A Dangerous Belief

Another Notre Dame story: Well, maybe it’s a South Bend story. I once told Jesse that this town (meaning South Bend), is a hole. I might’ve also used the word “armpit,” but I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.
And so he showed me the library and the Farmer’s Market. He took me to Marcri’s Bakery and bought us donuts and we walked along the St. Joseph River to the salmon ladder and he showed me here is where the water is too strong for them to swim, so people built this, because the fish will always keep trying, they will always go against the current when the weather ripens the world for new growth, they will always swim upstream.
He took me to Molly McGuire’s, a bar turned coffee shop because they’d gotten busted for serving minors. Bartenders became baristas, and pint glasses were filled with coffee. Sitting there felt like paying penance but it wasn’t redemptive. I sipped the coffee and felt a pull for what
was.
He took me to the Hammes Bookstore, minutes after it was built. I’m not sure the cement on the surrounding sidewalk had dried. We wrote our wedding gift thank you cards that first visit, and when my hand cramped, I’d walk around the store and look at books. The Hammes Bookstore is where I was introduced to a forgiven Judas. He was in a slim book – a devotional written from the perspective of those who had a part in Holy Week. He made no excuses for what he’d done, and yet here he was, fully loved and embraced – a sinner in the hands of an angry God – how is this possible? Why not teach the salmon to swim the other way? Surely it’d make their lives easier. Why not switch out pint glasses for mugs and move on from it all? Isn’t it too painful and scary to believe that anything beautiful could grow from a mistake?
I was afraid of this new Judas, but I didn’t want to let him go, either. I know I didn’t want to go back to the old Judas I believed in. I bought a class set for my then 6th graders (many of whom are parents now). We’d sit around the coffee table on an old couch and oversized pillows – where we started every morning together – and we’d talk about Judas and Peter, and Mary and Simon and Pontius Pilate and the mob and all of us who had a hand in this most horrifying story.
One morning, a mother came into my classroom and told me her son cannot read this book. “Judas is in hell,” she told me. “He’s in hell.”
I did not argue with her. I said, “OK,” and I don’t remember what happened after that. I remember shaking for the rest of the day. I suspect she did, too.
Jesse tells me I’ll always be ok as long as I can turn something into a story. He doesn’t mean I live in a fantasy world (although at times he could mean that), he means that creating from the truth allows me to handle it.
The truth is both this mother and I were betrayed. She walked into my classroom and broke up what it was I was trying to create – what it was I had created – a place where a person believes that they have something within them, no matter what it is they’ve done, or will do, that
can be worked and developed and offered as a gift to the world. The truth is I took her boy into a world she was protecting him from. I suggested to her son a dangerous belief – one that is much too wild to contain, one that cannot be ordered, one that breaks all order.
Decades later when I am searching for signs of spring, for signs that something is changing, when I am sick of all this muck and slush and when I have no patience for the work the world must do to turn itself, this moment sits in my stomach like a rock. For 40 days I turn this moment over and over: I believe in a forgiven Judas, and saying it feels like a confession.
In The Soul’s Journey Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori writes, “The kiss of Judas cannot remain wholly corrupted in the heart of God’s intention. It will pass into death, and through it, but it will not end there.” I’m paraphrasing here but she writes that redemption is in part God turning
our chaotic energy into a creative life. Kathrin Burleson calls this the “transformation of passion.”
When she was 3 or 4, my oldest daughter Hadley, learned in a Children’s Moment at our church that God is with her wherever she goes. That afternoon, and for what felt like 216 days following, Hadley would ask while brushing her teeth, while sliding down the slide, while hiding
under blankets, “What about now? Can God see me now?”
“Yes,” I told her, “Yes, God can see you.”
I complained (jokingly) to my pastor that it’s worse than the movie Groundhog Day in my house. He told me: keep telling Hadley yes, but also, don’t forget to add that He loves her very much; God will always love her.
It is a fierce game of hide and seek, and I’m not always sure who’s hiding and who’s seeking. God is not in the stories we thought we knew, or He shows up in a way we don’t think is possible. God is beyond our joy and our doubt, our accomplishments and our failures. He holds us in His hand in all of it.

God is never finished with us – even in death.

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We worked with three Stations of the Cross this week: Acceptance, Betrayal, and Denial. I printed out three scripture verses that corresponded with each station, and led people through Lectio Vevina. Then, I showed them how to do black out or found poetry from the verse. Finally, we got out art supplies and drew symbols and images that came up as we attended to each verse. Last week, nobody wanted to share, and that is OK. I can never share my writing right after I’ve done it. This week, everyone shared their work, and I tell you what: hell is eternal small talk, but heaven is the willingness to share the vulnerable, the authentic, what makes no sense but you want to say it anyway and I think I’m making more friends in a place I love so.