This coming Sunday—Second Sunday of Easter, “Divine Mercy Sunday”—the Gospel reading is from John 20: 19-31, the passage where St. Thomas the Apostle confronts the risen Jesus and puts his fingers into Jesus’ wounds. I will probably have a Sunday Meditation post on Sunday for your contemplation. Here I want to post a poem on the subject by Denise Levertov brought to my attention by my friend Mary Sue. Denise Levertov was a British born and raised American immigrant who had a religious conversion late in life and ultimately became a Roman Catholic. She was a poet from almost toddler years and as a child actually corresponded with T. S. Eliot, who had encouraged her. After her religious experience, she wrote a number of Christian themed poems that I have always admired.
St
Thomas Didymus [the Twin]
by Denise Levertov
In the hot street at noon
I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing
forth
beyond the crowd’s
buzzing
holding in desperate grip
his shaking
teethgnashing son,
and thought him my
brother.
I heard him cry out,
weeping and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help
thou
mine unbelief,
and knew him
my twin:
a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn
question,
Why,
why has this child lost
his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who
will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
Why is he cruelly
punished
who has done nothing
except be born?
The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my
breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out.
After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy,
receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude,
the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and
forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed
lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed
like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and
patient. To others
I seemed well enough.
So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same
convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me that He
lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed
through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living
man –
even then
when hope tried with a
flutter of wings
to lift me –
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the
same: Lord
I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.
I needed
blood to tell me the
truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark
crust of it
round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning
all the way through
to that manifold knot in
me
that willed to possess
all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence
won
the battle I fought with
life
But when my hand
led by His hand’s firm
clasp
entered the unhealed
wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing
heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for
my
obstinate need,
but light, light
streaming
into me, over me, filling
the room
as I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the
first time,
the knot that bound me
unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to
color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding
design lit
by a risen sun.
The poem recreates and marries two moments in the Gospels, the moment where a man asks Jesus to heal his convulsing son and when St. Thomas—the doubting Thomas—puts his finger into Christ’s open side but Levertov’s imaginative leap as to what he finds is wonderful. Both scenes are from the perspective of Thomas, since as an apostle he would have been present at the curing of the possessed young boy. When Thomas puts his finger in he feels “but light, light streaming/into me, over me, filling the room/as I had lived till then/in a cold cave.”
Now I don’t know how much Levertov knew of St. Faustina Kowalska and her image of Christ’s Divine Mercy, but that that light coming out of Christ’s wound has an amazing similarity to St. Faustina’s iconography. Take a look.
There
doesn’t seem to be a video of Levertov reading her “St. Thomas” poem, but if
you like you can watch her read six poems to get a feel for her style and
person.
Back
to the “St. Thomas” poem. If you’re
wondering why Levertov combines the convulsing boy scene with the Doubting
Thomas scene, contemplate first the struggle for the boy’s father to believe (“help
my unbelief”) and what I think is the key image in the poem, the metaphorical “knot
that bounds” Thomas inside his soul. The
convulsing boy, “twisted,” is a visual knot that Christ unwinds. The boy’s father’s unbelief “knots” his
insides as Thomas’s unbelief does to him.
Christ the healer “unravels” all knots.
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