Spirituality

Most of us have spent a few minutes hunting for reading glasses that were on our heads the whole time. Nothing about the situation needs to change in that moment. You don’t need new glasses, or forgiveness for losing them. You need to notice something that was already true. Two old traditions, one from India and one from the Mediterranean, built whole religions on a version of that moment. Buddhism calls the problem avidya. The Gnostic Christians called it agnoia. Both words mean not-knowing, and both traditions put it at the bottom of everything that goes wrong in a human life. ...

A lot of spiritual writing seems to come from people who’ve never had to make rent. It talks about letting go and renouncing the world, and then you close the book and there’s an invoice due Friday and a manager who wants the report by noon. The Gospel of Thomas has a reputation for being that kind of book, mystical and otherworldly, a string of riddles about light and solitude. But scattered through its 114 sayings is a handful that talk about money with almost no metaphor at all. They mention merchants, rent, loans, and a man planning his investments. I’ve been reading them as a set, and they add up to something I didn’t expect, which is advice for people who still have to go to work in the morning. ...

Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written. If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit. ...

The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped. I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did. ...

Most sayings in the Gospel of Thomas survive in one place, a single Coptic manuscript dug up near Nag Hammadi in 1945. Saying 22 got around. A version of it turns up in a sermon preached by an ordinary second-century church leader, and another in a lost gospel that Clement of Alexandria quoted around the year 200. So whatever “make the two into one” meant, Christians on very different sides of the later fights about orthodoxy were repeating it and arguing over it. I want to look at what they heard in it, and then at what I hear. ...

I can’t remember the last time I was bored for longer than a minute. Waiting for coffee, stopped at a red light, standing in the hallway while the kettle boils, my hand finds the phone before my mind has registered that nothing is happening. Boredom used to be weather. Now it’s something I can switch off. That sounds like progress, and in some ways it is. But nearly every contemplative tradition I know of treats the dull stretch as a door you’re supposed to walk through, and I’ve been wondering what happens to a person who never gets near it. ...

Anyone who has given a two-year-old a bath knows the routine. The clothes come off, and before you can get the water running, the kid is gone, tearing down the hallway and shrieking with joy. The clothes stay in a heap on the bathroom floor, usually with a footprint on them. That’s more or less the picture Jesus reaches for in saying 37 of the Gospel of Thomas. The disciples ask when they’ll finally see him, and the answer involves taking off your clothes and stomping on them like a little kid. I want to look at what that image meant to its first readers, and then at what it might mean for someone who isn’t standing at the edge of a baptismal pool. ...

Pick up a used book and sometimes a stranger’s notes fall out of it. A line copied from a sermon, half a recipe, a question underlined twice. You can’t reconstruct their life from the scraps, but you can tell what they cared about. Reading the Gospel of Philip feels a lot like that. It has no story and no clear outline, and it jumps from baptism to donkeys to the price of pearls without warning. It’s also the most quotable book in the Nag Hammadi library, and once you know how to read it, the jumps start to make sense. Here’s a guided walk through its best images. ...

The King James Bible carries 63,779 cross references. Those are the small notes in the margins that send you from one verse to another, and Pastor Christoph Römhild had gathered them into a single digital dataset. In 2007 he and the researcher Chris Harrison drew every one of them as an arc over a line of the Bible’s chapters, Genesis at the far left and Revelation at the far right. ...

Spend two years working in Dublin and there’s a good chance you’ll come home calling everything “grand.” You won’t decide to. Nobody will sit you down and teach you Irish slang. You’ll just hear the same voices every day until their words start coming out of your mouth. Most of us know this effect from the inside. We pick up the phrases of the people we live with, and after enough years we start to sound like our parents whether we like it or not. Saying 108 of the Gospel of Thomas takes that ordinary fact and turns it into a promise about Jesus. It’s short, it’s strange, and I think it marks the clearest line between Thomas and the church that left it out of the Bible. ...