by James Frey
You like this?
He smiled at me.
You think it’s required?
I spoke.
I am not God.
He spoke.
No man is God.
Are you not the Son?
Do you believe?
Yes.
He smiled again.
Sit with me.
He stood up. I couldn’t move. He moved back to where he had been and sat down. I looked at him, but still couldn’t move. He smiled.
Come, Father. Sit with me.
I stood slowly. My legs were shaking and my hands were shaking and I was both thrilled beyond description and absolutely terrified. I took three steps towards him and sat down. He smiled again and turned away, looking towards the altar of the church, above which was a statue of Christ hanging on a cross. I had a million questions for him, a million things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him, and he was beautiful, and he was God. I thought of Psalm 34:5, They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, it might have been five minutes, and it might have been thirty, but once again, seeing him made me believe that my life’s work had been worth it, that my commitment to God and the church had been worthwhile, and right, and just, and that God’s light and glory would soon flood the world. He turned to me, and spoke.
You going to say anything?
I don’t know where to begin, my Lord.
He laughed.
You look up there…
He motioned towards the altar, towards the crucifix hanging above it.
And you look at that piece of dead wood, beautifully carved, and beautifully painted, but still just a piece of dead wood, and you think it represents someone, and you think that someone is me.
Yes.
I’m not him.
You are.
I am not.
Is this a test?
No.
I know that God tests our faith every day, that being tested is part of faith.
God does no such thing.
And I believe this is exactly the type of test I would expect from him.
He laughed at me.
And I want to pass the test. I want to prove myself worthy of whatever God has in store for me.
God doesn’t know you exist, and doesn’t care about you.
I don’t believe you.
So be it, but it is true.
How do you know?
Because God speaks to me.
Literally speaks to you?
Not with some silly voice, as it happens in the Bible.
Then how?
How doesn’t matter. What does.
And what is that?
That this is all a fraud. This church, every church. That the world’s religions are bankrupt and meaningless. That the world itself is bankrupt. That it’s all going to end.
As has been foretold.
I know every word of every holy book ever written. None of them foretell what is coming.
Revelations does.
Revelations is a stone age science fiction story.
If that’s so, who are you?
Who do you think I am?
Despite what you say, I believe you are Christ reborn.
I’m a final chance.
You’re here to redeem us and forgive us.
There will be no redemption, and no forgiveness.
You’re here to resurrect the dead, redeem the living.
I’m here to warn humanity that it is going to destroy itself in the name of greed and religion. That there is no God to save any of us. There is no Devil to take us to Hell. That man’s only enemy is himself, and only chance is himself.
You’re here to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, and to show that the Catholic Church represents the one true faith.
Your perverted church has done more than any other to bring this about.
If you feel that way, why are you here?
I’ve been going to churches, synagogues, and mosques, trying to understand why people still believe, despite the fact that what is said in these places is ridiculous.
It’s because God is real, and people know it.
It’s because they’re scared of death, and want to disbelieve it.
The promise of eternal life is God’s greatest gift.
The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they’re given.
Worship makes one’s life better.
Love and laughter and fucking make one’s life better. Worship is just the passing of time.
I stared at him, and he smiled at me. And even though I disagreed with everything he had said, or wanted to disagree with it, his overwhelming physical presence, and the undeniable and unassailable feeling that he was divine, and that, despite his denials, he was the Son of God, made his words penetrate to the core of my being, and the core of my faith. He spoke again.
Stare at your cross.
I looked away and towards the crucifix hanging above the altar. It was a realistic depiction of Christ. Both the cross itself and Christ on top of it were carved out of wood from an olive tree. The nails could be seen through the hands and the ankles, and the look on Christ’s face was one of peace, calm, and serenity. A crown of thorns could be seen on his head, and his eyes were open. Christ himself was painted in what I would call a realistic manner, giving one the sense that it was a close representation of what the real Christ must have looked like during the Crucifixion. I had seen it a countless number of times, and had stood beneath it while celebrating mass for many years. I had prayed to it, asked it for advice, begged it for help, and sought it out in times of strife and sorrow. And while it was, to me, a representation of the Holy Trinity and the Catholic Church, I would be less than honest if I said that it held my attention the way the man next to me did, or if its presence had the same power his presence had. After two or three minutes, during which the only sound I heard was the two of us breathing, he put his hand on my thigh. I felt an immediate, and extremely powerful, rush, unlike anything I’d felt in my life, something that was in my blood, my bones, my heart, and my soul, something that literally took my breath away. And as I turned towards him, he stood and leaned over to me and gently kissed me on the cheek, holding his lips on my cheek. I closed my eyes, and I felt myself become erect, a sensation I was not entirely comfortable with and had always resisted with the fear that it would lead towards sin, but that felt wonderful, absolutely and stunningly wonderful. He held his lips against my cheek for a moment, and then ran them slowly towards my ear, where he whispered.
Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.
And he stood and he walked away.
Needless to say, I was stunned, and unable to move or think, and I stayed in the pew, in a heightened state, my heart pounding, my face burning, my skin tingling, and my penis erect, for a long time. When the physical sensations faded, I started thinking about what had happened, and felt a deep sense of conflict and confusion. While I had never felt so good before in my life, or felt love so powerfully, both physically and emotionally, everything I knew, and had been taught, and thought I believed, told me that what had just happened was wrong, terribly wrong, at best a sin and a transgression of my duties and responsibilities as a priest, and at worst blasphemy, heresy, and something that could result in my spending eternity burning in the fires of Hell. In my worship, I had never actually conceived, in a real way, what it might be like to stand in Christ’s presence, to hear his voice, to speak with him, and to have him touch me, to feel his love flowing through and affecting every cell in my body and every aspect of my soul. My thinking had always been abstracted, about what it would mean to meet Christ, but not what it would feel like to meet him. And while I could not reconcile all of his words and actions with those of the Savior, or what at the time I believed might be the words and actions of the Savior, the feelings I had felt when he spoke, and sat with me, and touched me, and kis
sed me, and was left with after his departure, felt very pure to me, and very true to what I now believe Christ must have made his believers feel. It was, more than anything, an overwhelming and very profound sense of love, innocent, unconditional, deep, and true. And it was after feeling it that, for the first time in my life, I truly knew what it meant to be close to God. Not the Catholic God, or the Jewish God, or the Muslim God, or any other God, but the true God. The God that is life, and the God that is love.
When I could, which was at least an hour later, and probably longer, I stood and left the church. I asked the deacon to handle my remaining responsibilities, and I went to my quarters in the rectory, where I kneeled before a small crucifix on my wall and tried to pray. I wanted to say a prayer of examination and contrition, which is something I said most evenings before I went to sleep, in which I examined my thoughts and actions and asked the Lord to make me a better person, and a better priest. As I stared at the crucifix, I kept thinking about what Ben had said, about the cross being nothing but a piece of dead wood, and I kept thinking of the feeling of his hand, and his lips, and the difference between what Ben made me feel and what the crucifix made me feel. I recited the traditional prayer of contrition, O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life, amen, but I did not feel any better, or any different. I kept trying, and tried to put more spirit into the prayer, but nothing changed, so I started praying, and speaking, directly to the Almighty Father, telling him about the conflicts I was having, telling him about the potential sins I had committed, and begging for his forgiveness. Nothing changed, and if anything, the fact that prayer was not helping me made me think more about Ben and what he had made me feel.
Whenever I was in crisis, or felt lost or confused, or needed earthly guidance, I reached out to the man who had brought me to Christ, and to the church, a man I considered my father here on earth, who had loved me more than my biological father, and who had brought me to the Holy Father. He had excelled in the priesthood because of his devotion and piety, and had become an archbishop of the diocese in Michigan where I grew up. I felt like I needed him that day, and though Sunday is obviously a busy day for a Catholic bishop, and normally I would never expect him to take time from that day, God’s day, and a day when his diocese needed his leadership, I believed I truly required his counsel. It took two hours to get him on the phone, during which I only grew more confused and upset. When I heard his voice, and heard him tell me that he would always be there for me in my time of need, I felt better. I proceeded to tell him the entire story, from the moment I first saw Ben in the bathroom until the moment he left me sitting alone in the pew, and I included all my personal thoughts and emotions. When I finished, he told me that he was happy that I had reached out to him, and that my mortal soul was at great risk. The first issue he addressed was the church, and my feelings regarding some of its recent scandals. He said that while priests were human, and thus vulnerable to the same temptations as any human, the sexual abuse scandals were, in large part, a creation of the media, which was controlled by the Devil. He said that many of the allegations were invented as part of a smear campaign, and that the church protected the priests because they had done nothing except serve God, the church, and their parishes. He said that the campaign against the church was designed to destroy it, and was similar in conception to the Holocaust. And though the church did know of some transgressions, it had always handled them appropriately, and had done everything in its power to protect priests from unfounded accusations. He said he also believed that a large part of the campaign had to do with depleting the church’s wealth through frivolous lawsuits, and he believed that if something truly bad had been happening, God would have stopped it. God, he said, always looked after the interests of the one true universal church. God, he said, would not have allowed anything so perverted to exist within it. He reminded me that he believed God chose each of the priests who became ordained within the Roman Catholic Church, and that God did not make mistakes.
