Psalm of the Prodigal Son: The 100th Sheep He Would Not Let Go by Jeff Callaway

Psalm of the Prodigal Son: The 100th Sheep He Would Not Let Go

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

For Jaxen & Casady

"I will arise, and will go to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee." — Luke 15:18 (Douay-Rheims)

O Lord of every morning I have ever woken into, of every country road I have ever walked without knowing You walked it too, of every small-town east Texas sky that burned orange and red above the pines before I knew enough to call that fire Your name—

I did not choose to be born. I did not select the coordinates of my beginning. You planted me in red clay Texas soil, in a town small enough that everyone knew your father's name, and You called that a gift, though I would spend forty years not understanding the language You wrapped it in.

What shall I render to Thee, O Lord, for all the things Thou hast rendered unto me?

I come before You now not as a man who has figured it all out. I come before You as a man who ran as far as his legs could carry him into every darkness that would take him, and found You waiting at the bottom of every one.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing. That is the testimony.

Before I knew the shape of my own face I was being held. Before I had language I was being loved. You gave me a mother whose hands knew how to comfort and a father whose mind was a cathedral of practical wisdom, a man who provided without complaint, who gave his family everything we needed and called it ordinary— which is the rarest kind of abundance.

You gave me both their names: Monroe on the left side, Callaway on the right, a great extended clan of cousins and aunts and uncles who filled every holiday with the noise of belonging, who taught me without knowing it what it means to be tethered to something larger than yourself.

We were poor enough to be grateful and safe enough to be free, and that is a mercy most of the world never tastes.

I ran through the streets of Malakoff like I owned the ground beneath my feet. I played baseball from the time I could hold a bat all the way up into high school, standing in the outfield under east Texas summer sun, the kind of heat that presses down like a blessing you haven't earned yet.

I had friends the way a river has banks— they gave me shape, they gave me direction, and I did not know then how much I would need them because I did not yet know how badly the road ahead would bend.

O God, You gave me a mind that moved faster than most. I did not ask for it. I did not earn the intelligence the testers wrote down on their sheets. You handed it to me like a loaded weapon and then You watched me point it in every wrong direction for thirty years, and still You did not take it back.

That is mercy. That is the specific and terrifying patience of God.

I was nine years old when I walked the aisle. Brother White stood at the front of that Baptist church and I did not fully understand what I was walking toward, but something in me moved, and something in me meant it, and You received it, Lord— not because the denomination was right but because the heart of a nine-year-old boy does not know how to be theological, it only knows how to say yes.

You baptized me in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and that water stayed on me through things that should have drowned a man.

I did not understand until decades later that a valid baptism is not cancelled by stupidity, that the seal You place on a soul does not dissolve in heroin, does not wash off in the beds of strangers, does not peel away in prison cells or ritual circles drawn in the dark.

The Church Fathers knew this. Origen wrote that God's mercy pursues the sinner the way a shepherd tracks a single lost sheep across every terrain, through every weather, over every terrain that the sheep in its foolishness chooses. Saint Augustine, who knew the wilderness of the body better than most, wrote that our heart is restless until it rests in Thee— and I was the living proof of that sentence for forty years.

But I did not know any of that yet. I only knew that something felt false in the church, that the adults who sang the loudest seemed to live the smallest, that the holiness on Sunday morning had a different smell than the holiness I was hungry for.

I was wrong about the conclusion I drew from that observation. The falseness I saw was in men, not in God. The failure belonged to the fallen, not to the Faith. But I was young and furious and looking for an exit, and the exit I found led me somewhere I cannot fully describe even now, with all the language I have gathered since.

When I was fourteen I fell in love for the first time, and it was as pure and frightening and real as anything I have ever felt since. She was sweet and she was patient and she taught me that love is not supposed to hurt, that it is supposed to feel like standing in clean air after years of smoke.

Then my father was promoted. Then we moved to Tyler. Then she was gone.

I did not process this the way a healthy boy processes loss. I stored it somewhere deep and dark and it became a kind of permission— permission to not care, permission to take what I could reach, permission to stop believing in the clean and start living in the wreckage.

