My patron, Thomas the doubter
Elie, Paul
much of Christian culture today seems to dispel faith rather than call it forth. The church, it is said, is Christ made visible. Put that way, the notion seems smug and dishonest, an echo from a...
...Thomas is our twin, yes—but more than that he is Christ's twin, the human person Christ came to make himself known for...
...Those are the essentials of the life of a saint, really anyone...
...After his rising Christ came by...
...He was naming the greatest saints, the most intellectual ones, I could tell, appealing to my exalted sense of myself...
...So it was that when it came time for me to be confirmed as a Catholic Christian a dozen years ago, I knew almost nothing about the saints...
...And then: "Maybe you don't believe...
...How unfortunate, then, that in an effort to emphasize the need for a personal encounter with Christ the church has come to doubt the usefulness of the saints...
...Here I was, supposedly ready to be confirmed, and I didn't know anything about those saints except what he told me...
...Then he came and saw him too...
...19...
...We were almost home...
...But my father had told me what I needed to know...
...He is the patron saint of doubters, of those of us who find that belief and disbelief trade places in the soul like watchmen taking shifts...
...Then, one evening a month before the date of the rite, we were told to return the next week having picked a confirmation name, that of the saint who would be the patron of our adult lives in faith...
...Thomas," she said...
...He was missing the point, though, and I told him so...
...I was going to be confirmed and my patron was going to be Thomas...
...That is its work in the world...
...My father was waiting in the parking lot in his green '74 Valiant, and as we drove home I explained the assignment...
...And in these circumstances, the Doubting Thomas story makes clear that the act of seeing Christ is bound up with the act of making him visible...
...There's Saint John, and there's Paul—but you already have his name...
...Doubting Thomas...
...John was there...
...The Apostles saw him...
...And he let the world know...
...We were confirmed a month later, dozens of us, all with new names of obscure provenance...
...Right, right...
...I didn't know about any saints...
...Put that way, the notion seems smug and dishonest, an echo from a more presumptuous age...
...In a sense I never have, and don't fully expect to...
...After the Gospel the bishop performed the rite itself, etching the sign of the cross on our foreheads...
...Witnessing and bearing witness are two parts of the same encounter, and one encounter with Christ gives rise to another...
...Well," he said...
...For Thomas Wolfe, because he's my saint, isn't he...
...May be...
...Eileen delivered the first reading...
...He pulled the car into the driveway and we went inside, and right away I called Eileen...
...He saw it...
...I was free to see Christ for myself, and it was up to me to reckon with him in the encounter...
...There was a problem, I told him...
...I was sixteen, and my family belonged to a suburban parish that seemed determined to symbolize American Catholics' emancipation from the urban, ethnic, tradition-soaked enclaves typical of the church earlier in the century...
...Thomas doubted...
...What about the crisis of faith that had struck me as my father and I rode home from church in the green Valiant that evening...
...For whatever else they are, the lives of the saints are records of personal encounters with Christ from his time down to ours...
...Wasn't that rote and hypocritical, exactly what Jesus wouldn't want...
...It was decided...
...My faith was my own...
...I'm going to be confirmed and my patron is going to be Thomas...
...John Paul II has canonized prolifically, but the church in North America is unsure and even embarrassed about the saints...
...Wasn't it wrong to be confirmed in a faith I really didn't understand or even know much about...
...Maybe you're right," he said...
...One priest who had worked in the parish was (and is) now the bishop of the diocese, and he would return in the spring to confirm several dozen of us in our faith...
...Maybe I never will...
...I want to go further, though, to claim more...
...We can see this in the skeleton of the Doubting Thomas story...
...She was my best friend, and I loved the way she abandoned chemistry lab procedures in favor of spontaneous public readings from Look Homeward, Angel and the Norton Anthology of Poetry...
...Yet if it can't be said that the church is Christ made visible, it can't be denied that the church should make Christ visible...
...Saints are present to us as statues or the occasion for feast days, as symbols of ethnic solidarity or the stuff of theological quandaries, but they generally are not seen as people who sought God and in Christ found him made known...
...In them we can see the great variety of ways people have seen Christ with their own eyes, then gone on to make him known...
...During the winter we prepared for confirmation in weekly classes organized around a workbook called Making Moral Decisions, and in a retreat during which we were asked to lie in the pews and pray...
...I hadn't resolved it...
...I don't care what they say...
...Maybe you're not ready to be confirmed after all...
...He turned down our road...
...he is the patron saint of those who suffer from blindness, who try as we might can't see as we ought...
...It's supposed to be meaningful, the name is supposed to mean something to you...
...The parish church, dedicated in 1963, was named not for a saint but for the doctrine of the Assumption...
...Maybe not," I said...
...And there's Saint Thomas—Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher, and Thomas More, he was a martyr, and the Apostle Thomas...
...They told Thomas...
...I asked her if she knew what her confirmation name would be...
...The headlights flashed on the siding of the house on the corner...
...One is of God, the other is one of us, yet they are figures cast from the same bronze, forever joined in an encounter, the end of the story still waiting to be told...
...I did the second...
...Thomas is the patron of all of us who would try to see Christ for ourselves, who would dare to draw close, to reach out and touch him and know him as Lord...
...My doubts were my own...
...I appreciated the effort...
...And what a patron...
...While he couldn't give me a crash course in the lives of the saints, he made clear that confirmation was an authentic sounding of my experience of Christ as I surged toward adulthood...
...Thomas the Apostle was my patron saint after all...
...There's Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Francis Xavier, the missionary, and Saint Bonaventure the medieval theologian—the college in Buffalo is named for him...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
