Judas Face

On understanding the Apostles’ Creed for the first time, I have a Father to thank, though I am ever thankful for mine and will get to that.

Previously assumed this Creed as a stuck-in-the-mud way to be shuffled through fundamental doors, his simple, loving, kind, and direct explanation opened a window to let literalism in as a cement floor of faith. No metaphor. I and other humans use metaphor to interpret and excuse poor behavior. 

Literalizing helps alleviate the self betrayal of truth which can be changed by oneself. 

Then, after this discussion, this comes to me; on a table in an antique shop, as if it was any other old thing. A small, plastic green figure, a doll, a nostalgic cartoon in the annals of pop culture history and to me and my small world, a talisman of before and after. A ghoulish effigy and the plastic material body which time stamps my descent into the underworld where one leaves behind the hope for cruelty to be a causation. A birth of fear done to the divinely right which leads the sinner to actions. We wish these were just kisses in a garden without signals sent to snipers aimed at the innocence one was responsible for. 

In short, a hand-sized emblem of a joke being a joke being born again. Realism where justice cannot exist because the act which calls for it is the injustice itself.

I have a biological allergy to anything, hand sized or heart sized, which has caused my child unnecessary fear. This offensive lampoon with his orange eyes and too long pointy fingers scared me looking at him through years of knowing reality from illusion, I hope.

I did not tell my hands to purchase this doll, but it did happen. At home his presence was not buyer’s remorse as much as what it would be like if a toll booth worker impulsively bought a giraffe to make for lunch... at work.

So, I did the most reasonable next best thing after buyers bewilderment. I wrapped him in tin foil as if my grandma’s grandma had made this a home keeping instruction like vinegar and baking soda and then I put that mummified aluminum in a gallon sized ziplock and shoved it behind a stack of freezer pizzas and waffles. 

I closed the freezer and walked away a little too confidently proud of the icy time-out and completely forgot about it for months. 

One night during that forgetting, my godmother brings over to me and my daughter some food, green beans, finger puppets of kittens, and a folk art replica of the Cenacle with a lower window that behind it is a tiny painting of the Last Supper. Above the window is a door with a cross laid over it and inside the door is nothing. 

It would be months before I came to learn that there was an upper room in scripture and inside that was just the common understanding that the upper room was in fact the last supper location. I also learned that I learned nothing in two semesters of Bible study in college. 

It is with show-stopping importance that I take the opportunity to announce, of course, this is my most favorite object I have ever received in my entire life. Anything that raises more questions than answers is an absurd miracle. I circled it like a buzzard for weeks each time I walked past it. ‘Excuse me, little door. Is it I?’

Then, as my obligation to my own natural curious progression did what it does, I started reading everything I could find about the thing that just landed like a spaceship in my life. I can assure you that I spent my normal hours doing regular(ish) things, but people are not wrong about me when they talk about obsession. They just have the pejorative part wrong. I would not wish ‘needing to learn everything about a specific thing’ on a random passerby or sworn enemy, however, if you are made for the job it is pure delight less than possession. 

I finally decided to place two locks of hair behind the door, one mine and one my daughter’s, along with a four-leaf clover that I had found and a three-leaf clover that she had found the same day, exclaiming, “look mommy I found one too. It’s a four-leaf clover.” I shared her excitement. I did not consider correction because there was no correction. I am irritated even clarifying that despite choosing to.

In Da Vinci’s painting I’ve always been able to tell who Judas is at the table because of his clenched fist. It was not until this tiny painting behind a plexi glass window inside a replica of a Cenacle came to me much by surprise that I realized his hand was clutched around a bag of silver. Apparently I had yet to do a DaVinci Last Supper deep-dive and it is by digression I submit some findings related to the painting as I still have not been spurred to curiosity about the painting itself. I do like it, though. 

In my estimation of the story it really never seemed to be about the silver. For Judas the silver or money was good to have, no matter the said-to-be small amount. Distortion does do strange things to mortal men and women, not so much to children. I doubt it was for the silver so much as it was the similarly reflective quality of Jesus being Jesus in front of Judas.

Not satisfied with my lazy armchair analysis of the ‘but why’ part of Judas. Bored by it really, to the point where I did not even jot it down in a notebook. Why people do bad things is actually a more shallow pool of reflection in my experience. I want to know how they feel afterwards. I always feel awful and I did not and have not and will not sell out the Son of God who was also my beloved friend and teacher to politicians so he could be stuck up on a cross and bled out. So, if I feel so terrible while rolling around in remorse for non biblical level shortcomings - how. Did. Judas. Feel.  

