In this Bible Bash episode, Don invites us into a closer look at what is going on with Judas when he rails at Mary for wasting expensive perfume on washing Jesus’ feet. In other gospel versions of the story, the woman who washes Jesus’ feet is unknown to us, but in John’s version of events, it is Mary, sister to Lazarus, who performs the intimate act of foot washing. And it is Judas, Jesus’ eventual betrayer, who complains.
Listen as Don has some things to say about Judas, stealer of the community purse, his self-serving agenda, and Liam offers some thoughts about his own research into this well-known, often superficially read Bible story. In closing, Liam shares some lines from a poem he is working on, “What Place Might Hold Us?,” in which he imagines speaking to his ancestors.
(Poem text if you need it/want it)
What Place Might Hold Us
If we could gather ourselves
together somewhere
between
your time and mine,
what place might hold us?
Where, and what, is the space between
my world and your worlds
near enough to bridge the distances
and differences, familiar
enough for each, and all,
to find footing, make a way,
carve a seat from earth and stone,
grass and shrub, clover and trees,
from all our lingering
undiscovered longing and, at last, rest?
Because I am who I am—
alive, walking as I do with a catch in my right hip,
struggling these days to work, create, or even open a jar
as my Brockman thumbs weaken more and more at the main joint,
like my mother’s, and my uncles’ and their father’s
(and, likely, his father’s and his father’s, and his before him);
because my left eye squints more than my right
when I smile; because I sometimes hear lizards,
see wind, grow things, and walk with deer;
because the highlands know and call my name;
because I refuse to be made other than who I am
and have paid for that in deep-running,
ancient blood that travels far, flows, submerges
and surfaces like mountain springs, through you, in me;
because I have worked, made things, dared to live, and died
before I was born, more than once, and still I have striven
and failed, wrestled and prevailed, grown to hear my name,
been changed and learned from my journey-bearing hip,
from hard things and been softened; I haveseen love is grown, like selfhood, in the daily doing of it;
because I have done a few things and dreamed of even more—because I am who I am and I have dared to live,
I know you were.
I know you were here. I know you
have been speaking, are speaking, still—
do you know I have been,
I am, here
learning to listen?
What if we could call ourselves
together
beckoning back as far as the winds, the tree roots,
streams, hawks and crickets can carry
the rising sounds of our voices—
reaching out farther and father, back and back,
and back farther still, until our wistful words become ghostly
whispers in time-echoing valleys?
What space might hold
our answering presence?
What might we come knowing, bearing
wisdom burdens, nearly lost treasures,
and deep-veined, living stories
in our knotted, life-worn, sometimes weak-thumbed,
still ever-grasping hands?
What might we ask one another, understanding
the needful question is never the one imagined
and it makes its way over tongue and teeth
as if it has been there—been here—before,
desperate to return, emerging in utterance?
Would you know me as we draw near, see yourself
in my gray-green eyes searching for signs of myself
across the ever-thinning veil between
Moigh and Georgia, highland and lowland, Franklin
and this place, this place and Sinai, and even Eden?
What might we say to one another,
to all of us gathered, kin to kin, collecting ourselves
in blood, bone, and yearning, present
and worded into whatever strange, mystical
space emerges, able and willing like cradles to hold us?
Regardless, because I dared to live, I know
you were here. I know you have been speaking,
are always speaking, on wind and stream
ripples, crow calls,
