30 Pieces
A Dispatch From The Edge Of Heaven And Hell
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Maybe, baby, I'm just losing my mind
'Cause this is trouble, but it feels right
Teetering on the edge of heaven and hell
Is a battle that I cannot fight“Lord, don't let me,” I said, “Lord, don't let me”
I said, “Lord, don't let me, let me down” (oh, Lord)
"Lord, don't let me,” I said, “Lord, don't let me”
I said, “Lord, don't let me, let me down”
Don't let me let myself down
Oh my God— Adele, “Oh My God”
In the bustle of switching between dishes, sliding the pans out left and right, all while making conversation and pouring a glass of water for my guest who’d just arrived for dinner, I eyed the dish that held the sliced zucchini and spaghetti squash. I picked up the white handles in an attempt to reposition it closer to the serving bar, when it came to my immediate remembrance that I had extremely recently removed the dish from the 375 F oven.
“Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow,” I vocalized my pain in as measured a way as possible as I struggled to keep control against the pain and finally managed, in a minor miracle, to set the beautiful, vintage CorningWare dish that I’d been given from my husband’s family back on the counter without dropping and shattering the precious piece. Gazing briefly at the burning, red-hot welts smack in the middle of both my palms, I contemplated what the exact next course of action should be for some in-home treatment, and then it suddenly hit me that I’d just prayed hours before, for the first time in my life, for the stigmata.
In the Northern Hemisphere, fall beckons, the daylight shortens, All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day right on its doorstep. I step into a Mexican restaurant — the good kind, not a soulless corporate husk whose existence is to churn back profits to hedge funds in Manhattan, but the kind owned by an actual family of shamelessly Catholic Mexicans who buy ads in their church’s bulletin — and, turning the corner in the lobby, I’m greeted with the bright, pink-blue-and-marigold-orange festive colors of a Dia de los Muertos shrine, replete with solemn, sepia-toned photos of the family patriarchs and matriarchs, children of the Aztec mingled in with the blood of Spanish conquistadors, peering out at us through aged wooden frames.
The houses in the neighborhood are covered in decorations for Halloween, cartoonish ghosts in the yards, hanging from trees, skeletons adorned on stately front doors. Everywhere, all around us, history presses into the present: the bones and the ghosts are staring, watching, waiting for our next move, the spiritual breathing so heavily onto the material world. We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.
Is it the autumn of my very young childhood in the nineties, though, when I’d dressed up as Tinkerbell and believed that, at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, my wings of tulle and elastic would lift me into the air for real? Or of my girlhood, when I was a witch of House Ravenclaw? And what about the autumn of the lost years of my young adulthood in the two-thousands-and-tens, when, one Hallow’s Eve, I’d caked on far too much mascara and descended onto downtown for bar crawls with the teeming multitude, looking for love in liquor and transcendence in togetherness? No, this autumn in two-thousand-and-twenty-four feels different from every other, fraught in a fresh, new, nerve-wracking way. As the ghosts of the past look on, the whole world seems to be balancing precariously on the precipice of something, “teetering on the edge of Heaven and Hell”. I ride out the interminable wait by doomscrolling on my phone, my shoulders ever-so-slightly tensing in anticipation for the moment that I come across the news item that I will only later realize was, in storytelling terms, “the event that incites everything else”.
Elvis croons to me in the car: we can’t go on together, with suspicious minds… This guileless son of Mississippi knew nothing of Carl Schmitt, but perhaps, I always wonder when the song plays, is he somehow, as a foil to Schmitt, right? For it is only one suspicious thought, one furrowed brow, one jumpy moment, one tweak in the algorithm of war games somewhere between Tehran and Jerusalem and Moscow and Washington that separates me from the fate of my flesh melting right off my body in the radiation blast, and my calcium-filled skeleton thereafter joining my neighbor’s 8 foot tall plastic one from Costco that climbs out of the green grass next to his driveway.
Yet also: at night, I dream of walking barefoot on the Martian soil at sunrise, worlds without end. Glimmers of light break through our darkness like the morning sun streaming in through the shutters: a story in the news of a determined father who financed his son’s own gene therapy and reversed the curse for other children with this rare condition; beloved grandparents and even teenagers get more years with their families, their lives saved by Apple Watch; AI detects previously imperceptible malignant cells; a photograph in the news shows a man, six months after his experimental treatment for cancer, his face ruddy, healthy, his hair even thicker than before, given new life by our human miracles.