We moved from there to my specific experiences with Ben. He said he wholeheartedly believed that Ben was an agent of Satan, most likely a demon in human form, sent specifically to tempt me and destroy me. He told me that God obviously must have something greater in store for me if Satan was sending someone so powerful, and that I should continue with a strict prayer regimen, which would give me the strength that I needed to fight. He also said that if the situation got further out of control, the Vatican had a staff of approximately ten exorcists who worked exclusively in the United States. They could be called upon to confront the demon directly, and had the power to send him directly back to Hell. He directed me to alert the other priests in my parish to the demon’s presence, and said that all of us should keep holy water on our persons at all times, and that when the demon returned, we should splash him with it. I thanked him for his advice, and he told me he was proud of me, and that he was excited to see what the Holy Father had in store for me. I thanked him and said goodbye.
I spent the rest of the evening in prayer. I slept for a couple of hours and woke the next morning and resumed my duties and worked according to my normal schedule, celebrating mass, advising and comforting parishioners, and doing paperwork related to my church. Every free moment I had, I spent either reading the Bible or praying, hoping that God would respond to me in some way. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in my life, to receive some sort of sign from the Holy Father, some sort of indication that all of the time I had spent on my knees and before the cross had not been wasted. Because of what I believed to be the gravity of the situation, I hoped to receive something quickly, and though I had been taught that God works in his own ways, ways that man does not and should not understand, I was upset when nothing came. A sense of loneliness, which in some way had always been with me, but through study, prayer, and activity I had always been able to ignore, deny, or control, began to overwhelm me. I had always felt that I was missing something, or had lost something, or misplaced something, and I assumed that that was a normal state of being, part of the pain of being human. Within a few days, however, the feeling became one of complete emptiness, hopelessness, and horror. I started weeping while I prayed, and weeping before I went to sleep. I wept when I woke up, and I wept whenever I was alone, and I had to force myself not to weep in the presence of other people. I didn’t want to get out of bed and didn’t want to see anyone. The job that had meant so much to me for most of my life had lost all meaning. It got to the point where I started thinking about killing myself. I knew it was considered a mortal sin by the church, that it was believed I would damn myself to Hell for all eternity in committing it. I also didn’t know what else I could do. I had no one to talk to about the situation. I knew that my fellow priests would tell me to continue to pray and that through prayer I would find my way. I had no other friends, and no family. I no longer felt close to the Holy Father or Jesus Christ. I was absolutely alone, doing something that no longer had any meaning for me, and I wanted to die.
I tried to identify why this was happening, and it was obviously tied to meeting Ben. This led me to a startlingly simple conclusion, which was that in my entire life, as a child, in the seminary, and in all my years in the priesthood, I had never felt real love. I hadn’t received it from my parents, my teachers, or my fellow priests, and, despite what I wanted to believe, I had never got it from prayer, from the church, from Jesus Christ, or from my supposed relationship with the Holy Father. I realized that the most powerful form of love could only come from another human being. That the love that was spoken of in the Bible could only exist in a person walking the earth, and could not come from a representation of that person, regardless of how beautifully it was made. That love was something real if it was comi
ng from a real person. I realized that I loved Ben, that even after my limited interaction with him, I loved him in a way that I had never loved anyone or anything. I also realized that, in some way, he loved me, that in his divinity, he expressed love for everything and everyone he came into contact with, and everything and everyone he touched. And for the first time in my life I understood Christ, and his importance, and I understood why I believed Ben was Christ reborn, and was the Messiah, as I still do. Like Christ, Ben loved unconditionally and without judgment; he loved men and women equally, and did not make distinctions between loving men and loving women; he made everyone who met him feel his love, and feel it in a way that was unlike anything they had ever previously felt; and he understood that religion as it was practiced had little to do with love. Love is something we must feel in our hearts, and in our bodies, and something we must express without fear of judgment or damnation. Love is something beyond rules and dogma. Love is beyond good and bad, or right and wrong. And love is beyond people who know little of it and have no experience with it deciding how it can be felt or expressed or who has the right to feel it or express it. I believed Ben would come back, and I decided to wait until I saw him again before I made any decisions about my future, though I already knew what I was going to do.
A week passed, and I continued to perform in my role as a priest, though it was entirely ceremonial for me. The words I spoke were empty, and I no longer viewed the blood and flesh of the Eucharist as anything other than what they were, and what they are, which is cheap wine and bad wafers. I spent most of my personal time sitting in the church, which was almost always empty, staring at the door, waiting for Ben to walk inside and sit down, but it never happened, and I thought constantly about what he had said to me the last time I had seen him, how he had whispered life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront in my ear. And he was right. I had spent my life worshipping death, fearing it, obsessing over it, and living my life according to what a book says will happen when it comes. I had functioned as a missionary of death for a dead church, praying to a dead man, and I came to understand that it’s no way to live, and that living is all we have, and all we will ever have, and that it is not to be wasted. That love is life. That life isn’t worth living without love. And that the Catholic Church, filled with celibate men who have no experience with it, has no right telling other people how to love or who to love or what kind of love is right or wrong.