My next Holy Grail became something I was positive must be written about if I just could find it. I went through them all, stopping myself only at reading the Gospel of Judas (no thank you and I don’t mean that in a pious way, I mean it in a - ‘please stop analyzing bad behavior into compassionate justification’). I was unable to locate the writing that I was looking for because as it turns out it does not exist. It does not exist because it doesn’t need to. And there in lies the rub of noses being stuck right on faces. 

The scene I imagined I was looking for went something like this - and please do imagine it as if you are in your early teens looking out a car window from the backseat pretending to be in a movie - so, Gethsemane has happened, the garden, that evil kiss, the ear hacked off, the healing, the surrender to walk the walk. But! Before the rugged cross and those who chose to remain as witness; a simple encounter where Jesus and Judas cross paths. 

Before Judas does himself in (or whatever version of that death is the death of Judas of your understanding) and before the crucifixion, eye contact! I really needed Jesus to look at Judas’s face after the betrayal. I really needed to know that they looked at each other, or at least that Jesus looked at Judas, preferably Judas looking at Jesus. I won’t stop short of confessing I wanted to know if Judas felt shame. I do not care why, I care a great deal if or what he felt about the what that was done. 

In my adulthood I have learned some discernment, the way a shipwrecked infant raised by seagulls might learn to waltz after being ‘rescued’ and taken back to civilization. So, when I had audience again with a witnesses father I carefully pulled at threads around this imaginary encounter instead of demanding outright which secret Greek Orthodox text had what I was after. 

We ended up at Mary Magdalene and though it wasn’t what I was circling, a tiny enlightenment washed over me in his words. A father finally made her come alive and out of the binary where she and others like Lilith seem to never be able to be wholly one instead of two in the same. 

The witness’s father told me the story I already knew, but he told it with such feminine reverence I was actually silent the entire time he spoke. In this replica of the story spoken with audible reverence for Mary Magdalene as not only herself but as a woman, he paused after the part where she responded to Jesus after the resurrection. 

“She believed him.” Was how he described Magdalene’s call and answer relational knowing. He need not look like him, she need not see him clearly, the circumstances beyond the realm of belief, but she heard his voice and she believed him. Believed it was he who was there. 

She then went to tell the Apostles, or those of them that she could find, and they did not believe her. They did not believe. Later, most if not all of them did, and it seems like with most men they needed more proof than the importance of relationship to wager their bag of silver on. 

Hearing your name and saying another’s name in return is truly holy. Naming is our original origin. To name is to locate. So why then, with all of these stories of Jesus going to speak with each Apostle, or some or most, why then never an encounter with Judas? I know, he died. But so did Jesus and Lazarus. Death never stopped a teachable moment in scripture before! I'm sorry, but I was told there would be a story to teach me about mortal shortcomings and humanity and the ever slight possibility of moving my sacred little soul around the whole of being mad instead of staying stuck there. Where was.. oh dear, I was asking, really, for Jesus to have given me a schadenfreude shaming of Judas with a blazing loving stare from across a stable or gate. Maybe an old manger was overturned nearby. Which by the way, can we take one moment to shame Freud who has nothing to do with the word 'schadenfreude' which is a shame in and of itself because it is the should-be subtitle for his legacy. I will not note digression again and you can find written thoughts on the shame of Freud where it belongs in a different writing. 

So again I ask, where was my closure? By this point I knew I was placing demand on something impossible like a very passive aggressive woman who did extra laundry and dishes out of spite. 

With the help of a simple passage from Lois Wilson I found the center of clarity to accept that I was not able to find what I was looking for because I forgot to remember it did not need to exist. 

There was no scene of closure because it already existed so annoying and simple. The moment of closure happened at the moment of the betrayal, right there in the garden. At the same moment. I took great offense to this maturity. That means that Jesus would not have needed time to process and I suppose that is why he is Jesus and not me. Jesus just outright knew he would be betrayed, said it, prepared for it by sweating blood, let it happen, accepted it, and never went into magical thinking about Judas. He just loved him despite Judas being Judas. 

I mean, the whole garden scene is the Serenity Prayer summed up - 'accept the things I cannot change;' Judas sat right there at the table knowing damn well it was him while the other Apostles worried if it was 'i.' Jesus had the whole tip off and couldn't change it and accepted it. 