O Lord, You watched this happen. You watched me choose the darkness the way a man chooses a back road because the highway has too many rules.

I will not pretend the darkness did not call to me. I will not make myself more innocent than I was. I went looking for it. I found it. I opened the door, I stepped inside, and I closed it behind me.

At fifteen I began practicing something I will call what it was: Satanism. Not the theatrical kind. Not the adolescent rebellion of borrowed imagery and dramatic posture. The private kind. The secret kind. The kind where you tell no one because the power requires darkness to contain it— or so you tell yourself, which is what the darkness tells you to tell yourself.

And things happened. Doors opened that should not have opened. Things arrived that I had called by name. I received what I asked for, Lord— and what I asked for was everything wrong, and You let the consequences educate me, which is a kind of curriculum I would not recommend but cannot deny was thorough.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five I slept with a hundred and seventy-three women. I wrote their names in a book because I needed proof that I existed, that I meant something to someone, even briefly, even wrongly.

I tried every drug that the decade offered. I rode the psychedelics to the outer edges of what the mind can hold and came back with pieces of it still attached to me, fragments of something vast and dark and enormous that I spent years trying to name and never quite could in the language of ordinary men.

I shot what I have calculated to be close to a million dollars of heroin into my arm across the years when I should have been building something, across the years when other men were laying foundations.

And through all of it—Lord— I was writing. You kept that burning. In the worst years, in the worst rooms, in the worst mornings after the worst nights, the poetry was still there. You preserved it the way You preserve a lamp in a storm— cupped it in something I could not see, kept the flame from going out when by every natural right it should have.

I did not understand then that You were doing this. I thought it was just a habit, just a nervous tic of the intellect. But there is no such thing as a gift from God that God forgets about. You planted the word in me when I was young and even the heroin could not uproot it. Even the rituals could not silence it. The word You placed in me held its ground through thirty years of occupation.

At twenty-five, Lord, the bill came due. I had been picking psilocybin mushrooms and moving pounds of them in Dallas and they caught me with the weight of the law and I went to prison for the first time.

It did not stop me. It slowed me. It gave me time to think, which was dangerous, because thinking without You is just a man in a room arguing with his own echo.

I came out and I went back in.

The second time was in Athens, Texas, in a motel room on the day Johnny Cash died— September 12, 2003— cocaine and methamphetamine mixed together, three syringes in my pocket, the whole architecture of destruction visible to the arresting officers in a single glance.

Johnny Cash died that day. I did not die that day.

That is Your work, Lord, not mine. I do not know why You kept me alive in rooms where other men did not survive. I do not know why the overdoses did not take me. I do not know why the needle never found the wrong vein on the wrong night when by all statistical probability it should have.

But I know that it was not luck. I know that a nine-year-old boy's yes had been recorded somewhere in the ledger of heaven, and the recording had not been deleted, and the Recording Keeper had not forgotten whose name was on the line.

In prison the second time I began to focus. I began to look at the faces around me— men broken in ways I recognized, men who had chosen the same exits I had chosen and arrived at the same locked gate— and I began to think about a different life.

Not yet a holy one. Not yet a God-centered one. But a straighter one. A life where I might have a family. Where I might have a son. Where I might write something that mattered to someone who was not also currently incarcerated.

You were planting even that, Lord. Even the prison was a seed bed. Even the concrete and the steel and the fluorescent light at two in the morning. Even the voices of lost men speaking their losses into the dark.

At thirty I met Casady.

She was the love I had been circling since the girl in Malakoff, the kind of love that is made of the same material as a person's soul— not just attraction, not just chemistry, but recognition, the way a man recognizes a landmark he has never seen because he has been told all his life it is where he belongs.

Five years later, in what I can only call an act of Your specific grace, we had a son.

Lord, I am going to stop here and say this plainly: Jaxen Callaway is the most important human being You ever placed in my life. Before the vision, before the Church, before the priest's prayer— it was Jaxen. You sent him first. You sent him as the early warning, the trumpet before the angel, the first gray light at the edge of the sky before the full dawn breaks.

