Judas

Several years ago, a woman was standing on a subway platform in New York City, waiting for a train that would take her to work. As the train approached, a man came up behind her and pushed her onto the tracks. Other people on the platform watched helplessly and in horror as the woman’s body disappeared beneath the cars of the train. The man who pushed her did not run. He stood and watched. He was subdued, thrown and pinned to the ground until the police arrived. A later article reported that he was off his medications. He was deranged, unable to control his actions. There was no crime involved. It was one of those tragic things, the kind of which occur every day in one form or another.
Life slips through our fingers, as much as we want to hold onto it and assume that it is in our control. We stand waiting and can be pushed from behind. We can fall and there is no one to blame. We can do the pushing as well – pushing a person beneath the wheels of slander, gossip, jealousy – those murderous feelings that can spin out of control and can maim, crush, leaving a broken life for others to heal.
Judas is a traitor and a victim. Driven perhaps by a greed for silver, or a jealousy that overwhelmed him, leading him to kiss and then push a man to his death. We do not know. Judas is long gone, having become since a scapegoat, an icon of depravity, the prototype of the suicidal. He lives in religious or popular memory as a victim of the worst temptation imaginable – pushing God beneath the wheels. We may recoil, may wish to distance ourselves, but he is us.
Our Easter Triduun – the three days leading up to Easter – is as yet a fresh memory.. All kinds of levels of identification surfaced within many of us those days. We knew ourselves as the redeemed, as the perpetrators, as the ignorant, as the frightened and helpless bystanders, as the deeply loved and the coldly indifferent. We reached for the best in us and bowed our heads in bewildering sorrow from an awareness of the worst that we harbor in our hearts.
In and through Easter we entered into a deeper awareness of ourselves as the body of Christ, a body very much alive but a mystery to us in terms of how to live from it, carry it, embrace it. We push it and it pushes us. Life passes, and our good deeds are stained by blindness, by sin. Yet in all circumstances we remain his body.
There is no pushing off the effects that are Easter. We must go, enter Easter’s claim and living presence within us with faith and with hope, believing that it is the only way we can listen to who we are and ask God’s mercy for what we have done, and express a kind of gratitude for the presence of love that made Judas aware and made him weep. We have been given a kind of love that can and will save him – and us – from ourselves.

Nesting

There is a large area above our garage. Years ago, it was home to a number of monks. They lived up there while the larger monastery structures were being built. From what the monks have told me, the style of life in those days had a lot of rough edges. Father Anthony tells me that there were mornings when it was so cold that the water in the holy water font turned to ice. There are still some tell-tale signs from those days. There are hooks on the wall and small cabinets where the monks stored their few personal belongings. Pairs of old well worn leather boots can be spotted here and there, as if patiently waiting to be filled with the feet they once protected. The area has been used as a storage area for many years. There are all sorts of things up there.
There are old books on shelves. Books about farming and seeds, machinery and soil. The books are all more than sixty-years old. I noticed one book that was lacking its binding. I took the book from the shelf, brushed off a layer of dust and opened it. It was a New Testament and from the light brown stains on the upper corners of each page, it was a well read book, the finger prints of a long ago seeker of God’s wisdom still quite evident on every page. The binding looked as if it was chewed off. The rest of the cover was in good condition. A mouse must have gnawed off the entire binding as use for making her nest. I suppose that she could have gone for the entire book, but probably took just what she needed for her dwelling. Or perhaps she moved on to more mundane texts, though I did not see any other books that were missing bindings or covers.
I thought about some things later.
Great care has been taken over the centuries to record God’s Word and to preserve it. Many a scholar has devoted an entire career to analyzing ancient biblical texts in the hope of securing a surer footing as to its origins, its place in the emergent body of religious literature, its possible contribution to the seemingly ever elusive search for the truth as to how God has entered history and what that entrance means for us. And so it is natural that biblical texts are of irreplaceable importance as prime source material.
The mouse of course had no idea of all of this. She needed a home, a place to birth her young. And the Bible binding must have fit the bill perfectly. Somewhere up in that space above the garage, there is a nest with sacred shreds, shreds that are inextricably woven in with whatever else the mouse found to make her nest. So, the mouse put the sacred binding to good use.
I wonder if I have done the same over the years.
Maybe there is something to learn from that little creature.
In a flight of fancy, imagine that there was only one bible left on the earth, and it was hidden in that space above our cars by a long gone monk who hoped to preserve the last extant Bible. Believing that the Truth was to be kept safe, little did he know that time would pass and that the book would be chewed to bits and made into a nest. New born creatures would be given shelter and warmth by God’s very word, and they would be oblivious to it. But the written word would have proven itself true in the very making of a nest, a secure dwelling place.
The truth is not in the sacred text. The text points to a truth outside of itself, a truth that is growing, a truth that is fashioning hearts and hopes, horizons and possibilities, patterns of forgiveness, love and mercy as these are fleshed out in our lives. The truth lives all within us and about us. We do not find it as much as live it. It does not come to us. It is already here, in the wisdom that monks, among others, follow. It is the wisdom that finds what it needs and builds a nest for new life. And it is the wisdom that makes me hope that God is taking the stuff of our lives and building a home where we will be born anew, a place divinely made, a place made of hearts and hopes, tattered lives and dreams that we once thought were lost forever.
That little mouse did well, being about her business and making a home for her young. Such a modest creature reminds me that God is doing much the same for all that He has made, from monks seeking wisdom to mice that have somehow found it. .