'Courage to change the things I can;' yes, Jesus, you healed an ear despite being walked to your death. It is overkill for those of us who get irritated by words we actually chose to say.

'Wisdom to know the difference;' ear? yes we can heal that because the owner of the ear consents. Betrayal? Not so much. 

See now, if I am supposed to have faith in a God of my own understanding, then so too should I have a Jesus of my understanding. And in my estimation or understanding of the Jesus of my understanding he was maybe weirdly all about realism. Like, reality being the whole thing of it all. Take away illusion, the blinders of attachment, denial, control pretending to be care, and what have we left? People just as they are. Judas as Judas, opening and closing at the exact same moment of his too-dramatic, silver gripping, Johnny Depp-style paid 'Gospel of Judas' bots - kiss and betrayal. 

In one Gospel, it is quoted that Jesus said, “Judas, would you betray the son of man with a kiss?” When I first re read that I thought, ‘my God, that’s passive aggressive, I love Jesus.’ Then I sort of stubbornly and humbly realized, or let myself realize, that he said 'son of man,' one of you. You are me, I am you, we are we.

Ok Jesus, I understand the standard you’ve set and I am into it but how are we ‘we’ if I don’t ask ‘is it I?’

The Apostles are great because they are just some dudes who were open enough to hitch their wagon to love. This does not absolve them of being dude-like and mortal as they followed the leader.

When they asked ‘is it I?’ they were exhibiting the most moral function a mortal being can; to recognize one's capability for harm. If you do not ask ‘is it I?’ then you have shut the door on possibility for atonement, growth, wrongness, forgiveness, amending.

Emmanuel Levinas had a sweet thought and since he was an educated man and had the proper credentials to toss his thought into the philo-psychology ring for peer review, the thought-turned-theory was that a person’s morality is mapped by the face of the other. 

I imagine these thinking men standing around this circle where formed thoughts were tossed in - to see if they would stand the alchemical test of becoming belief. The way men stand around a flat tire for a spell, pretending to assess the situation when really they are having a quick rest before getting to the task.

Relational call and answer. Levinas thought that our moral center had an origin in relation; my relation to you, your relation to the other, the other, how the other is to you, and maybe most importantly; the other in the eyes of the child who cannot care or survive by themselves. So, really, in many cases, the mother.

What does one do with all that power to be the moral center for a fledgling?

Would you be willing to believe that I wont note that I digress? Let me back up a little bit. There is a coffin that is small and unlike the freezer mummy I made in haste. I believe that it was once intact and before the mountains, the climbing, the wilderness, going into the woods and out of the woods and having my baby taken back into the woods without me, my father and I exhumed a coffin that was only slightly larger in size than the mummy that I made. 

I would like to think that I was my father’s witness in the exhumation that took place in a graveyard. However, I was one of several and I often forget that being part of a group makes me no less valuable. Also, I would have to hear his side of the story to know for sure who witnessed who, and if when you’re an adult, no matter if you are parent or child, if you witness each other.

On the first January 26th after a tiny Athena sprang from me like an origin myth, organs politely placed in medical bowls akimbo, my father came to the house to suss me out. He is a bloodhound when it comes to a daughter in distress. I talked to him about the things I did not speak of and even then I am pretty sure I said nothing but everything with dodgy fear. 

When I stopped talking he asked if I was done and I said yes and he said the following words to me; “you see that baby there?” He’s a Texan, so please revere that rudimentary is regal. Anyway, he says “you see that baby there? The way you love that baby is the way I love you. What do we need to do to get you packed.”

There is a certain amount of spoken words I’ll remember exactly as they were said. I’ll most likely take them to the grave still intact. Some might stay painful or become a joke after the reasons underneath the words have healed up. 

These set of words that my father said that day might live past my death becoming a part of the me that remembered myself because they were said. My daughter will inherit a mother who remembered. 

It wasn’t that he spoke of the likeness of love felt for a baby as a parent. Nor was he speaking of nostalgia by proxy, the glow of his child learning to love the way he had when us girls came on the scene one by one. 

What he said and when he said it spoke of me separately, individual to him, as an adult. Loved and still loved with or without a baby. I had forgotten that. I had been told almost daily for five months I was despised. I was busy and frightened and forgot to remember to be loved while loving my child in fear. 

