Category Archives: God

You worm Jacob

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Isaiah 41:14 NIV

[14] Do not be afraid, you worm Jacob, little Israel, do not fear, for I myself will help you,” declares the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

Badass Isaiah walks naked through the streets of Jerusalem, stopping occasionally for a tuna sandwich and thinking about clothes. Clothes of the invisible God. Clothes of the kinsman-redeemer. Clothes eventually gambled away at the foot of an impossible Cross.

Who trades a God for a worm? Who does that?

A fisherman, I guess.

Luke 5:10-11

Winter Storm

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Over my shoulder I hear the PBS lady tell my sons about blizzards, how they are just snow storms unless the wind is strong and fast. Here in Texas we have driving rain, not driven snow, and it is the percussive light which wakes the dogs in the night. Poised for a fight. Hurricanes have the eyes of Quint’s soulless sharks as they roll across the landscape of childhood and wakefulness I will momentarily regret the home I left in fear. Regret what I did not leave there. Regret what I did, but not the winds. The winds around the eye, the deceptively calm eye, of every storm that changes the landscape

Of who we once were.

Darling-I-Count-Sheep

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This started as a break up but ended with old friend, Wakefulness here in the dark, in the storm

It was a dark and stormy night! But it was the dogs that kept me up

Dogs of the past

Dogs of war

That dog whose name* I can’t remember who re-enacted classics like The Prince and the Pauper.

When names and sleep elude you, there are sheep. They start out chalky, outlined, and two dimensional, but they elaborate

In depth, complexity, and general fluffiness, but also about the weather, dogs barking at night, and all the ways it was and wasn’t my fault this chance we took hurt so much.

*Wishbone

Thigh-High Hell

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Lauren Duca, famous for “thigh-high” politics and damning people to hell, has reminded me of a very old joke-

A person is ushered into hell and told to choose between two rooms. In one people appeared to be stuck head-first in a solid foot of manure. In the other they are standing, with coffee mugs, in several feet of manure. Upon reflection the newbie chooses the second option. As soon as soon as the choice is made, a disembodied voice says, “coffee break over, get back on your heads!”

But in all seriousness, hell is no joke. Neither is death or AIDS or anti-semitism, or abortion or sexism or segregation or war.

Lauren’s comments about Graham illuminate her anger and her politics. Calling anyone an epithet like “shit” or “bitch” is an act of dehumanization and should elicit questions about why the speaker is that angry.

So I read Graham’s biography. He was just a guy. He did some brave things, he made some big mistakes. He was flawed and occasionally made public comments he regretted or private comments he regretted even more. A public figure of mixed repute who said or did things he sometimes regretted–not that different than Lauren Duca.

By my estimation Duca is in her 20s, which means she is a cool three-quarters of a century younger than Graham. She is young, young and apparently angry.

I wonder if Duca would have said what she did had she been older or done some research on literal hells.

I am a lot older than Duca and a lot younger than Graham. At fifty my regrets come back to me, chalky outlined ghosts of all my squalor, all my terrible, ordinary sins.

What if hell were just that? No fire and brimstone, just all our dead deeds come back to us forever. Just all our paid-for-with-this-glib-t-shirt dead.

We would wish for what Graham claimed to have–

An unequivocal Redeemer.

Job 19:25 NIV

[25] I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.

Eldest Child

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Something about Elvis impersonators, well-fed dogs, and raffles for them rattles around my head–keep asking myself what what can I give them? What can I do? When you were born I was still in college, George HW was president, both Princess Diana and Mother Theresa were still alive.

So many years of hunger.

I wish I could make it all better, like one of those chubby, diminutive fairy godmothers–change the immutable curse into a deep slumber, when you wake up

Wipe away all the tears from your eyes

Prepare a table just for you,

Things any decent mom would do…

Psalm 146:7 NIV

[7] He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free,

The Winter Swimmers

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They are out there somewhere still, three, sometimes four, figures and a dog who has long gone, gone past the snake on the path, gone past all the wounds of time, leaving snapshots of a good dog all the while the children howl full wind

They knew no shelter from the start

Miles of lonely nothing

No stones, bread crumbs, or birds to

Guide them back

Home.

Reflective Light

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Whether before or after the flock of cranes fly upstream at dusk, the moon catches its own face in the watercup waves

One three-quarter cameo dances into many

silvery-petalled-moons spun from the

Streaming coattails of a brooding sun

who has just

strode

up the river bank, across the burnished rooftops, past the crayoned, arbitrary horizon

Good-bye he said, over broad, burning shoulders,

leaving me all this lovely

reflective light.

He speaks to us in parables

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I leave the shower curtain on the living room floor and the little boy who does and does not resemble us takes it up, exclaiming, the periodic table! with the remains of his little boy voice.

Later, after forgetting and days of heavy gravity, I lift the curtain and pierce each hole again, arms growing heavy-diagonally, the way trees grow.

Admire the way they have been ordered each in their brightly colored boxes. Iron, gold, carbon, oxygen, and the exotic ones we seem to have conjured to fill up the empty places.

  • There whether we see or not.
  • Unchanged by our indifference.
  • Three or more dimensional even if we only see them flat.
  • Elements and symbols for when full words seem to be not enough

He speaks to us in parables.

Tara Lynn Badamo

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Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…

In the unassuming kitchen of God

Singing-

someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!

“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-

He talks beauty and parable

All tears wiped away.