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With my natal north node in the sign of Pisces, I am supposedly destined over the course of my life to move toward the pair of fish, to that nebulous space where they dance between each other in watery, dreamy chaos. If that is true, then one could say that the wheels began to spin on a summer day when I was 14, when I stood before the bones of St. Peter in Rome. A committed WASP — I revered Luther and Elizabeth I then — keenly interested in the historicity of it all but much less the emotional religious experience, which I viewed as too much an expression of low class relative to my own station in life, I folded my hands politely and watched off to the side for a few minutes as an army of Catholics in all shades and sizes and ages from all over the globe, women in lace mantillas, paraded in front of the tomb and genuflected before the glass, kissing and holding up delicate, beaded rosaries, many of them with tears in their eyes. It was all a little too much Catholicism for me at the time, but I tried to be respectful of the spectacle as an encounter with a foreign culture whose ways I did not know. But maybe the fisher of men was watching me from the other side of the glass, even as I was distracted watching them.
At the time I wrote “The Mountaintop” last year, I was really unable to capture into words the experience during that lunch that all happened in the space of — what was it? Ninety seconds? One-hundred-and-twenty — if that? Reading it over again more recently, it is clear to me that I was still too terrified, for a multitude of reasons, to really even try to explain everything that I experienced.
In the moments in my life when I’d half-entertained the idea of what theophany might be like, I’d always imagined that it unequivocally had to be something like The Ecstasy of St. Teresa: a rapturous moment of bliss, intimate union with the Divine, like a drug-induced high. That does, of course, happen, but what I experienced, and did try to give some voice to in “The Mountaintop” — even if not successfully, fully — was not at all something blissful and pleasurable, but something terrible and kind of apophatic. It was more akin to the narrated experience of Zechariah in the Temple, when I had my words taken away from me, a punch to the gut from an angel who had stunned me into a silence so awful it gasps.
The days, weeks, and months that rippled after that were some of the most emotionally challenging of my life as I struggled to integrate the experience back into my everyday life and even attempt to move forward. For one, my whole experience could be said to be triple-faceted: I was given a sudden revelation of the nature of the Trinity; I realized who I was to the Logos — a traitor, a betrayer, of course, forever, and always, and absolutely nothing before the unfathomable reality of He Who Is; and, somewhat connected to that, I realized how men immediately left their nets, their livelihoods, to follow Him, and I wanted nothing more than to do the same, if I could only figure out how, if only I could figure out how to give at all an iota of any meaning back to His divine work, which is how I would later come to the state of fervor where I prayed for the stigmata. This theophany nearly drowned me in blackest black ice-cold choppy waters in almost a moment’s human time, but it was, to me, something I might have preferred to take in slowly, in delicate, thoughtful sips, over a decade or two.
In my clumsy, awkward, and perpetually horrified processing of this information, I became obsessed with the idea of value as distinct from everything else that we typically deem as “valuable” in the world of the mundane. I searched for the right piece of art to give some imagery and accompaniment to my own interior journey, and I came to pin this experience to the 16th century German painting “The Parable of the Pearl of Great Price”, which visualizes the short parable shared by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”
Intellectually, I’d come close to exploring this idea of value about two years ago in my lengthy Peter Thiel post, “Mr. Thiel’s Appeal”. In that post, I discussed a video by a Christian Reformed pastor, Paul Vander Klay, who had commented on Eric Metaxas’ January 2020 talk with Peter Thiel:
Pastor Vander Klay had remarked, as I quoted in that post:
We’re in lands where what is up, and what is down, and what is progress, and what is regress, and what is corruption, and what is decay, and how can we know? And so the member of the Board of Facebook is speaking against the Cathedral, or the Citadel. The Board of Facebook is about as powerful as it gets in certain realms. […] And [Thiel] wrote a business book. Followers wish to follow in wealth, while saying ‘money isn’t where value finally is…’ So, where is the value? Of course, the most interesting thing in the Douthat-Weinstein video, was the conclusion, where Eric smuggles Jesus in, he brought him right in the front door and says, ‘I can’t help but wonder, if Jesus were alive today, what would happen to him?’ Could Jesus be nullified with the memes? Well, don’t forget, they cast lots, lots, for His clothes. What does that mean? That one garment He wore, which was one long seamless thing, and the soldiers officiating at the execution — crucifixions can take a while — ‘We shouldn’t split this up between us — let’s cast lots.’ Where is the value? Where is the value we recognize? […]
Where’s the value? Where is the value? How can we know? Do we follow the money? That will teach you something. Progress: can we know it? Can we see it? Does it look like decadence? Will the pandemic shake us out of it? I don’t know. Why not smuggle Jesus here at the end of this?