I had forgotten I was loved at all. I had forgotten it was possible.

The broken needs no fixing when love is bigger and the person is always bigger than the break. 

My father is a man who makes living through the ordeal of suffering a merry exit. A triumph. Even when his own making. He delights, it seems, in healed injuries. I had an eraser stuck in my ear for nearly ten months when I was twelve and it required surgery to remove it when I finally let loose that I could not hear out of one ear. 

After the surgery he asked the doctor for the removed eraser, took it home, turned a mason jar over with the eraser on its bed of gauze set on the lid, sealed the hillbilly bell-jar, and onto the mantle it went. The trophy was half part humor, half part first place in absurd pride prize. 

Mary, as in the mother of, was witness. She also said or showed - 'I cannot fix what does not break and I cannot fix what does, but I am here.' 

This maternal stay, the face of another, the name heard, the fever that won’t pass, the dead daisy or clover that is never thrown out because a tiny likeless of earthly divinity picked it out for you. The thorns made by things that don’t make sense put on the most sacred head sacredly watched over, eyes open for it all. 

Of those who chose to stay, the mother, knowing that she could not do, stayed. It is the thing that no mother should have to chose to do but put in the place of it, she stood witness and did not look away. ‘I am right here.’

Most of us don’t think we can do that sort of thing and maybe most of us might be surprised that the holy act is not so unique as much as the circumstances asking for a witness are the unthinkable part. I can wonder and hope I possess love that pure and pray I never need to find out.  

Das Ding is sort of the prehistoric absence of the other. It is what is missing and what we look for in all the things we seek. Lacan went hard on the language, it’s much simpler if you just watch Dumbo. A stroke of fate gave Dumbo ears to replace his original need; to be beside his mother. Ironically the reason for the natural crime of the separation is due to this genetic inheritance. Dumbo’s das ding is substituted, liberating his mother with it, and replacing the simplest of what we all really want, to be held by a face we were born to trust. Achievement is a dangerous replacement as the thing. It can eclipse basic need.

Melanie Klein also went hard in language to say something so simple and similarly related - we are born in need and that need is wired to the relationship of that which is needed to prevent death.

The other is recognized later. In the beginning the other is the whole of self. Self sufficient in partnership. If the face and eyes of who we perceive as ‘us’ until ‘us’ becomes ‘me’ is loving, we are in good standing to be able to eventually see others clearly. 

Distractions, wounds, cruelty, external threat or abuse to the other who is us, will play the trick of the deepest well for a whole life unless interrupted. 

What would we not give for the other who is supposed to be our start and our ‘us’ to accept us as needing and true? It is the 'ding' of getting in our mothers bed after a nightmare because our mothers bed is a fortress from evil - the safest high we will chase our whole life maybe. 

Without something to stop this need, nothing and everything. We would be in deep wells asking “are you my mother?” Some of us know about pretending well walls don’t have to answer because natural law assures us their presence alone is a ‘yes.'

The good news for Dumbo is there is no denying his mother saw those big ole’ ears but didn’t not see his face because they were so big. She saw her baby who happened to have big ole’ ears and said ‘it’s you and I love you.’

Thank God for that, Dumbo needed that kind of start to deal with what came next, including the racism if you watch the movie. 

He would need to know that at one time he was needed as himself, as much as he needed his mother for survival and then severance.

She holds him from behind prison bars. He is still vital to be held and we love him because he is lovable because he was told so at the point of impact entering the world. 

That box car with bars is the moral center of right from wrong before the song even starts. 

Mrs. Dumbo and Mary are part of a list of ordinary devotion which has kept the human race alive. 

To not witness is to distort and even simpler it is to place a reflection in front of the other. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says “If your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.” But Jesus, come now, what if we, beggars and sinners and heathens rattling the tin cup of love across the prison bars of life (this line I inherited from my father) have eyes all over us to see whatever we need in perception for protection? How can we surgically amputate the eyes we’ve grown through years of distortion?

Here I go back to the shock that Jesus did not need the years-long bargain with himself about Judas to accept his betrayal. Reality was embodied and he needed no distortion to know he was betrayed when it occurred. He told him to

do what he came to do.

I really cannot say reality is the truest form of divinity, or I can say it while having already confessed I wrapped a toy in tin foil and hid it in the freezer. I can hope that in confessing the act of finding something only to then hide it from myself gets me closer to honesty and being closer to honesty is slightly closer to reality. 

