I see a young man standing just
To the left us
Dazed
Hands to the open
Wounds to the chest
Asking
How long ago
Was Columbine?
Emilio Hoffman
2
Category Archives: history
Casey Kasem’s Dilemma
I used to listen to him regularly. I bet at one time or another most Americans have.
All those years, if you had told me Mr. Kasem would end up dying of thirst and starvation and medical neglect, I would have been shocked.
And yet no one besides his wife seems shocked now?
Our country has become a full-on fulfillment of sci-fi dystopia. We fight and argue for hardened child-rapists and -murders to have the right to die of old age but we let our judges rule against basic rights for the dying.
The right to water should not be withheld.
The right to nourishment is so basic. And yet time and again the most fragile members of our society are starved and dehydrated to death.
Shame on us.
We neither acknowledge the pain of the dying nor the ultimate cost to our souls of suborning justice to lower a hospital bill.
But who will pay for our lost compassion and our broken souls?
The Darkest Days
Jesus gave them plenty of warning–he said he was going to die. He warned of betrayal and grief. He told them things they did not want to hear.
Even so, the space between the last supper and the resurrection was almost unbearable.
Almost because he took the unbearable part.
Just short of unbearable.
That is the promise of Christian life–it might get pretty awful, but it will never be as awful as the atonement.
The grief of the disciples seems so dark. So painful. And their brokenness was pretty broken.
But
It is finished
And Sunday is one Son-rise away.
Dear Veronica Badamo,
In the fall of 1998 I lost you. Since I was your foster mom, I never had much legal right to you anyway.
What happened to your real mama. What happened to your whole family was awful. Criminal awful.
I was just a broken bystander.
You were, for one precious year, my baby. And when they took you away I was broken.
Barely survive broken.
Whole world changed broken.
I was pretty sure the people who took you would erase me, but I could not let you go without a benediction.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it. I knew that they would change your name so I called you Little One.
And for year I have been calling and calling, Little One.
I missed you. I missed the years, days, hours with you.
You were my lost treasure.
One good thing happened; losing you gave me a plumb line for love.
Anyone’s child could be you. Suddenly the world was full of Veronicas.
It was a painful gift. I would have rather had you, real you.
But I was the ghost. And I can give you these two promises–
I loved the world better because of you.
And I love you. Always, always, little one.
Adoption Stories
You should know that no matter how old you are, I see you as the little girl you once were.
I say this because you tell me you can’t ask Yahweh because you don’t believe in Him.
Because you don’t believe in Him is exactly why you should ask Him. What do you have to lose?
Don’t worry, I know you do have stuff to lose. So let me phrase the argument as a parable:
In 1998 I lost a daughter. In my mind I lost 3. She was a triplet. She was taken from me because I was a foster parent in a place where the laws of custody and adoption were not held in high regard.
Her mother wanted the babies back. If she could not have them herself, she was willing to allow us to adopt them. Brave mama, tough story.
They took the babies. Broke my heart. Drove me to desperate measures.
The last desperate measure was leaving a record.
If you go to the archives of the federal court of western Pennsylvania you will find my record–a quixotic lawsuit I filed so that if I could not get her back, at least she could find me.
If she ever looked.
If she wanted the true story.
Because I was pretty sure she would not find it without a little help from the public record.
And since she was just a baby when they took her, I knew that they could erase me pretty easily.
But I am real and I love her. I was her mother for awhile. And I have never stopped loving her and her family.
God is like that. He is always our first mother, our foster mother, who can then be erased by another story.
But never forget. The story of His love for you is in the public record. It is your job to find it.
I have known for years that my daughter had a choice to look for me or choose to look away.
But I can assure you that I am real.
And I have loved her since the day I met her.
Monuments in the water
Go back
Go back to the place you lost
Your courage
The battle
The war with fear
People were never intended
to walk on water/
Raise the dead
It requires things of us
We do not possess
Gravity
A voice to calm the storm
And turn ghosts into this
Man who calms the sea
5% You
In the end I decided to meet you
In the same place I found you
A waiting room near bridgewater
I squeeze myself into the Fisher-Price
Playhouse
And wedge myself into the picnic table alcove
Has your life always been this small?
You were Thing One
He was Thing Two
And you whirled in
Nonstop noise
Your first foster mother
Expressed infinite relief
In the space around her eyes
At the imminent prospect of
Handing all 200% of you
To me
I am handing it back.
But since 95% has been
Yours for years now
I give you all that is left:
An expression about turtles and hope
A song about going to town
All the way to town
A pocketful of french fries of indeterminate age and origin
And telling the truth on the one day it mattered.
Community College
You used to stand
In the doorway of winter
Receiving the Russian men
With their flowers and words of love
As transparent as their motives
Never letting on
You were a sucker
For their swarthy accents and abundant facial hair
But not that much
That you would fail
To mark each hour of rising light
Not yet
The full Twelve
He speaks of so casually
Before dark.
The Alabaster Jar: what we used to be
The story goes like this:
A woman who owes a great debt to Jesus takes her expensive dowry perfume and breaks it, then pours it over his head.
The scent wafts throughout the house. Beautiful, costly, extravagant.
She weeps and wipes his feet with her tears.
Humbling, intimate, kinda embarrassing.
Onlookers don’t get it.
Jesus does. He is the ultimate gift of love, she responds with the next dearest thing she possesses.
Because he has returned life to her.
Because he has redeemed her soul.
We have an impulse to scramble either to embrace or evade the expectations of our “love holiday.”
Perhaps we don’t need to do either.
Perhaps we already possess the most priceless gift of love–a perfume born of sacrifice and redemption.
More satisfying than chocolate, far more enduring than cut blooms.
The cost and burden of love is a Man who pours out the only life he has for us.
I have a theory about all of this–overpriced roses, fancy chocolates, even costly French perfumes are all nice, but the real symbols of love are often more like the tears at his feet–baby wipes, paper towels, mops, and detergent.
Often it is the daily, ordinary sacrifices we make, the humble and invisible things we do without any glory whatsoever, which in the end define love…
in the shadow of his Cross.
Dennis Rodman Proves MIB Was Right
I maintain that anyone who discounts the literal existence of hell is ignoring North Korea.
Now Dennis Rodman has taken things to a new level:
Carrying Light 