Texas Outlaw Psalm: A Prayer for the Forgotten American by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Psalm: A Prayer for the Forgotten American

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

I. The Cry from the Caliche Road

Hear me, O Lord, from the cracked asphalt and the caliche roads, from the gravel lots and the dead-end streets where no campaign bus ever stops, where the signs in the yard are not political banners but handwritten notices that the lights are about to go dark.

I have walked these roads. I have known the weight of a man who has nothing and is told by the powerful that his nothing is his own fault, that the poverty pressed into his spine like a boot is the consequence of his laziness and not their greed.

Lord, You know the lie they tell. You named it before I was born. You sent Your Son into the margins, not to the marble halls of the Herod crowd, not to the counting rooms of the temple moneychangers who dressed their theft in religious garments, but to the dusty roads where the lame sat begging, where the lepers were driven outside the gate, where the fishermen stank of the sea and still You called them by name.

Call us by name, Lord. Call us by name.

II. A Psalm for the Man in the Concrete Box

I have been the man in the concrete box. I have heard the steel door close and felt the world make its decision about who I was before it ever bothered to ask.

The judge with his robe and his gavel did not see a man. He saw a case number. He saw a statistic. He saw the body of a poor boy from Henderson County who had never been given the tools to build anything but ruin.

And I became ruin, Lord. I confess it freely. I am not innocent of the charges that the world or my own conscience lays against me.

But I say this, and I say it to Your face the way David said hard things to Your face because he trusted You enough to be honest:

The man in the prison cell is not only there because of what he chose. He is there because of what was chosen for him before he ever drew breath.

The system that locks the poor man in concrete while the rich man's lawyer walks his client out the door is not justice. It has the name of justice painted on its courthouse wall and the face of justice stamped on its official seal, but it is a whitewashed sepulchre, clean on the outside and full of dead men's bones.

You said that, Lord. Not me.

I am just repeating it from the bottom of the cage where Your words still reach.

III. For the Addicted, the Broken, the Self-Destroyed

And now I raise my voice for those who destroyed themselves, for the ones who opened doors they should have kept shut, for the ones who poured themselves into bottles because nobody ever poured anything good into them, for the ones who chased the needle or the powder or the pipe searching for something to fill a void that nothing made by human hands can fill.

I know this man. I am this man.

Lord, I spent thirty years chasing darkness. I opened every occult door the devil set before me. I courted destruction like a lover, and destruction obliged me generously. I put things into my body and my spirit that were never meant to enter either one.

And the world, the fat and comfortable world, looked at me and said: He made his choices. He deserves what he gets.

But You did not say that. You sent her to me in my darkest hour, the Blessed Mother of God, when I had nothing left, when the ledge was close and the night was absolute, when I had exhausted every human remedy and laid down in my ruin to die.

She came, Lord. She came for this outlaw. She came for the man the world had written off, the two-time felon, the occultist, the addict, the wreck, and she pointed me toward her Son.

So when I pray for the addicted and the broken, I pray with standing. I am not praying down from a pulpit at a safe altitude. I am praying from the ditch, from the same ditch where they are lying, saying: There is a hand reaching in. Take it. Take it before the night is permanent.

IV. The Indictment of the Powerful

Now let me turn my voice toward the ones who built the system that grinds the poor man's face into the concrete.

O Lord, how long will You permit the men who move markets with a phone call to walk the halls of power unmolested, while the man who stole bread to feed his children rots in a cell?

How long will the legislators who have never missed a meal in their lives write the laws that starve the working poor and call it economic policy?

How long will the pharmaceutical lords who manufactured the opioid plague in their boardrooms, who knew the addiction they were engineering into the flesh of the poor, who counted their billions while the body count climbed in trailer parks and mill towns and dying rural counties — how long will they attend their charity galas and call themselves philanthropists?

I have read the Scripture, Lord. I know You have a special patience for this kind of wickedness. I know Your judgment moves at its own pace and on a schedule that is not mine to demand.

But I am the voice of the ones who have no voice in their chambers. I am the poet of the caliche road, the prison yard, the emergency room waiting room, the midnight shift at the job that will never pay enough, the tent city under the overpass in the city of the mega-church that does not see the tents.

I am the one You gave a voice to when You could have given it to someone more respectable, more comfortable, more palatable to the powerful. You didn't. You gave it to this wild son of East Texas, this reformed outlaw, this repentant sinner, this man who knows what it costs to be nothing in a world that worships success.

So I use this voice, Lord. I use it the way David used it, the way the prophets used it, without apology and without compromise, not for the Republican party and not for the Democrat party, not for the flag of any political faction but for the Kingdom that You are building in places where no campaign donor will ever invest.

V. A Psalm for the Forgotten Children

And Lord, do not let me pass over the children.

The children of the working poor who are born into the America that does not appear in the commercials or the campaign speeches, the America of second-hand shoes and government cheese, of fathers who left and systems that failed, of schools that were never funded and futures that were never imagined because the imagination of possibility requires someone who will invest it in you, and nobody ever made that investment.

These children are not invisible to You. You said: Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and do not forbid them. And You said that whatever is done to the least of these Your brethren is done to You.

Let that register. Let it land like the hammer that it is.

Every hungry child in this nation is a hunger You have declared Your own. Every child warehoused in a system that processes children like inventory and returns them to the street broken is a child whose suffering You have named as Yours.

Every child who grows up to become the man in the concrete box or the woman on the corner or the veteran under the bridge passed through a childhood that somebody, somewhere, with the power to intervene, chose to ignore.

That choice has a name. It is in the Catechism. It is called the sin of omission. It is called the failure of social justice. It is called the scandal that rises up when economic disparity becomes so extreme that the human dignity You wove into creation is crushed out of people before they ever learn it was theirs.

VI. The Turn Toward Praise

But I will not end in indictment alone. David never did. The Psalms do not conclude in darkness. They conclude in trust, because the God who hears the cry is not a God who abandons the ones who cry it.

You heard me, Lord. In my forty-fourth year, at the bottom of everything, You heard me. You sent the Mother of Your Son to a two-time felon in East Texas who had wasted every gift You gave him and You said, not yet. Not yet. There is still work to do. There is still a voice to raise. There are still people in the ditch who need to hear from someone who has been there.

So I raise this Psalm. Not because I am righteous. Not because I have arrived. Not because the man I was has been replaced by some sanitized version of a Catholic convert with clean hands and a tidy testimony.

But because You called me anyway. Because Your grace is not distributed according to merit. Because the Kingdom belongs to the poor and the lowly, and I have been both, and I intend to stand with both for every day You give me breath to do it.

VII. The Final Petition

Hear this prayer, O Lord, for the forgotten American, for the one the system left behind, for the one the church passed over, for the one the politicians used and discarded, for the one who carries a record that follows him like a shadow, for the one who lost the battle with the bottle or the needle, for the one who prays in a language the comfortable cannot translate, for the one who brings nothing to the altar but wreckage and hopes that is enough.

It is enough. You said it is enough. You said: Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. You did not list the prerequisites. You did not specify the credit score or the clean record. You said all.

Lord, I hold You to that word. On behalf of every forgotten American whose name never appears in the ledger of the powerful, whose death does not make the news, whose life was spent in service to a system that never once served them back —

I hold You to that word.

And I believe You will honor it.

Because You honored it for me.

And if You can honor it for me — this wild, wayward, occult-chasing, prison-serving, East Texas outlaw who ran from Your grace for forty-four years before Your mercy finally caught him —

You can honor it for anyone.

Viva Cristo Rey.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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