can’t say with certainty that the spiritual reality is
there—but I can’t say for sure that it ISN’T there,
either. I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t want to believe
it. And I admit I have chosen a very strange profession in that case. I
want to be the eternal Thomas, always saying, “prove it.” I
want to put my hand in the wound in Christ’s side. I want to see
it, feel it, know it for myself.
I imagine that the incident with Clare’s bed was my own
“hand in the side” moment. Perhaps that was my cue to drop
to my knees and declare “my lord and my dog!” but instead I
just dropped the teacup. I consider myself privileged to have had such
experiences, and indeed, this was not the only such experience I have
had.
And it does afford me some comfort—comfort that the world we see
is not all that there is—that there is a larger reality of which
this world is merely a part, the visible tip of a now-obscured iceberg.
And the ability to take comfort in such a notion is what separates
me—and you, if you share this view—from the empiricists of
the world. The willingness to suspend our disbelief long enough to
consider a larger reality is what it means to be a person of faith. It
does not mean that we are uncritical in our approaches, it does not
mean that our spiritual lives are not leavened by healthy doses of
skepticism. It does mean that we are willing to consider, if even for
fleeting moments, a reality that is obscured from our senses.
For it may indeed be true that Jesus walked through the walls of the
room not because he was insubstantial, but because he was real and it
was the wall that was insubstantial. It may be that the dogs we sat for
were able to perceive a reality that was hidden from my own senses, one
that made it impossible for them to inhabit the space of a
“real” creature. It may be that the Buddha was right, that
this world is a transitory shadow that rises and falls in the wake of a
transcendent reality we can intuit but cannot perceive.
In the wake of Ken’s death, it is tempting to dismiss such
speculations as wishful thinking, attempts to pacify the pain we feel
when confronted by the empty space where our friend used to be. And
many people do reduce religion to just such terms. But there is an
evidence that the skeptics cannot refute—the evidence of our own
lived experience. There are no shortages of Thomas’s shouting,
“prove it!” but nor, I think, are there shortages of
opportunities to slip our hands into the wounded side if we but have
the courage to do so.
I like to say I am an agnostic, but the truth is that even if I have
trouble believing, I do indeed have a great deal of faith. When my
grandmother died briefly in childbirth, she vividly experienced walking
across a meadow and meeting her departed relatives. Jesus was there,
and lovingly bid her to return to the world. She has no doubt
whatsoever that when she finally makes her transition to the next world
Jesus will be there to meet her.
Myself, I have faith that I will be met by a knee-high yellow dog,
fulfilling her promise to meet me as I passed from the unreal to the
real, from shadow into light, from death into resurrection. Sure, I
want to meet Jesus, but there will be plenty of time for that. First
off, I want to see my dog. I know lots of people have far more subtle
and altruistic definitions of Christian hope, but that one is mine.
Let us pray in the words of the Hindu Upanishads…
Oh God, lead us from the unreal to the Real.
Oh God, lead us from darkness to light.
Oh God, lead us from death to immortality.
Peace, peace, peace unto all.
O mighty God, may there be peace in Celestial regions.
May there be peace on earth.
May the waters be appeasing.
May herbs be wholesome, and may trees and plants bring peace to all.
May all beneficent beings bring peace to us.
May thy scriptures propagate peace all through the world.
May all things be a source of peace to us.
And may thy peace itself bestow peace on all.
And may that peace come to us also.
Oh God, lead us from the unreal to the Real.
Amen.