Who’s Fooling Who?

Truth & She-roud of Turin  6/17

Holy as she is Marilyn doesn’t cotton to the idea that she is wrong from time to time. She has a way of reconnecting the dots of an argument to her own advantage. Well, why not? I know when it’s going on but don’t know how to keep from getting tangled up in it. It’s like I crack open an egg and dandelion seeds spill out.

There’s enough right in the general weave to pass for real and because I am not quick enough to multitask at thinking, at least under fire, she usually wins. Not by my being convinced, just by surrendering in playing verbal chess.  Or shooting verbal craps:  Snake eyes, I win! She says. I say, What? You were trying for a six, and got two. She says, Snake Eyes beats a full house! Hold on, I say, you’re mixing poker with dice, and Marilyn explains to me it depends on the game you’re playing, and I say Where’s the cards? And she says, You didn’t take them out, that’s why I win.

The Catholic Church decided once and for all to prove the Shroud of Turin was a fake. American scientists had examined it and in the end could not decide what made the image. They knew it wasn’t paint or pigment of any sort they were familiar with. They weren’t trying to prove it was the burial cloth of Jesus; they wanted to know empirically what left the negative image of the man buried in it, whoever he was. An explosion of intense light seemed to be the only possibility they could come up with after several years of study.

This team and some others kept after the Vatican to take samples of the shroud to get a Carbon 14 reading on them and suggested they be taken from different areas, from the inner older fabric as well as the rewoven outer margins damaged in fires. The church refused to take samples from anywhere near the figure on the cloth claiming it to be too threatening to the integrity of the image. At the same time they were claiming it was not Christ’s image.  They ended up taking three samples from the outer margins and sent them off to labs in different countries. All came back with a date from the fourteenth century, and the church considered the matter closed: Shroud of Turin is a fake: Over and out.

But they didn’t count on the Knowing. The Knowing is the cumulative memory bank all life has contributed to, a trans-cultural, trans-species hard drive of collective truth. Deep down we all feel the force of truth, and no man-made legerdemain can fool us. Our sense and senses you can be sure, but not the Hayseed deep within us sitting on the fence sucking on a stem of grass. His gristle is our core being. He knows.

So the church’s findings only made many hungry to know more, to have the image itself sampled in several places. If it was the fake the Church said, then what was there to protect by testing the image itself?

The Church replied that there would be no more tests, too many people were worshipping this thing, it was idolatry, no one in the Catholic church practiced idolatry; well, maybe a little, like the icons in any cathedral, but that’s traditional, this isn’t, this is too mystical and no one in the Church likes mystical. Except a few legends and stories and some history and ancient reports of weird things, but again these are grandfathered in. Christ’s burial cloth is not.

It was a solid argument. Who can argue with that? Ignore the Shroud and people will no longer worship idols. Case closed. Two Snake eyes beats a full house.