Thoughts and sermons on life and faith active in love, by Rev. Tom Gaulke | Author of An Unpromising Hope (Pickwick, 2021) and Everyday Armageddons (Cascade 2023) | www.tomgaulke.com
Peace, all. I preached Sunday. And this not the sermon! Not at all. That said, I had some surplus notes that I wanted to put somewhere. So here we go. Last week, it was meaningful to reflect back on 15-20 years of sermons on Thomas & Jesus. Wild. Thinking this may develop into a project. We'll see. Anyhow, keep fighting the good fight, friends.
These reflections are based on a translation of the Easter II text that's posted here.
Peace, Love, Liberation.
~Tom
John 20:19-31 | A Translation
Use freely. Copyleft.
When it was evening
on that day–
the first day of the week–
and the terror (φόβον) they felt
toward their own–
toward their own people,
toward their own neighbors and schoolmates,
toward their own family in ancestry and in faith–
when that terror
had fastened tightly
the doors
where the disciples were staying,
Jesus arrived.
He stood.
In the middle.
He stood in the middle of everyone.
And Jesus said:
“Peace be with you (εἰρήνη ὑμῖν).”
~~~
After saying this,
Jesus showed them [too].
~~~
His hands.
His side.
Therefore,
the disciples?
They rejoiced!
For they had seen.
The Lord (κύριον)!
The Lord!
~~~
“Peace be with you (εἰρήνη ὑμῖν).”
(Jesus said it, again).
“As the Father has sent me,
I send you, in the same way.”
Having said this,
Jesus breathed (ἐνεφύσησεν).
Jesus breathed
on them!
Jesus breathed on them
while saying:
“Receive
the Holy Spirit,
Blessed Wind,
Sacred Breath
(πνεῦμα ἅγιον).”
~~~
And then Jesus said:
“If you let go of the sins of any,
if you let them loose,
untangle, untie them,
release them like a helium balloon:
well, then:
they are gone
let go
released
un-tangled-and-tied
set free
(ἀφίημι).
If you hold onto the sins of any:
they, too will
hang around,
hang on
hang onto
stick
be bound
(κρατέω)
?
~~~
Thomas,
one of the twelve (δώδεκα)
(who was called twofold/twain/twin (Δίδυμος))
was not with them
when Jesus arrived.
“We have seen the Lord (κύριον).”
The other disciples were telling him.
As disciples do.
“Unless I see
in his hands
the marks left by those nails”
Thomas replied,
“and put my finger
into the places
those nails penetrated,
as well as my hand
into his side,
I will not come to trust (πιστεύσω).”
After eight days
Jesus’ disciples were inside.
Again!
So was Thomas, this time.
The doors?
They were fastened tightly.
Still!
Nevertheless, there,
Jesus arrived.
He stood.
In the middle.
He stood in the middle of everyone.
“Peace be with you (εἰρήνη ὑμῖν)!”
Jesus said.
And to Thomas?
“Put your finger here.
See?
My hands!
Reach out your hand!
Put it here.
Into my side.
Do not be voided
of trust (ἄπιστος).
But filled with it (πιστός).”
[Be filled.
Again.]
“My Lord.
My God!”
Thomas responded.
~~~
“Because you have seen me,
have you trusted me (πεπίστευκας)?”
Jesus asked him.
“Blessed/happy/full
are those who have not beheld with their eyes
but who have been filled with
(or beholden by)
trust (πιστεύσαντες),
nonetheless.”
~~~
Jesus did a ton of other signs
while around his disciples.
They’re not written in this book.
But these ones are,
so that you may continue being gripped by (and filled with) trust
by Jesus
a messiah!
And Jesus,
the Child
of
the God,
and that through
trusting (πιστεύω)
you may hang onto (or be held by)
Life (ζωὴν)
in/with/through
his name (ὀνόματι).
[ Bone Chapel | Évora, Portugal | My Photo ]
Protestantism and Repression, Religion and Desire
In the early 1980s, after having earlier rejected his faith of origin and, then in turn, having rejected the self-identified “dualism” or “new fundamentalism” expressed in his liberationist faith, Alves decided to take a detour. He would revisit that fundamentalism of his youth as an academic task, and he would write a bit of an alternative to these dueling dualisms. The first task he tackled in his book, Protestantism and Repression. The second emerged subtly in What is Religion?