When I held that boy I understood for the first time that love is not about what you receive. It is about what you would give everything for without a moment of calculation, without a ledger, without a negotiation, without a single reservation.

I stopped the hardest drugs the day he was real to me. I stopped the needles. I stopped the things that had been killing me for fifteen years. Not because I found willpower. I had never had willpower. I stopped because something in me knew that I could not be that man and be his father at the same time, and there was no version of me that would choose anything over him.

Casady and I eventually parted ways as a couple, but we never parted ways as parents, and we never parted ways as friends. She is one of the great blessings of my life. Not every love story ends in a wedding. Some love stories end in something better— in two people choosing their child over their wounds, choosing cooperation over bitterness, choosing to be good to each other because a small person is watching and learning from every choice you make what love is supposed to look like.

We gave Jaxen that. In all the wreckage we had each made of ourselves separately, we gave him that together.

Lord, I know that was You. I know You held that co-parenting arrangement together the same way You held everything else together— invisibly, stubbornly, without ever insisting on the credit.

But then came the suffering.

I will not wrap it in language that makes it smaller than it was.

The stroke came first— the body's first hard warning that permanence is an illusion, that the blood moving through the architecture of a man is moving at Your pleasure and not his own.

Then the heart attack, the organ that had survived three decades of damage finally announcing that it had limits, that even the most resilient muscle will present its bill eventually.

Then the lung collapsed— pleural effusion, fluid filling the space around it, the body displacing the essential with the wrong substance, which is a kind of physical parable for everything I had been doing with my life.

The hernias came. One after another. The body tallying up the debt of decades, itemizing what it had absorbed in silence and delivering the invoice all at once.

And then the darkness came that was worse than all of them.

The Dark Night of the Soul—Saint John of the Cross named it, and he named it accurately: it is not depression though it looks like it from the outside. It is not grief though it contains grief. It is the moment when God withdraws the consolations and leaves a man alone with himself in the full, unfiltered light of what he actually is— without the drugs to blur the edges, without the women to distract from the center, without even the poetry to contain what is boiling up from below.

Saint John of the Cross endured this stripping. Saint Teresa of Ávila described the soul in its state of spiritual desolation as a castle whose rooms have been emptied. I did not know these things then. I only knew the emptiness.

I stood in that darkness and I asked You why. I had been clean for years and still the suffering had not stopped. I had tried to be a better man and still the body was failing. I had loved my son with everything I had and still felt like a man disappearing into himself, becoming less and less substantial, until the question of whether to continue stopped being unthinkable and became thinkable.

I thought about ending it.

Lord, I am telling You this not because You do not know— You know everything, down to the number of the hairs and the number of the days— but because I want the record to show that even at the very bottom of the very bottom, there was something in me that had not agreed to die. That hesitation—that last, barely surviving resistance— was the hem of Your garment. I reached for it in the dark without knowing what I was reaching for.

And then she came.

The world went dark in a way that the world does not go dark in ordinary darkness. This was a different absence of light— not the absence of the sun but the presence of something that cleared the room of everything not holy, the way fire clears a field of everything that is not essential.

She was robed in white. A white that has no comparison in anything I have ever seen in this world, before or since. Her crown was gold and it was the crown of a Queen— which is what she is. The Queen of Heaven, the Mother of the Lord, the Woman clothed with the sun that Saint John saw on Patmos, the one the Church has called Mediatrix and Advocate since the earliest Fathers put language to the mystery.

She spoke.

She told me it was not my time. She told me there was more to do. She told me the graces were waiting if I would come back to Him. And then she showed me what I had done.

Not in accusation. Not in the voice of a prosecutor. In truth. The way a mother shows a child the wound he has made not to shame him but so that the healing can begin with honesty, so that the mercy can be applied to the exact place that needs it.

She showed me the rituals I had performed in the dark. She showed me the rooms. She showed me the women I had used. She showed me the needle. She showed me the prayers I had directed toward the wrong name in the wrong direction. And she let me feel—just a fraction of it, Lord, just the edge— how much this had offended her Son.

I wept.

I have wept at many things in my life— at the end of relationships, at the loss of freedom, at the sight of my son sleeping. But this weeping was different. This was the weeping of a man who finally understood the full weight of what he had carried and what it had cost Someone else to carry it for him without being asked, without being thanked, for thirty years.

I said I was sorry.

She looked at me. She looked at me the way no woman has ever looked at me— not with desire, not with pity, not with judgment— but with a love so specific and steady and unwavering that it could only have come from the Woman who learned to love by being the first to say yes to God, by standing at the foot of the Cross without running, by receiving the dead body of her Son into her arms and not abandoning the mission even then.

She said: He died for you.

Three words. Lord, three words. The whole Gospel in three words, spoken to a man who had done everything in his power to make himself the least deserving recipient.

And then she turned, and she showed me to You.

You were there. Robed. Crowned. Present.

But not distant— which is what I had always assumed You would be, always assumed the holy was also the cold, the majestic also the untouchable, the sovereign also the removed.

You were not cold. You were not distant.

You looked into me the way no human being has ever been able to look into me— past the words I use to manage people, past the intelligence I deploy to keep myself hidden, past the poetry and the performance and the curated versions of Jeff Callaway that I have been maintaining since I was fifteen— straight down through all of it into the thing underneath all of it. The boy who walked the aisle. The boy who meant it. The boy who had been lost for thirty years and was standing in the dark at the end of his rope not knowing that the end of the rope was exactly where You had been waiting.

And You said my name.

Jeffrey.

Not as an accusation. As a reclamation. The way You called Lazarus from the tomb— not announcing a judgment but issuing an invitation back to life.

You said: I forgive you for all of this.

Lord. Lord, Lord, Lord.

What does a man do with a forgiveness that large? He does not analyze it. He cannot negotiate it or qualify it or spend time deciding whether he deserves it. He receives it. He stands in it the way a man stands in the first rain after a drought so long he had begun to believe the sky had forgotten how to open— face up, arms out, not asking how the rain works, not calculating the rainfall measurement, just grateful beyond calculation that it is falling.

You said: if you ever consider doing what you were just thinking of doing, I will turn My face away. I will not know you.

And I heard that warning not as cruelty but as the love of a Father who has spent too much keeping a prodigal son alive through three decades of darkness to watch him throw away the grace of the return.

And she stood beside You—Your Mother— and she said five words that I will carry to my grave:

Do everything He tells you.

Then they were gone. And I was in my room. And I was not the same man.

The next morning I drove to the Catholic Church.

I have been trying to explain this decision to myself ever since and the only explanation I have found is this: she led me there. The same way she has always led people to her Son— quietly, without fanfare, by her very presence indicating the direction, by everything about her pointing away from herself and toward Him.

The Catechism confirms this: Mary is the Theotokos, the God-bearer, and every grace she dispenses is a grace that flows through her from her Son. She does not hold the light. She directs the eye to the light. She did exactly that for me.

The priest listened. I told him everything. Not the curated version. Not the dinner-party version. Not the version I might write someday in a memoir with the most disturbing parts softened. Everything. The rituals. The needles. The names in the book. The things I had invited in the dark. Everything.

He prayed over me.

And Lord— this is the part I cannot fully contain in language— something left. Things that had been attached to me for years, presences I had felt but never named, entities that had made themselves at home in the rooms of my life because I had invited them and never once formally rescinded the invitation— they fell away.

Like a coat sliding off a man's shoulders. Like chains not broken but dissolved. Like a pressure that has been building for so long you stopped noticing it was there until the moment it is gone and suddenly you can breathe at a depth you had forgotten was possible.

I stood in the light coming through the stained glass window. I stood in that colored and fractured and gloriously impractical light— red, blue, gold, the colors of a mystery I was only beginning to enter— and I was clean in a way I had never been clean before.

Not the clean of sobriety, which I had known. Not the clean of behavioral modification or self-improvement. The clean of absolution. The clean of something having been done for me that I could not have done for myself in ten thousand hours of effort.