Despite my earlier investigations, it was only after that midsummer day last year that I had a knowing about value down in my bones, and my quest (perhaps my penance!) would be only to further tug at the knotted threads of all the unspoken knowns and try to string it back together again in my feeble little words — nothing before Almighty God, but then again… What is anything?
Perhaps true to the node of fate, to that day in Rome, I developed a fascination with why Jesus was so interested in fishermen, in His special relationship to St. Peter, why He was forever circling around the Sea of Galilee, and what the exact value — the real value of fish — was to Jesus.
It was in this quest that I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about one extremely short story in the Gospel of Matthew, shortly after the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountain:
After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”
“Yes, he does,” he replied.
When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”
“From others,” Peter answered.
“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”
There’s so much that’s curious about the story — including that the miracle seems to take place off-screen; Jesus is merely describing the miracle that will occur, but we never see St. Peter actually go about carrying it out. I could never work out much meaning from it, until I inquired with a knowledgeable friend, who recommended to me the very remarkable book Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money by James Buchan, for an answer:
Mr. Buchan places the story of the coin in the fish’s mouth into the broader context of the narrative of Matthew as it relates to money:
The coin in question, for which the word is ‘stater’, is a tetradrachm, and was minted either in heaven or in Tyre. The temple tax has been paid by God. There is no question of Jesus himself submitting, through the medium of money, to the official cult or defying it. The schism has been avoided. […]
Matthew cuts back to Jerusalem, the High Priests and the kingdom of money. He now introduces the most famous money in theology, the triakonta argyria, the thirty pieces of silver:
Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.
These famous coins have a triple existence, Jewish, Christian and, as it were, universal. At the Jewish level, they are tetradrachms out of the temple treasury, thirty of them, of the type that Peter drew out of the mouth of the fish at Capernaum; that Pontius Pilate had, according to Josephus, tried to confiscate for a water project and thus provoked the unrest for which Jesus was a scapegoat; that financed the revolt in A.D. 66. [After which Titus demanded the Jews pay the tribute to the Temple of Jupiter in Rome.] These coins therefore embody the independence of the Jews extinguished by Titus in A.D. 70.
In “Cast Your Net Upon the Waters: Fish and Fishermen in Jesus’ Time”, Mendel Nun writes:
The flat shape of the musht makes it especially suitable for frying. The skeleton consists of an easily detachable backbone and relatively few small bones, and thus it is easy to eat. It has long been known as St. Peter’s fish. Recently, it has even been exported under this name. But, alas, the name is a misnomer.
Presumably the fish got its name because of an incident recorded in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 17:24–27). In this episode, the tax collectors come to Capernaum to collect the half-shekel Temple tax that each Jew was required to pay annually. Jesus tells Peter, “Go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and yourself.”
The musht was probably given the name St. Peter’s fish because of this miracle. However, this cannot have been the fish Peter caught with a hook and line. The reason is simple: Musht feeds on plankton and is not attracted by other food. It is therefore caught with nets, and not with hook and line. The fishermen on the lake have, since time immemorial, used a hook baited with sardine to fish for barbels, which are predators and bottom feeders. Peter almost surely caught a barbel.
(St. Peter caught a barbel, a fish in the carp family.)
A few chapters later, in Matthew 21, Jesus enters Jerusalem triumphant, as her King, on Palm Sunday before the Passion. He has been to Jerusalem many times, but this time, He clearly means business. Having no doubt caused some degree of shock and scandal among the powers over His overwhelming reception by the crowds as He rides into the City, Christ then shortly thereafter overturns the money-changers’ tables at the Temple courts, which, when one reads Matthew back closely, is arguably the singular event that raises the stakes for the Sanhedrin and solidifies their resolve to be rid of this Jesus problem once and for all. In Matthew 22, the Pharisees attempt to pit Jesus against the Romans on the matter most sensitive to every government, its taxes:
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.
In Matthew 26, Jesus — staying out of Jerusalem at night — is eating dinner in Bethany when a woman comes up to him and anoints Him, weeping, with a costly perfume from her alabaster box, in what is thought to be the equivalent of perhaps a year’s wages. Immediately after this, Matthew shifts to Judas Iscariot conspiring with the priests to betray Jesus for the thirty pieces, which is probably correctly understood as happening concurrently with the anointing on Wednesday evening. The next night, Thursday, will see Jesus at the Last Supper and in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the events of the night before come to play out:
While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.
