Today we have been observing the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, for whom I have a somewhat ill-informed liking, if only for two particular reasons. The first is that as a small child he would apparently ask his elders "What is God?" Not who?, you will note, but what? I entirely realise that he should actually have been asking whether anyone had found his teddy bear, and I thus have some sympathy with his poor elders - but I do think he was on the right track. God has got to be more than a little old man on the top of a middle eastern mountain with a long beard and a short fuse.
I also like Aquinas for his reported answer to his own question at the end of his life, namely, that having actually experienced the Real Thing (please note the capital letters) he understood that there could be no answers, except for the ones that make sense. And where God is concerned, sensible answers often make no sense at all. Thus the Angelic Doctor is said to have refused to finish his great Summa with the statement that what he had already written (and that was an awful lot) was only so much straw.
The contrast between St Thomas and a good many of the Doubting Thomases of our own time (often fully paid-up clergy and theological professors, alas) could hardly be greater.
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