The Catechism calls the sacrament of Penance a liturgical action. That is accurate and it is also too small. What happened in that room was not merely liturgical. It was a resurrection. A man who had been dead in all the ways that matter stood up and blinked in the light of a Texas afternoon coming through the colored glass of a small-town Catholic church and said: I am here. What do You want me to do?

And You answered.

You sent me back to school at forty-five. The same college I walked out of at nineteen with nothing but a bad attitude and a head full of wrong ideas— I walked back in and I finished. A paralegal degree. An accounting degree. The same mind that had once catalogued the chemical compositions of illegal substances and memorized the operating hours of dealers in four cities now learning the architecture of law and finance.

You do not waste the mind You made. Even when the man wastes it for thirty years, You do not waste it. You wait for the man to stop wasting it and then You put it to work on something that will last.

You gave me a career. Not a job to endure. A vocation—a calling within a calling. Managing housing for the elderly, the disabled, the poor— two complexes in two small Texas towns, the kind of people who have nowhere else to go and need someone who will actually show up, who will look them in the eye, who will not process them like paperwork but will treat them like they are made in the image of God.

Because they are. Because I know what it feels like to need someone to believe that about you when you cannot believe it about yourself.

I show up. I actually care. I know I can only do this because I have been where they have been. Not the same particulars. But the same bottom. The same feeling of having nothing and being at the mercy of other people's decisions about your life and needing someone—just one person— to look you in the eye and treat you like you matter.

I look them in the eye. I treat them like they matter. Because You looked me in the eye when I was at my absolute worst and You called me by name and You told me I was forgiven. That is the source code. Everything I do now runs on that.

Two churches hold me now. Mary Queen of Heaven in Malakoff. Saint Edward's in Athens.

The people in those pews are not fake. This is not a thing I say easily. I spent decades watching fake faith and it is what drove me off a cliff. The people in those pews are actually living it— the daily Mass, the rosary, the acts of charity conducted quietly with no audience and no Instagram documentation— the quiet and stunning work of people who have let the Gospel change them in the small, daily, grinding, unglamorous ways that are harder than the dramatic ones.

I sit among them and I receive the Eucharist and every time—every single time— something moves in me that has no name in English.

Saint Thomas Aquinas spent the full force of his magnificent mind on what happens at the altar. He built the Summa Theologica, one of the greatest intellectual structures any human being has ever assembled. And near the end of his life, after a mystical experience at prayer, he said that everything he had written was like straw compared to what he had been shown.

I understand that, Lord. Not because I am Thomas Aquinas. But because I have been shown things that cannot be argued with, cannot be unpacked, cannot be reduced to a dissertation— things that can only be received in the posture of a man on his knees.

The Catechism calls the Eucharist the source and summit of Christian life. I receive that summit with two hands open and a history that makes me understand exactly why it should not be casually approached, why the Church builds cathedrals for it, why the angels cover their faces before it.

There are sins I carry, Lord. I carry them to Confession. I lay them down. You remove them. Then I carry them again in memory— not in guilt, not in the crippling and self-centered way— but in the honest awareness of what I was and what that cost other people who did not ask to be part of my story.

The women. I used them. Some of them wanted something real from me and I gave them something counterfeit because I had nothing real to give and no honest language to say so.

The drugs. Every dollar spent went somewhere it should not have gone, built something it should not have built, funded the mechanics of other people's destruction, took years from a life that had been given for better purposes.

The rituals. Lord, the rituals. I have made a full and complete confession of these. The priest absolved me. The Church received me. You forgave me. But I will never stop being grateful for that forgiveness because I know what I was asking to be forgiven for. I know the depth of the offense. I know the cost of the pardon. I know that the Cross is not a metaphor. I know it in a way that cannot be debated because I have been to the bottom of the debt and I have seen the receipt— written not in ink but in the wounds of a King who had every reason to let me have what I deserved and instead absorbed it Himself.

Some people come to God clean. They come to God unfallen, which is a different kind of grace.