In his 1981/1984 (Portuguese/English) work What is Religion?, Alves offers a presentation of religion that is both anti-dogmatic, as well as un-dogmatic, to the core. Here, for Alves, faith and hope are nearly one in the same. Hope, again, has to do with desire. Yet there is a departure from Alves’ first works.
In 1972, Alves held that hope “is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. Itis the suspicion that Reality is much more complex than realism wants us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative event which will open the way to freedom and resurrection.”
In this sense of hope, there is in Alves a conviction and even a defiance tied to emotion—and still something (if only traces) of belief. Further, faith here is to be moved (emotionally and physically) by such convicted, believing, and defiant hope: “Hope is to hear the melody of the future, and faith is to dance to it.” There is something contained in faith of premonition, conviction, and rebellion. But in What is Religion?, faith for Alves appears to become less of a convicted belief, and more of a desiring risk: “And the reader, perplexed, in search of a final certainty asks, "But does God exist? Does life have a meaning? Does the universe have a face? Is death my sister?” to which the religious soul could only reply: “I do not know. But I ardently desire that it be true. And I make the leap unreservedly. For it is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to have certainty on the side of a cold and senseless universe.
“It is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to be certain on the side of a cold and senseless world.” It is subtle, but by the 1980s, as he slowly trades in the theological for the theopoetical, presentiment for the moment (the not quite certain hunch) becomes outweighed by the wager (that which we bet on—and live by—not because we fear risking hell with Pascal, but simply because we wish the contents of faith to be true, because to us it is beautiful). Belief in gods is traded for the desire that a god might exist and that the world might be kind. “Prayer is the sacred name that we utter before the Void.”
In Protestantism and Repression, after hundreds of pages of describing what Alves sees as the problem with fundamentalism in Brazil, Alves finally concludes, “Is there a way out? I don’t know. [It seems to me that] those who already possess the truth [those who claim to be certain] are destined to become inquisitors. Those who have only doubts are predestined to tolerance and perhaps to burning at the stake. That is why I see only one way out. We must consciously and deliberately reject truth and certainty before they take possession of us. We must make our own the sentiments of Lessing: [choose striving toward truth and never truth itself].”
Alves becomes anti-dogmatic and poetic not because of a disdain for theological constructs. They had helped him survive some very difficult years. Rather, he becomes anti-dogmatic because, in his experience, rigid theological constructs were quite literally harmful to the bodies of believers, and became weapons in the hands of corrupt (and even well-meaning) authorities. Ultimately, they led not to freedom, but instead became the opium den of the enslaved. They encouraged that even the most persecuted become “saved” and thereby better adjusted to the feeling of their chains, believing that their prize was in the blessed beyond.
~Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Saudade," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 65-67.
Peace, all. Here's a prayer. Ash Wednesday. 2025. ~Tom
Into a void desiring.
You shaped us.
Of laughter.
And of clay.
Still.
Where hate.
Where greed.
Arrive.
Here.
Here.
Is ash.
Boots.
Trample grinding.
To whom.
To where.
To turn.
Peace, All! As Transfiguration has come and gone, and Lent is at hand, I thought I'd share this weird little reflection from the Death book that Matt Holmes and I put together. I hope you dig it.
Peace, Love and Liberation.
~Tom
Image Source: Saint Calixte Catacomb, Third Century
From the time it is foretold, until its end, each person involved in its
life already knows the terrible truth: the fullness of the beauty of bread is never perfectly known until it arrives at the agony of its final hour. It is only then that, being eaten, it dies, giving up its ghost for the life and joy of others.
For this reason, the ancient messianics declared that, among all of the available elements, their godhuman (whom they called the Bread) picked bread as its sign—a tool to point human bodies toward the heavens. For it was there, they believed, that the Bread sat. Mystical and majestic. Its forehead casting beams of light from cushions made of right hands.
The sect also understood that this sign was not a sign alone.
Their communities celebrated the advent of spring with a solemn period dedicated entirely to death. Songs of praise were omitted from worship, replaced with absence or by the sounds of a dirge. Dust was traced onto skin. Garments were torn. And the whole thing concluded with a recitation of the very last words muttered by the Bread on its very last day.
