Tag Archives: Jesus

3/15/44 BC

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They say that JC fought hard until he saw Brutus among his assailants. How well-thought-out is death by a thousand cuts? And would it matter to us if he had called him child in the dying hour? These are my ides-of-March musings, as if we were not warned he was the god of war, not love hanging over us. I do small calculations–how old was the world when Julius Caesar died? How long until that other kind of King? Easter is coming, sure as each sign of spring, but there has never been a resurrection without some kind of dying first.

Eight Day Litany

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When Billy Graham died there was a minor brouhaha about a young woman who wished him fun in hell.

Whatever you or I may have thought about BG, he was an unabashed Eternalist. Stephen Hawking was not.

It is my belief that they both are now.

Which reminds me of a story…

A long time ago a rather counter-cultural day laborer was executed by the Romans apparently for some sort of political expediency.

His rag-tag followers were devastated (naturally), until a few days later when he came back from the dead and started appearing to people!!! (Rather supernaturally)

Although not initially to Thomas, a contemporary Aramaic friend of his, or Stephen Hawkins, a science-type from the 20th century B.C.E.

But after a bit,* he fixed this by showing up. For Thomas it came in the 20th chapter of the Good News of John. For Stephen it happened today.

Worship science all you want, or money or sex or power or fear.

But on the day we die we all turn into Eternalists…regardless of whether the science was every really on our side or not.

John 20, 21

*eight days

Nina and the Russian Brides

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Like you I dread

The cascade of terrible deals waiting each day in the junk folder of a yahoo account

Offers for things I don’t want, need, fear

Including Nina’s daily offer of

Gorgeous Russian brides

(Which raises so many questions)

I decide to believe

They are all nesting dolls

With the hopefully-hypothetical Nina the biggest mama doll

Seamed at the waist so

Each smaller iteration can come out

With her own

Painted-on wedding dress, bouquet of flowers

in a line they become their own wedding procession

Waiting for Someone to breath on them

Immortal life

Making us all real.

Parable of the jack pot

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Nose running, he rifles through piles of unfolded clothes looking not for the library books which are due today but for everyday handkerchiefs you say you are lonely and wish you had someone to talk to the trick is to stay amicable strangers he finds nasal-remedy-counter-wiping-dish-cleaning-spill-absorbing bits of cut-up-cotton beneath the burnished sink exclaiming I hit the jackpot! As if he had–the neon casino, the human animals trained on slot machine monotonies and the tall handsome kid who just needs a piece of something to blow his nose hitting jackpot with a cascade of washcloths emerging from whatever machine or game or apparatus you might win them from

You might win them and not know you had won because you don’t expect things you win to be old, worn, ordinary

Hoping instead for quarters, bright metonymical poker chips things of value in the gambling sense of course bright bits of new, new noses, running, treasury things, hit-or-miss, a gamble,

Stranger.

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.

How to clean a toilet

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When I tell you I found the old mushroom-colored sweatshirt which saw us through thick and thin you will know I am talking about the way the Romans used to have it done, long pole, wad of cloth, vinegar soaked as we raise it to the real hero, his naked pain, the way he eschews ordinary safety for a stretched-to-the-limits agony

I take the brush, add the cleanser, wipe it all down with an uneasy litany

Drab for color

Old for young

Plain for beautiful

Forgotten for remembered

He says

Me for you

Death for life

Life, everlasting.

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.

One Thing

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The lady in the picture is a fraction of her whole-a bit of glasses, hair like mine.  Did she shape the assignment or was it the Wizard of Oz for freshman comp?  I don’t know, but as with so many words shaped into injunctions it sticks in my craw–pick the one thing?  Not a good thing?  Not one among brothers? I suspect literary ambush, which then feels like literary paranoia, but I kick around/go into the weeds with this one thing-

You.  You are the one thing.  The voice in my head steadying my coward’s heart. My man, Jesus I tell Madeline about that universal division of time into before and after You.

Like if you believed in evolution it would be 50 billion, million zillion years BCE, and those sylphish, wispy 2000 after.

After you.

Let me just

Tag along after you

Big brother

Strong tower

Never-leave-me God