Judas, however, eventually crawls back to the priests in the Temple on Friday morning, attempting to return the money that was given to him:
Early in the morning, all the chief priests and the elders of the people made their plans how to have Jesus executed. So they bound him, led him away and handed him over to Pilate the governor.
When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”
“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”
So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.
The chief priests picked up the coins and said, “It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.” So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”
Mr. Buchan explains the meaning of the thirty pieces of silver that Judas earns for betraying Christ:
Exodus 21:32 stipulates that the compensation for an injured slave [gored by a bull] is thirty shekels of silver. (Here a shekel is a measure of weight since there was no coinage in the time of Moses.) It is nearly impossible to disentangle what those ancient prophecies and prescriptions meant to Matthew and his auditors, but it seems to have something to do with value. There is a dramatic or ironical contrast between the slave and the Messiah, between what the High Priests thought Christ was worth and how the Christians valued him. [….]
At Capernaum, Jesus was reluctant to play the temple tribute because he foresaw what use it would be put to. Jesus saw, in a sort of monetary epiphany, his own agonising and shameful death. The puzzle is unraveled piece by piece: the strange miracle of the fish and the coin, the cleansing of the temple and the overturning of the money-changers tables, the box of ointment, and the thirty pieces of silver. Jesus will inevitably appear irrational, petulant, or sentimental unless we recognize that he saw, in money, the agent and symbol of his death. Which, after some hesitation and in regret, he embraces.
Mr. Buchan goes on to highlight a Rembrandt painting, “Judas Repentant, Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver”, painted in 1629:
From the moment it was painted, the picture was seen as something very special, inaugurating not just the painting of the Dutch Republic as an independent and self-conscious profession but an entirely new world of thoughts and conduct, what we would call modernity. Constantijn Huygens, the great contemporary historian of Dutch painting, saw the picture in 1630 and, in a Latin manuscript in the Royal Library in The Hague recorded an almost overwhelming excitement:
“With the painting of the repentant Judas bringing back to the High Priest the pieces of silver that were the price of Our Innocent Lord, I will illustrate what is true of all his work. […] [T]he posture and gestures of this one despairing Judas, leaving aside so many other stupendous figures [brought together] in a single painting, of this one Judas I say who, out of his mind and wailing, implores forgiveness yet holds no hope of it, or has at least no trace of hope upon his countenance; that haggard face, the hair torn from the head, the rent clothing, the forearms drawn in and the hands clasped tight together, stopping the flow of blood; flung blindly to his knees on the ground in an access of emotion, the pitiable horror of that totally twisted body — that I set against all the taste and refinement of the past, and I just wish that the brainless imbeciles could see it, those people who contend — a contention we have argued against elsewhere — that nowadays nothing is being done or said that has not been said before or that classical antiquity has not already achieved. […]”
Behind that glowing patriotic outburst is the conviction that Rembrandt had come to grips not only with Matthew but with the essence or label of modernity, which, it is already clear to the Dutch (and, to a lesser extent the Spanish and English), is money. […]
Above all, Rembrandt recognizes their power [of the coins at the center of the painting]. They are like grenades tossed into a crowded shelter, scattering the human figurines, the High Priest and the man wearing the Polish sable kolpak, into the shadows. […] Of the human beings only Judas can tolerate the propinquity of the coins, but at an unspeakable cost. He has ceased to be human. He has been reduced in his shame to the condition of a dog. He whimpers to be put out of his misery. The detail is shattering. Tiny brush-drips show blood on his head, neck and ear. Flecks of white suggest tears on his closed eyelids, foam on his lips teeth.
What Rembrandt has understood, and portrayed as nobody before or since, is the strangeness of money: that it breaks the chain of desire and effect. Money provokes people to act, for the sake of payment, in a fashion that, if they knew how the action would turn out, they would not contemplate. Rembrandt seizes the moment when the veil of money is torn asunder and wish and consequence come explosively together: Judas realizes that he has assassinated the Son of Man.