But I know something they do not know. I know what the forgiveness costs. I know what it feels like to stand in a room where the price has already been paid and to feel the payment clearing the ledger in real time. I know that knowledge in the muscle of it, in the bone of it.

And that knowledge, which came from going to the absolute worst places a man can go— that is a blessing. That is a strange and hard-won and irreplaceable blessing. God did not let my sins happen without their punishment. He did not let my darkness go unreckoned. But He also did not let my sins happen without extracting from them something I could not have gotten any other way— a knowledge of the real weight of grace that only a man who has needed it desperately can fully carry.

Jaxen is fifteen now.

He makes a 98 in Algebra and a 99 in Geometry. He can pick up any instrument you set before him and make it speak the language it was made to speak. He is recording his own music— playing every instrument himself— a fifteen-year-old building something in sound that most adults spend their whole lives searching for and never quite find.

He is kind. He is honest. He loves his mother and his father without the complications that accumulate in children of broken homes when the parents decide their wounds matter more than their child. We decided otherwise. Or rather—Lord—You decided otherwise, and then You made us into people capable of carrying that decision out.

Casady is still my best friend. That is not a thing most people understand when I tell them. But most people have not seen what happens when two broken people decide that a child's wholeness is more important than their own bitterness.

The result of that decision is Jaxen Callaway. The result of that decision is a fifteen-year-old boy who knows he is loved, who moves through the world without the shrapnel of his parents' war in his chest, who can play music that moves people and still walk into school the next morning and get a 99 in Geometry.

He is my evidence of God. He is my ongoing argument for grace. He is the thing that happened when I chose one right thing in the middle of thirty years of wrong things— and God took that one right thing and built something out of it that I could never have planned.

My son is my evidence of God. My vision is my encounter with God. My Church is my home in God.

I have a bank account that does not terrify me. I have insurance—health, dental— which is a thing I did not have at forty-four when the heart gave out. I have a retirement account. I have a Jeep—a brand new Jeep— the first new vehicle I have ever owned in forty-seven years of life, sitting in the parking lot like a small and almost embarrassingly concrete announcement that the days of hiding and scraping and surviving on the margins are done.

I know these are blessings because I know what the opposite feels like. I have slept in places where the ceiling was too low and the hope was lower. I have owned nothing and borrowed everything and spent decades being the man you cannot trust with anything because he will disappear with it or destroy it.

That man is still in me somewhere. I do not pretend he is gone. I simply have something now that is stronger than he is— something that does not fluctuate with mood or circumstance, something that was placed in me in a vision by the hands of a Queen and confirmed in a priest's prayer in a Texas church and renewed every Sunday at the altar where the living God comes down.

O Lord, who placed me in east Texas red clay and pine country, who gave me a mother's hands and a father's mind, who saw to it that a Baptist preacher named Brother White was standing at the front of a church on the right morning when a nine-year-old boy's heart was ready and did not know it—

O Lord, who preserved me through the heroin years and the ritual years and the prison years and the wasteland of the sexual wilderness where I searched for the thing that only You can give in every place that was not You—

O Lord, who sent me a son before I was ready for one and then made me ready for him by the sheer weight of his arrival—

O Lord, who let the body break in enough places that I could no longer pretend I was indestructible, could no longer sustain the performance of a man who does not need help—

O Lord, who sent Your Mother when I was out of options and standing at the edge— who sent her when words had failed, when philosophy had failed, when every substitute for You had failed—

O Lord, who spoke my name and meant it as a mercy and not a verdict—

O Lord, who led me to a priest in a small Texas town and let me feel the weight of thirty years of darkness lift off my shoulders in a room lit by colored light falling through the image of Your saints—

I am here. Still here. Imperfect, still learning, still sometimes feeling the old roads call to me the way a former road remembers the shape of a man's feet— but here.

Celibate and trying. Catholic and grateful. A father who shows up. A property manager who actually cares. A poet who uses the word instead of the needle. A man who goes to Mass and means it, who kneels at the Consecration and is not performing kneeling but is kneeling because there is nothing else to do in the presence of what happens on that altar.

