The Blood & The Bones

I haven’t really decided what I believe.

Even though I’m far past old enough to have done so.

I feel sure that there is a God…

Having felt him in the way the trees sound when the wind is first full of fall.

And in my son’s eyes when I’d catch him looking at me with enough love to heal what is broken.

In the prayers that my father would not come home drunk and full of rage for the life he had been dealt and an opportunity to leave its handprints on skin he didn’t own.

In the classical CD I bought at a yard sale when I was 17 down a road I’d usually never go. And listening to clair de lune on repeat hoping for a revelation of direction for a girl who had only ever felt lost.

2 years before, I saw him in the faint neon glow of the stick on stars spattered across a popcorn ceiling above the bed where I waited for it to please be over.

And just a few months shy of 20 years later, in the calming of my own shaking hands. Hands that belonged to a woman who should’ve known better, when I had to leave the home I’d known the longest.

I know there is something bigger than this.

Yet I don’t think he’s the one they wrote about..

The Sunday God the man in the pulpit with his sweaty brow and uncomfortable eye contact raised his voice beyond what was needed, for effect I guess, to preach hellfire and brimstone about. I asked myself many times if this man only ever studied revelations.. This man who beat his kids. And who fucked many of the women sitting right next to his wife on those long dark pews that felt like boats swimming in purgatory.

Many claim that this God hates you for things you can’t control and is the one the atheists swear makes sick kids close their eyes forever..

But I don’t think that’s him or that he smites or denies. I don’t even think he keeps score that closely.

He just lets us do our own thing and wants for it to be good or good enough. Maybe more than anything, waiting for us to find him in everyday acts too beautiful to comprehend and in moments where there is no hope..

And makes a place in whatever lies beyond for those of us who did not always take more than what was given, earned or owed..

the blood
& the bones