The Feast Day of Saint Thomas and the Winter Solstice and Our Long Season of Doubt

Today we celebrate the life of Saint Thomas. It's also the Winter Solstice. It's the time of year for doubting, as we finish another year full of doubts and dread, a year that many of us thought would bring some kinds of closure (in terms of politics, in terms of disease).  But here we are, at the end of the year, dealing with disappointments and changed expectations and more pivoting to be done. Those of us in the northern hemisphere may feel that the dark will never recede. It's a good day to celebrate the most famous doubter of all.

Who can blame Thomas for doubting? It was a fantastic story, even if you had traveled with Jesus and watched his other miracles. Once you saw the corpse of Jesus taken off the cross, you would have assumed it was all over.

And then, it wasn't. Thomas, late to see the risen Lord, was one of the fiercest believers, legend tells us, Thomas walking all the way to India.

I wonder if Thomas is near and dear to the heart of the more rational believers. We're not all born to be mystics, after all. I worry about our vanishing sense of wonder. We've all become Thomas now. We don't believe anything that we can't measure with our five senses.

We've spent significant amounts of time recently even doubting what we can measure with our five senses. We've spent even more time arguing about what it means to measure. We seem to be in a time when we can't even agree on some basic truths, let alone more complicated information.

The more I read in the field of the sciences, the more my sense of wonder is reignited. I continue to be so amazed at the way the world works, both the systems we've created and the ones created before we came along. The more I know, the more I want to shout from the rooftops, "Great show, God!" (long ago, when my friend had small children, they would shout this refrain whenever they saw something beautiful in nature, like a gorgeous sunset; I try to remember to shout it too).

So today, in the Northern Hemisphere, as the earth leaves its darkest time and inches towards light, let us raise a mug of hot chocolate to St. Thomas, who showed us that we can have doubts and still persevere. Let us raise a mug of hot chocolate to solstice celebrations and all the ways that the natural world can point us back to our Creator. Let us pray that our rational selves live in harmony with our sense of wonder. Let us also offer a prayer of gratitude to those around us, Divine and ordinary humans, who don't cast us away for our inability to believe, to trust, to accept.

Here's a prayer from Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Winter for this day:

"Everliving God, who strengthened your apostle Thomas with firm and certain faith in your Son's resurrection: Grant me so perfectly and without doubt to believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, that my faith may never be found wanting in your sight; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen."