Didymus was not with them

The duplicity in our discipleship

Κύριε, βοήθει μοι

Wandering, or more often lumbering, down some side-track in the sylvan beauty of conversion or some kind of soul syntax, I can’t help stubbing my toe. Lord knows I’ve hooked them under gnarled roots enough times to stop believing it’s a simple coincidence.

---

Svelte trail shoes 
ratcheted down & bounding
down a hardened clay track threading through the wooden sentries,
like some escutcheon brandishing feaux-chromoly confidence on an ABS plastic base.

                Get - where- YOU - want - to - go

The slogan sloshes in the base of my skull in time with footfalls 

All while branches rush by in a green and brown pine-scented blur—a mental polaroid, taken without even the patience to hear the shutter snap.

---

Thomas’ moniker of “Didymus” translated “the Twin”—the Apostolic assessment, for which precious ink and parchment was spent to vouchsafe the name but not to expound upon its meaning; and “the doubter” (a more “modern” and decidedly nihilistic judgement)—protrudes like so much root or exposed bedrock on an otherwise broad and smooth path.

Early Christians, including those most accountable to the teaching and pastoral vocations of presbyter, bishop, or theologian saw little need to speculate on the title—Leaving the root of the Twin exposed for us to stagger over, depending on the severity of the logismoi we toil under.

Acting as a duplicitous twin, I am often wont to kick hard into this exposed crook in full stride, tumbling into the thorny brush. A few fellow in-patients from this ward of the wayward, who know my injuries all-too-well, may laugh, and I heartily with them. And yet here we are.

This is how it has been pre-eternally and ineffably before generations of human eyes—the bloody scuffs and snot of humanity flung by our own design, headlong and heart after, into the brambles of ”I will not believe unless[…]”¹, only to meet arms having been stretched wide on that beam, showing us the way to embrace all, despite through our wounds of hand, side, and soul.

…and perhaps

Coming to ourselves², stretching our own arms in aspired imitation, having forsaken self-styled didymian paths, we might then toddle toward a Kingdom untamed by man. Alongside our battered neighbors, cruel friends, Spirit kith, and repentant kin we may be undone at hearing our own voice cry out and ring pregnant in the air—“My Lord and my God!”³

⁴

When Beauty shines

From a habitation not of this world, all waking creation bends her neck;

Not under the weight of a heavy yoke of condemnation

But like a child wearied by the endless schemes, judgments, and willful nihilism of the world

having finally come home to the ready embrace of her first love.

⁵ Δοξα Σοι, Κυριε

1. John 20:25

2. Luke15:17

3. John 20:28

4. “Thy Bridal Chamber” arranged by Olivia Insignares. Performed by Olivia Insignares and choir of Holy Ascension Orthodox Church, Mt. Pleasant, SC

5. James Tissot:"What Our Lord Saw from the Cross (Ce que voyait Notre-Seigneur sur la Croix)". Open Collection. Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 4 January 2022