the kiss of judas and a dog
a small start to a little good
I made this Substack a while ago, and it has sat untouched as I’ve struggled to know what I meant by making it.
I knew what I meant broadly — I want to write about something good once a week. Something good I’ve observed, something good I’ve heard about, but things that are real and solid. Not Pollyanna silver linings, not ontological wanderings into what “good” even means. I want to find good, like a bloodhound in the woods, nose pointed into the wind, a metal detector on the sands of Atlantic Beach, quavering and sifting through the mundane.
When I was a Catholic theology student, before I stopped believing in God (but maybe not god), I was really into the kiss Judas and Jesus shared. Judas kisses Jesus, identifying him to the crowd gathered to arrest him, betraying him in a moment recreated and revisited in pop culture and literature since (the kiss of death in mafia lore, for instance). Jesus’ response varies based on gospel, but my favorite is in Matthew (and not only because I was in a high school production of Godspell), “Friend, do what you are here to do”. It’s easy to read, as many have, that the kiss was cynical, unfeeling. Jesus’ response does not seem to believe that to be the case, and neither do I. I’ve always done the exegesis in belief that Judas kissed Jesus from a deep conflicted love, a desire to love free of the world in which they lived, and a shame to be bound by that same world’s greed and violence. The kiss was a plea, an apology, a sealing of hope.
The good I’m interested in is in the kiss Judas gave to Jesus. In the human co-mingling of lips and spit and teeth at an apex made up of humanity’s ultimate fallibility and its most fevered redemptive dream. I believe where culture now only sees a symbol of callous betrayal there is the muddy space where goodness grows. I see a bittersweet promise. Perhaps the divine is closest when we are the most caught out. We can touch it with dirty hands. We can draw salvation in for a kiss when we are lost in the awful trying of it all. I want my goodness with broken nails and salty lips from scrambling. Keep your goodness if it’s kept like a cut flower, fed clean water and neatly arranged, dying with a quickness allayed only by reeking clinging soil.
I am looking for good that is small, mundane, human, mucky. The kind that hides itself from you, easy to miss.
I’m starting with the absolute smallest good. A good so little it’s almost silly to call it out, to pick it up and hold it under the light. But it is this week’s half mortal, half divine kiss before the end and beginning of the world.
My one year old dog and I were on a run through the trails of Cougar Mountain on Sunday. The mood was sporadic, fading between the flat heavy gray of a northwest January, with sun bursting through and lighting up limey moss.
My puppy’s name is Carol, and she’s quite shy. With people she loves, she is effusive and obtrusive in her affection. If she doesn’t know someone, she is skittish, quick to duck behind my legs or a tree to avoid an unfamiliar touch. In her off-leash training, I haven’t had to worry as much about her running away or running up to people, but I’ve had to train her to be brave and walk up to people if need be. This has been markedly easier in the dead of winter, when it’s just her and me and my red nose on the trails.
An hour into our run, we ran into a group of people hiking, trading jokes, ribbing each other. I heard them a split second after Carol did, her shepherd ears perking. I announced myself, asked if I should leash her, and the group enthusiastically said that they didn’t mind if she walked by unleashed. So I let her.
But she wouldn’t move.
“Sorry, she’s a little shy!” I called from ten feet up the trail, and the whole group stepped off the trail reverently. Carol stayed very still, staring at the five people she didn’t know.
“You’ve got this, Carol!” one of the women gently urged as a wind whistled through.
Carol did not at all have this.
The group encouraged, I offered treats. I ran ahead up the hill, hoping to entice through my own scarcity. Nothing worked. I finally stopped, and apologized to the group, who at this point had stopped for at least five minutes, wholly focused on a puppy on a trail, staring with bright brown eyes and alien boundaries.
As I decided to take Carol and myself on a different route and I sidled past the sweet bunch, one of the women touched my elbow and said “maybe she knows a better way”. It was a conspiratorial joke, a kindness offered in the embarrassment of inconveniencing strangers (something we rarely feel when we inconvenience those we’ve already suckered into loving us). The idea that a puppy could know the way better, the extended joke that any of us know where we’re going at all, the incomprehensible warmth of someone trying to connect on a trail in the middle of January, stuck and laughing because no one wants to upset the smallest among us.
Carol found a better way.