The season itself was prefaced with a story. The Bread ascends a mountain. Arriving at the trail’s end, it is greeted by a cloud who, in reverence, bows down, becoming fog in its humble descent. Lifting its eyes, the cloud is met with a surprise. There, with the Bread, two figures have appeared: the Order Maker and the Agitator of Kings! Ancient men, faces afire, their bodies are left unconsumed, embracing, and overjoyed. A holy convocation. A meeting of faith, space, and time.
Quickly, however, it is revealed that what they had received as intimate joy has, in actuality, been subjected to another’s gaze. The Bread has been followed, its students, voyeurs, in a tizzy, emerging from the weeds.
The earth shakes, as well. Not from fear. But in rhythm with a thunderclap. Arriving as a thief. Breaking windows. Fracturing skies. As the heavens, exposed, are forced to testify. This Bread is Love. This Bread is loved. And this Bread, beloved, is sacred, indeed. At this proclamation, the fog ascends, taking the ancients and the voice with it. The Bread, left alone, sets its face toward the city about which the oracles had foretold.
Here, the reading ends, setting the tone for the weeks to follow, not to be picked up again until the end of the season when at last devotees will find the Bread in that city. Arrested and abused by those who fear leaven, the Bread will be hung high upon a hilltop, no one hiding in the weeds, exposed on purpose, for the whole world to see. It is only then, in the nausea of devastation and in the Bread now broken, that the Bread’s students and friends will finally come to realize who the Bread really was.
Michaelangelo once imagined man, naked and pale, his finger flaccidly drooping toward the Divine—yet, nonetheless approached in its impotence by the outstretched finger of God. After the Bread was gone and the community still remained, this is what began to happen to the bread that they were baking. In its gesturing, their bread was greeted. Not by a nearness producing a gap, one finger not quite touching another. But by a full embrace. An adoration. A cloud bowing down. A fog.
The bread pointed and the Bread pointed back. With a hug. A touch so powerful that it left the bread transformed. Not only in posture or figure. But to the core. So that, there, pointing and embraced, the bread became the Bread itself. Broken, shared, tasted, and seen.
Bread is a sign that is more than a sign. It points. As it points, that toward which it points draws near—so near, that the bread is touched. Touched, it is transformed, becoming the presence of that very thing toward which it had been pointing in the first place. Sharing a meal, recipients of the bread perceive the Bread that is presenced in the bread. This is fleeting as, again, it takes place only at the moment of dissolution. Such is the life of a sacrament. It’s here. And then it’s gone.
There is another sacrament. One that no sect has yet acknowledged. Neither in declarations nor in catechetical instruction. This is not because the sects don’t believe in it—they do—but because their traditions and their hierarchies, for millennia, have preached disdain for the vessel in which it is contained: breath and blood and dry cracked clay.
It was not always this way. The lives of the messianics were once marked by bodies invigorated, revived through spiritual acts of ecstasy, eyes euphoric, backward rolling, joy remaining for days. Wind, spirit, love: these their bodies welcomed in as breath, as smoke, as fire, moaning expulsions, nonsensical cries. Codswallop. Gibberish. Laughter. Glossolalia.
They shared in communistic feasts where each would eat each one’s fill, taking leftovers home for family and for occasional late night snacks. Pleasure and longing took their place at the center of the community. For decades. Here, the body, healthy and well-fed, was celebrated, alive, and unbound.
Then a new generation of leaders arrived. And quickly all of that was buried. The body, they condemned, calling it unkind names. Concupiscent. Cage. The Cause of All That is Wrong! From it, they claimed, no good could arrive.
If a member causes you to sin, cut it off! Cut it off!
If it tempts or if it tests you in any way, throw it away, throw it away!
Toss it, toss it, to the fire, to the flames!
Toss it, toss it, toss it away.
These were the words of their anthem, sung while swinging machetes.
Chopping. Hacking. Scraping. Until the job was done. They swallowed every cord. They left no trace. They made certain no memory would remain. The marriage, nullified. The kid? Cut in half. Body and soul were forever estranged.
Severed from spirit and mind, the body was quickly and easily reduced into a caricature, a cartoon, a sketch—unseen even as it was viewed—subjected to the ignorant, arrogant, and reductive gaze of the ones called theologians. And yet, all the while, the sacrament within it remained. Intact. Buried. But alive.
