Chapter 18: Carbon and Ash

Last week it was announced that another radiocarbon dating will be conducted on the Shroud of Turin. Also last week a volcano in Iceland spewed forth a cloud of volcanic ash, grinding travel across Europe to a halt. The skies darkened in an ominous cloud of toxic, gritty volcanic ash. A suitable metaphor for radiocarbon dating.

This upcoming radiocarbon dating the cloth of the Shroud would be something of a moot attempt at proving the authenticity of the Shroud image (but not for the reason skeptics latch onto: that the 1988 testing proved the cloth to be a medieval forgery).

Certainly a new C14 test result of the cloth should be able to tell us the age of the cloth itself — that is if this go round they responsibly test a sample of the cloth that had not been repaired. Regardless, no matter what the proven age of the cloth is, that will never prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the age of the cloth is the same as the age of the image on the cloth...

No one has ever satisfactorily proven how the image got onto the cloth, much less when it got there. The Shroud first surfaces in documented history circa 1355. Who is to say Christ did not choose to imbue His image on a piece of cloth then? For that matter, who is to say that He could not, right this moment, transfer His image onto every waving flag of every nation or onto the bed sheets of every person around the world?

Stranded passengers at airports all over Europe and beyond are experiencing “an act of God”. Befuddled and bewildered, they are left helpless and without control. Likely, many are on their way to see the Shroud. I was, but my flights were canceled. Frustrating, disappointing, yes. But acts of God are totally out of our hands.

It is easy to take it personally when you are in some way affected by an act of God. A cloud of suspicion lingers and you wonder if you did something wrong or if God is smiting you. But that is the nature of how we tend to perceive suffering, as though we are being targeted individually. The human ego can do little else except ask “why me?”. We are first confined to the boundaries of our own personal suffering. Within those confines, we empathize with the suffering of others.

Christ was a man whose personal suffering was an example of “Yes, me!” not “Why me?”. He took on all suffering for each of us and then left behind an imprint of it for us to be reassured that the burden is not ours alone. But, of course, being human with our fragile egos, we work furiously and tirelessly to try to disprove the authenticity of His gift. We have the arrogance to think that, if the cloth is proven to be from another time period, then the image could not be that of Jesus Christ. Never mind that the image contains holographic information. Never mind that no one can adequately explain how the image got onto the cloth. Never mind that Jesus might just have been a man who could move and reassemble His particles outside the boundaries of what we know and understand as spacetime...

If the C14 testing is repeated, surely it makes sense for it to be done meticulously and with strict oversight. The French reweaving of the 1st century cloth with the 16th century cloth is reason enough to warrant a new testing of some kind, as it clearly throws a wrench in the 1988 C14 test results. But in the end, what are we really testing here...the boundaries of time, faith, skepticism?

Acts of God humble us and bring us directly back to the reality of how very small and insignificant we are. We are experiencing that smallness all over the world now with volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

And still, in our smallness, we go on living, steadfastly attached to the assumption that the human race is of the utmost significance. That illusion is hard wired into us via our survival instinct. Anything in our domain (the Shroud, for example) becomes fodder for our scrutiny. We assert control...that is what we humans do best.

It is refreshing to have an image in our midst of a suffering crucified man who, via an imprint of complete vulnerability and surrender to death, becomes a puzzle we can never solve and an answer we can never fully control.



carbon locks
readable time
unlocking
reachable faith
ash locking
clear skies
unlocks
darkened days

alone in this desert
testing prayer
we prove