Saints, for me, are useless unless they do two things for us. The first is to inspire us, to show us what is possible, to lift us beyond ourselves. The second is to be human and fallible so that we believe their achievements are not unrealistic ones to emulate.
For those of us living in Western Europe in the 21st century, Thomas is perhaps the ideal saint. Our religious lives are still coloured by three centuries of critical thought, which means that we in Western Europe now struggle with religious faith in a way the rest of the world finds hard to understand.
And so a saint who struggles with faith feels to me like our kind of saint.
The story of Thomas can give us some clues about why we find faith so difficult. I believe it shows that our understanding of religious faith needs to change: to be less about an intellectual assent to propositions and more about the imagination, about an encounter.
We expect both too much and too little when we try to understand religious faith. We expect too much because we look for a kind of proof rarely present in the rest of life. And we expect too little because we risk missing what is at the heart of Christian belief: being caught up in an imaginative vision of the world which engages our heart and allows us to hear ourselves addressed personally by God.
this page last updated: Sunday 27 November 2005