I’ve been thinking lately about Jesus’ last moments on the Cross, when He looks over to the Good Thief, known in legend as St. Dismas, who asks Jesus to remember him when He comes into the Kingdom. Jesus responds, in one of His more ethereal, haunting statements: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.” And I wonder — was Jesus thinking of Judas hanging from another tree, so much like St. Dismas, so much like Himself? Did Christ supernaturally hear the last, silent confession of Judas that he might have prayed as the rough-hewn rope — perhaps even a piece cut from the same net that caught the miracle of the fish — strangled him to death, snapped the bones in his neck? When Christ spoke to Dismas, was He giving absolution to Judas, too?
The angle of Judas is most often studied is the scandal of anyone at all betraying Christ: He who was without sin, He who was a healer of the sick and the lame, worker of miracles, raiser of the dead, the Son of the Living God, the Messiah long-awaited. But perhaps the less studied, but no less interesting, angle of Judas is the scandal of how easily — and how cheaply — we are bought.
God Incarnate is sold off to death for the price of a gored slave.
Like animals in a zoo whose existence we remark upon from this side of the glass, with all curiosity, we too paw at meaningless, shimmery trinkets, that the Father, in His infinite wisdom and knowledge, can see for what it truly is. Maybe the secret of the world-as-it-is is not so much that Heaven and Hell are very distinct and distant from our lives here on Earth, that is, on the material plane, but that that all the whole trifecta of Heaven-Earth-and-Hell is all very much uncomfortably smashed right up against each other, overfull even, and that these choices between these states are all much closer, thinner, than we would ever be comfortable fully realizing. The fate of a nation falls for one statesman’s brief moment of pleasure with a spy; and, for just $4.99 a month, a beautiful, intelligent woman will sell, to a horde of strangers, the sacred unveiling of the feminine. The ways and means by which we give up something so valuable for so little plays out across all dimensions of human experience like a kaleidoscope of fractals: the truth is we’d all give up the Kingdom of Heaven for an invitation to the right party.
I myself, of course, am no stranger to this. Few experiences have made this point of how cheaply we are bought more salient for me than a time when, a few years ago, I was regularly receiving some spiritual direction from a priest. We always started out with the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and, one day, my limbs folded into the antique chair in his office like origami as I scritched the ears of his sweet, glossy black Labrador companion, too ashamed to make eye contact with him directly as I spoke, I confessed to a particular habitual sin that emerged from very negative, dour, judgmental, severe, mean part of my personality.
“Well then, why do you keep doing that?” he asked.
I sighed. “I feel like if I were to stop… it wouldn’t be me anymore. That is who I am, maybe. I’m just hyper-judgmental and critical. I’ll be boring, or not myself, without it.”
He leaned forward, his forearms resting on his legs, and, peering intently at me over his rimless glasses, said in a grave, firm but loving half-whisper, “That’s not true. You’re so much more than that, Kristin.”
It was in that statement by the priest that I realized the cost of settling, of being less than what I was called to be: that it was not only some sort of sin against God in and of itself, but it was a failure to fully and properly manifest my own potentiality, to become someone holier, more worthy of Heaven, more aligned with the original design for my life as marked out by the Father. The individual choices themselves were very simple, very thin: to give charity instead of criticism, to refrain from dwelling too long on another’s mistakes, to shut up instead of mouthing off. It was those choices that slid me step by step closer to manifesting Hell here on Earth as opposed to Heaven, and what I was being asked to give up for Heaven was extremely, laughably small. In the five years that have passed since that confession, I have tried — but I am still weak, and sometimes all too easily capitulate to a lesser world.
So it is with me, and I cannot help but wonder how it plays out at scale: is the reason that I simultaneously feel, so near, both the poles of impending utter destruction and a coming paradise, because that is actually how it is? That it is only a few steps away from here to both Heaven and Hell, all depending on the most minute choices that we may make, all depending on how correctly — God, help us — we see the value?
“Will you not stay awake with Me one hour?” the pained Lord Jesus asks, and the answer is no, I probably won’t, I’ll betray You yet again and I’ll fall right asleep in the quiet under the olive trees in Gethsemane, but You will still die for me tomorrow anyway, because You — Who are all that is signified in money and attachments and longing of the human heart — love me.
And it is in this love, my Crucified One, that I hold fast to the hope that, despite everything, our beautiful weakness, our paper-thin fragility, You would rush in to harrow our hell, and we might somehow all be saved.
Foolish hearts, why will you wander
From a love so true and deep?
There is welcome for the sinner
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Savior,
There is healing in His blood.— Frederick W. Faber, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”
Bravo! 👏 ❤️🥲