The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

Every once in a while, a little of someone else’s world opens up, enough to take a peek in. You can see for a second a glimpse of that person’s problems, his worries, get a sense for what is important in his life, what’s pressing on his horizon, even what things he pays no attention to. You may not know this person at all, but for that little while where you look in, whether through some phrase that slips out in an email or a mention in a phone call, that person is a person, just like you. You relate. You two may be living different lives — completely different lives — but you are both living lives; you both are fully human beings. The window doesn’t stay open forever, and perhaps that’s a good thing, because I think we do not have room to live more than one life at a time.

I sometimes think about such windows when I hear about death on the news. When I hear of some number of people being killed in some sort of horrible occurrence, man-made or otherwise, I think about how all these windows have closed for good. The numbers do so little to convey that for each one of these within the statistics, there was a life there. There were years of experience, good and bad, that that person went through, digested, handled, folded and stapled. And there are years, now, that such a person would have gone through, but have no chance of doing so now. But here, too, such thinking is fleeting. We have none of us hearts large enough to handle the true total of tragedy in this world, or even that we hear about. We move on, thankful for the glimpses.

We of the age of television and video, even radio, should take heart in this phenomenon, of windows into other places, places just as real as ours, our own homes on this great earth. What did our Lord say, and what does every religion say? “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Use your minds, use your hearts, see from the window cracked open before you that you and they are the same animal, and sometimes, the same angel. Everyone you meet is your neighbor, and you can see this when you do get the chance to look through these windows. That your homes are not the same, but you both have homes, that your hopes and dreams are different, but you both have hopes and dreams. Because sometimes, we are lucky enough to get the first commandment for free, “Love God”, when we love our neighbor as ourselves. No deal better than that.