And so we wonder. What is this Sacrament? Of what is it composed? What is its name? What does it do? How, in us, does it feel? These questions we will explore briefly below.
WHAT IS THIS SACRAMENT? OF WHAT IS IT COMPOSED?
Unlike the Sacrament of Bread that is made and can be touched by human hands, this sacrament simply exists and is only touched from inside of our skin. Like the Bread of the Table, this sacrament is composed of at least two elements, each with its own instincts and personality. Distinct though they are, however, they are also connected. To borrow a theological metaphor, each is a pole that inhabits a sphere. Though, from the surface of one pole, the other may seem foreboding and alien; from a distance, we are able to see that they’re conjoined at the core. They grow from the same earth. They are shaped by the same movements of the same ocean waves.
WHAT IS ITS NAME?
This sphere, in its wholeness, is the sacrament that we now know as the Sacrament of Expectation (or sometimes the Anticipatory Sacrament—the names are used interchangeably). The names of the poles, as you may have guessed, are Anxiety and Hope.
WHAT DOES IT DO?
As noted above, sacraments are signs that point. The Sacrament of Expectation points in at least two ways.
First, the pointing of this sacrament is both future-oriented and emotional. It is felt as a premonition, a hunch, a prayer, a suspicion, an intuition. It is a funny feeling, a what if?, a what about, and so on. It is a feeling of feeling-already that which has not yet taken place. It’s a feeling of feeling already that which the sacrament is gesturing toward. Known among many as a forestate, it’s a feeling that, feeling already, invites the body, in one way or another, to salivate or simply to prepare. Said differently, feeling already that toward which it points, the Sacrament of Expectation gestures toward a future—or, rather, futures: happenings or events that, for now, exist only in potentiality. Lying in wait. It is this multiplicity of futures, commingling in potentiality that complicates this sacrament’s pointing. Also, it is what makes its pointing unique. This uniqueness of pointing is also the source of this sacrament’s second differentiating quality.
Second, unlike other sacraments, this sacrament does not point in one direction, alone. As futures and fate are many and unfixed, the Sacrament of Expectation is unable to fixate. Unlike the bread who only and ever points toward the Bread, and unlike the water who points only toward its Bird (a topic we have not covered here, but which I invite you to investigate), the pointing of this sacrament is multidirectional and a bit more scrambled. This multidirectionality is the source of the sacrament’s considerable emotional impact upon the human body.
HOW, IN US, DOES THIS SACRAMENT FEEL?
As the pointing of the Sacrament of Expectation is less of a pointing and more of a pirouette, it often produces a dizzied sensation. As the body partakes of this dizziness, the elements themselves can begin to drift. Hope and anxiety melt. And they merge. And as they mix, they become much more complex. Hybrid emotions are born, swimming and unpredictable. Just as a great pianist can play three melodies at once, so the body sings in endless emotional symphony. No field of study has produced an adequate name for this state. It is usually described simply as mixed emotions. Other times it is called a state of erosion or overwhelm. Whatever we call it, it is sacred and sacramental.
In these state(s), there emerges in the body an unspoken imperative: With heart, hands, and hair, stand on edge! At attention. Lamps lit and ready. Be prepared! it cries. And then again. And again. But for what? Here is a mystery: neither the body nor the sacrament knows. There is no knowledge. There is only a sense of something unknown.
THE UNPREPARING
There is one exception. If one lives long enough, if the body grows old, ears and nose full of hair, if the spirit becomes tired, if the heart has mellowed or learned to let go, similar changes sometimes take place in the sacrament. The sacrament starts to let go of its spin and to acquire a unique direction. Having sought for so long, it finally finds a focal point. It fixates. And it feels, at last—body, soul, and mind—that future toward which it now points.
In these last days, anticipation is unceasing. A nag. The body that once possessed the sacrament now feels as if it is the one who has been possessed. Perhaps it was this way all along. The former vigilance has departed. There is no preparation to complete. For that toward which the body and that toward which the sacrament has been pointing, arrives.
Holmes, Matthew., Gaulke, Thomas R., Everyday Armageddons: Stories and Reflections on Death, Dying, God, and Waste (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023), 96-101.