This is not the life I designed. I am not clever enough to have designed this life. This is what happens when God takes a ruined blueprint and builds something from it anyway— not despite the damage but through it, using the cracks as load-bearing elements, the fractures as the lines where the light gets in, the scars as the specific evidence of a mercy that did not look away.

What shall I render to Thee, O Lord?

I will render this. The psalm of it. The honest and undecorated testimony of a man who ran from You for thirty years and could not outrun You.

I will render the career of caring for the people You called blessed— the poor, the sick, the elderly, the forgotten. I will show up for them the way You showed up for me— not perfectly, not without failure, but persistently, stubbornly, because someone has to be the person who will not stop showing up.

I will render the fatherhood. I will keep showing up for Jaxen the way You kept showing up for me when I gave You every reason to let me go.

I will render the poetry. All of it. Every word. Given back to You—the only Source I have ever found that can hold a line long enough to mean something, the only ground from which anything real has ever grown in me.

I will render the Confession. I will keep going back. Every week. Every time the weight requires it. Not as a formality. As the drain. As the mercy made physical. As the forgiveness given a time and a place and a human voice so that a man like me— a man who has always needed things to be concrete, who has never been good with abstraction— can receive it into his actual hands.

I will render the Mass. Every Sunday and more. Sitting in the pew of Mary Queen of Heaven in Malakoff. Kneeling at Saint Edward's in Athens. With the people who are not performing faith but living it in the difficult, unglamorous, daily ways that the saints tell us is the only way it works.

I will render this broken, reconstructed, still-healing, still-grateful life back to You for as long as You leave it in my hands.

And when the day comes— whenever that day comes— when the body that has already given so much warning delivers the final notice, when the heart that stopped and started and was given back stops for the last time, when the lungs that filled with the wrong fluid exhale for the last and right time—

I do not ask for a spectacular death. I do not ask for a dramatic end. I ask only for a priest. I ask only for the last rites. I ask only that the sacraments be present at the door.

And I ask that You receive me the way You received the prodigal son in the parable Your Son told— not asking for an accounting of the years, not presenting the spreadsheet of the waste, not tallying the cost of the retrieval mission— just running down the road and putting Your arms around him before he can finish the speech he had prepared.

Lord, I have eaten at so many wrong tables. I have drunk from so many poisoned cups. I am ready for the right table. I am ready for the cup that does not kill but transforms the one who drinks it.

Until then, I am here. I am Yours. I am trying. I am grateful beyond what language was built to hold for every single moment of this strange, ruined, redeemed, red-dirt east Texas Catholic life.

Blessed is the Lord who searches until He finds. Blessed is the Lord who waits at the bottom of every darkness a man is capable of entering. Blessed is the Lord who knows a man's name even when the man has spent thirty years doing everything in his power to forget God's. Blessed is the Lord who sends His Mother when words are no longer sufficient and a presence is required. Blessed is the Lord who speaks forgiveness into a face that arrived expecting condemnation. Blessed is the Lord who takes the ruined blueprint and builds something anyway. Blessed is the Lord who puts a son in a broken man's arms and lets the son teach the father what love was supposed to be from the very beginning. Blessed is the Lord of small Texas towns and Dallas jail cells and Athens motel rooms and hospital beds and prison corridors and psychedelic wilderness. Blessed is the Lord of the stained glass and the Eucharist and the confessional and the priest's prayer and the weight falling away and the first clean breath a man takes on the other side of thirty years of suffocation. Blessed is the Lord of the new Jeep and the savings account and the retirement fund— yes, even these, even the ordinary and embarrassingly material evidences of a life finally stabilized, finally held together by the right things— blessed, blessed, blessed.

All of it. Every last broken and beautiful and improbable bit of it.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord from this day forward and into whatever remains of the days He has numbered, and into whatever comes after what remains.

I will praise Him. I will not stop praising Him. He has been too faithful for me to stop. He has traveled too far to retrieve what was lost for the lost thing to do anything now except shine in gratitude and tell the truth about where it has been and what it cost the One who came for it.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

Amen.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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