I would like to think I absolved my weird eidolon by accepting that I mummified it for no reason at all. I can accept easily that I did such a strange thing because this was barely a dent in the impact craters of my strangeness. However, I’m rarely strange in secret. Secrecy to me is more than a stranger, it is an alien who I just damn well know is sucking up those cows to slaughter them. 

Discreetness doesn’t murder cows. In that whole upper room situation it can be argued Jesus doled out secrets before heading out and having that all too common issue when you get scared at a slumber party and try and make your friends stay awake with you but they keep falling asleep. Of course, I am talking about that darkest, longest night before Judas did what Judas would do because he was Judas. I know that scene in Gethsemane is serious as the grave it led to, but I will never fail to laugh thinking about Jesus shaking one of his friends being like "omg, you PROMISED you would not fall asleep! I am super scared! wtf!"

Also, more true, at least to me, the upper room discourse was simply just discreet because he talked to the people who were there by choice to listen. Distortion outside the Cenacle, like weather, inside, the land. 

That’s why I decided on the hair and clovers. They are two true things. One is true because it quite literally contains DNA of blood relation. The other is true because a four leaf clover having only three leaves is about as inconsequential as Dumbo’s ears being big. 

I am not distorted to her and my only true goal is to stay there. It is a tiny tiny room. 

My body did not fit and the first night lasted forever. I think it must still be night. The strange urgency. If I tried to lay down I did not lay down. It is still happening, though I notice it less and noticing it less is also a loss. My hands felt at everything, walls and blankets, drawers, knobs, and while I knew I was touching not her face I still could not find her face. 

Thank God for the physical pain of separation from your child. It is absolutely necessary to survive. Otherwise I am too able to sharply know she is not here. And where is she. Are her jammies soft? Where is she. Not here. But that does not stop the pacing. I have looked in rooms I know she cannot be in but I keep going back in. The felt need to start driving somewhere. But where. Obviously to her. But how. Obviously just take the road to where she is. I can’t. Why on earth not?

If I speak of it too tenderly I need to sharpen it quickly so that no one else is allowed to have a hint about the greed of grief. Mine. I get to have it. It speaks of her size to me and I do not want anything else spoken. 

How can touching this toy not kill me but a spider bite could. I sang and sang and sang her songs for her to hear but I cannot speak about that and I cannot speak about how I still do. I cannot speak about any of it, the quiet of her room, the dishes - clean, the drawings still piled as they were. I cannot speak of this because it has not ended. I cannot speak of it because it is too precious and too sharp to make into words that could be heard less precious and less sharp.

My little door and clovers and hair is not a secret. It is an offering for sanity and a reminder that the truest distortion is taking a child from a mother and expecting her to act sane. 

The realist insanity would be a mother, suddenly childless, to politely obey the santitized requests of manners without morals. At three my child is and was still part of my nervous system.  A small solar system functioning to keep futures and life alive. I gratefully planned to orbit her with respectful expanse as she grew. It was a promise and a prayer and my greatest honor. 

Gravity was removed and I was told to stay seated. 

I'm sorry, what? The floor of what everything is about was just yanked and I actually was not aware that was possible and yall are still drinking coffee's and discussing behavior but not that *other* kind of behavior, just the decorum kind when we have lost the plot on foundation which would give reason to even decorate? No. Come back to me when you want to talk about a funny pig in a Richard Scary book on the page after the airport page but before the apple picking page because we always cannot stop laughing at it until we are laughing at each other laughing. 

I have not checked but I would guess that if Da Vinci's Last Supper has been scrutinized for proper table setting it would be to find some hidden meaning and not as a pop quiz for etiquette. 

I have come to despise clipboards and clicky pens that make proprietary notes on folded napkins, fork and spoon, despite the back side of the dining room wall being bombed out with cherished framed moments once thoughtfully hung now scattered on a singed lawn. A lawn I once walked in barefooted in a white nightgown tented from another human who was literally inside my human body. 

When I get like this, subversive, unpeaceful, defiant, I think I am supposed to look for calm somewhere. Instead I re read about those money changer tables being turned over and remember that peace is actually not always about quiet stillness.  

Clearly I cannot be Mary, though I admire her with her filled grace. As pedestrian turned pedestrian mother I can point to the more reasonable reference and ask; did we really learn nothing from Mrs. Dumbo?