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October 16 - October 16, 2025
I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I’ve stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important … On the day of my son’s birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding … The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven—because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.
I held him in my arms for four days. On the third day, I remembered how Jesus had said that God has the biggest love for the least of his creatures—and Judas was the leastest creature I had ever seen.
CUNNINGHAM: Your Honor, the only person who needs forgiveness is the one who doesn’t deserve it.
CUNNINGHAM: Not from an olive branch, but on a battlefield in northern Georgia in 1864. Allatoona. And the tree—Oak, I believe. Your Honor, I have to wonder what your honest answer will be, when you are someday asked how different you are now from that day when you died?
SAINT PETER: I hated your ass to look at it. SAINT MATTHEW: And I looked at you, Peter, as a dumb, ignorant fisherman. SAINT PETER: And I looked at you, Matthew, as something I can’t say in mixed company.
SISTER GLENNA: “Despair … is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves.”
MOTHER TERESA: Judas, he succumb to despair. The music of God’s love and Grace kept playing, but he, he made himself hard of hearing—like me, no? I need this earphone device to hear you, jess? Without them, I can no hear nothing. Judas, he threw his earphones away—and dat is very sad, but dat is what he chose and dat is what happened.
EL-FAYOUMY: But Mother, couldn’t God have just obtained a megaphone and simply shouted instructions into Judas’s ear? MOTHER TERESA: Boy, one must participate in one’s own salvation. In order to hear, one must be willing to listen. When you turn off God, you are saying: “I know better than you.” No good, boy. No good.
EL-FAYOUMY: Of course you do, and there, Zealous friend, lies the answer to one of my previous questions. The difference, I posit, between you and Judas Iscariot is that you accepted that you were created in God’s Image, whereas Judas Iscariot—he sought to create God into his own image—God as earthly avenger, which was not God’s way.
I think that if someone were to say that Judas was good for Jesus that they would not be mistaken … SAINT MONICA: Not mistaken! MARY MAGDALENE: When I think of Judas, my heart breaks. SAINT MONICA: But Mary Mags: If we are all eternal, and if Human Life is only the first mile in a billion, do you honestly believe that God could abandon any mothahfuckah so soon in the journey? MARY MAGDALENE: I don’t know. Jesus never talks about it. That’s how I know His heart hurts worse than mine.
EL-FAYOUMY: But why not? We all cross the line sometimes, don’t we? CAIAPHAS THE ELDER: We are all capable of crossing the line. Thankfully, we do not all do it.
FAYOUMY (rising): Objection, Julius! The witness is not just a Holy Man—but a very Holy man! Defense counsel is aware she is a juicy pulchritudinous dish—and yet, the witness is being berated for merely avoiding the salacious temptations of her intoxicatingly firm and fervently aromatic flesh! I move to censure, really!!
CUNNINGHAM: I withdraw the question. EL-FAYOUMY: Sexy Vixen—you are warned! BAILIFF: Hey! EL-FAYOUMY: Oh! Julius! Yes! Forgive me! She makes my organs bounce! Yes. Uh. (To CUNNINGHAM): Sorry. (To BAILIFF): Yes. He sits.
CUNNINGHAM: And therein lies the real difference between you and Judas Iscariot, does it not? And yet, you sit here and say how Judas “crossed the line” and that he “disgusted” you! And if that’s true, Caiaphas, then I wonder, how you must’ve felt about yourself. CAIAPHAS THE ELDER: That’s between me and God. CUNNINGHAM: Well then for your sake, Caiaphas, I sure hope that your God has a more forward-thinking attitude than Judas’s God does. Step down, you’re excused.
EL-FAYOUMY: You’re very handsome, Caiaphas. CAIAPHAS THE ELDER: If I am, it’s ‘cuz God made me, not ’cuz you said so. Good day.
El-Fayoumy, the truth is: Your self-diagnosis is correct: You’re a bag of hot air and a weakling—and you will never, ever, be loved. (To CUNNINGHAM): You’ll never be loved either, Cunningham, and that’s because you’re incapable of giving it—but you already knew that about yourself, didn’t you?
CUNNINGHAM: And what? Getting tossed out of Heaven—that didn’t bother you at all? SATAN: There’s a concept, Cunningham, called Playing the Cards You Are Dealt—One can either accept that concept or one can slowly lose one’s mind, heart, and soul. I’d like to be more helpful to you here, but really, that’s what it all comes down to.
CUNNINGHAM: Yes! And if Human Despair is so powerful as to render God powerless over it, then what does that say about God?! It says one of two things, Mister Satan: Either God’s not All-Powerful and therefore useless—or—God’s Love is Conditional, which renders that Love false and Unworthy! Which one is it?! SATAN: Cunningham, please don’t take this personally, but your father never really loved you or wanted you, right? And the only reason your mother didn’t abort you was because she was afraid of scarring—I think she told you that once, didn’t she— CUNNINGHAM: Mister Satan!— SATAN:—Just
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And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, “Who I Love” is every last one.
JESUS: I’m sorry. Pause. Judas: If a thousand strangers spit on me and kick me as they pass, I will smile. But if the brother of my heart gives me only a passing hard look, then, Judas—I will not sleep that night, nor sleep—at all—till he will let me love him again.
JESUS: I never left you. JUDAS: That you didn’t love me. JESUS: I do love you. JUDAS: Why … didn’t you make me good enough … so that you could’ve loved me?
Do you know who W. H. Auden was, Mister Iscariot? W. H. Auden was a poet who once said: “God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good” … She was my poem, Mister Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly … her … You cashed in Silver, Mister Iscariot, but me? Me, I threw away Gold … That’s a fact. That’s a natural fact.
