Not so different

This week I rewatched the National Geographic TV program on The Gospel of Judas and it's weird presentation of Judas especially the accusation that the Gospel of John makes Judas evil personified. It's weird because I understand from this Sunday morning's message, suggested from Phillip Yancey's book, that many alternative interpreters see Judas as potentially like us, or perhaps even more so, we can easily be like Judas. We're not so different.

I am still mourning Margaret's passing. I have struggled with my identification with her death. And the more I reflect the more I realize that she and I are not that different. We were not so different. I have said it a number of times in recent past that without my experience of faith, I wouldn't be alive today.

Jacques Derrida late post-structuralist philosopher, created a word différance. It sounds the same as différence but points to a key issue. It plays on the different meanings of the French word différer which means both "to defer" and "to differ." Derrida liked to defy definitions and thus perhaps that is why I am also very much a Derridean. To defer means that meaning and hence understanding can never be accessible, rather what we have is an endless play in meaning with other words that also resist being pinned down. Thus the limitations of dictionaries is always to try and define a word in terms of other words that don't actually mean the same thing. In contrast to differ brings us to a distancing which forces either/or understanding and the intrinsic violence that forms a part of making meaning. A dictionary is in a sense an act of violence because it forces or imposes meaning. Strangely the poet always plays with words and meanings to create new allusions or even illusions of something else.

In the end, my own playfulness and deadly seriousness is that I/we - are/were - not so different. Whether Margaret or Judas. Perhaps only a deferment or perhaps a different choice in the either/or situation of life and death, pain and relief, agony and ecstasy which we call life.

Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly. ... I saw that wisdom is better than folly, just as light is better than darkness. ... but I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both. Ecclesiastes 2:12-14