Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Faintly, above and beneath the sound of the heart monitor, Philly heard Jesus humming softly to Grandma. Then Jesus stopped and looked at Philly, as if surrendering Grandma’s attention to him.

  Philly took his cue. He cleared his throat gently and said, “Grandma, I’m here. And I’m with Jesus, just like you prayed. He came to be with me like you wanted.” For the first time, he expressed a modicum of excitement over his unique visitation.

  Jesus smiled slightly and looked at Grandma.

  Philly continued. “I didn’t know what to expect. I guess I’m sort of seeing the answer to my question from the other night, about what it is you pray for when you say you pray for me. I’m seeing the result of one of your prayers.”

  Stopping to sort through what he wanted to say, Philly found inside himself an array of unprocessed reactions to Jesus’s presence. He wanted to thank Grandma, but he realized how strange her prayer had made him feel. He also bumped up against his aching dissatisfaction with the last conversation with Brenda, which tainted slightly the monumental blessing Grandma had sent him.

  “Thanks, Grandma. Thanks for praying for me. I guess I’m a lot more impressed with what it means that you pray for me now,” he finally said.

  When Jesus knew Philly had said what he came to say, he resumed his humming. Philly sat down in the chair and found Grandma’s hand to hold through the blanket. After a minute of silence, Philly watched Jesus reach up and try to place his hand on Grandma’s head, but, of course, his hand disappeared when he tried. Philly just watched, annoyed and confused, mute in his consternation.

  Jesus turned to Philly and said, “I would like to heal your Grandma, so she can wake up.”

  Philly looked at Jesus, who had pulled his hands back. His first thought was, “Well, then why don’t you?” But then he remembered that Jesus had said something about not being permitted to touch people. Philly just shook his head and furrowed his brow.

  “This is your chance now, Philly,” Jesus said. “Come and touch her as I’m trying to touch her, so she can be healed.”

  “What?” Philly said, sliding forward in his chair.

  “Do it now,” Jesus said, a hint of urgency intensifying his voice.

  “Do what?”

  “Come and touch her, as you see me touching her,” Jesus said, motioning with his hands, as if preparing to lay them on her head again.

  But Philly couldn’t leap the gorge in his mind between his grandma’s coma and his hands on her head. He not only lacked faith, he lacked a basic understanding of what Jesus was talking about.

  As he stared at Jesus, Philly became aware of whispering by the door, beyond the curtain that divided the beds. A moment later, his mother entered the room, tiptoeing as if afraid she would wake Grandma. Behind her trailed Philly’s dad.

  “Ma,” Philly said, annoyed that she had interrupted whatever it was that Jesus was trying to tell him and perturbed at her very presence spoiling his quiet moments with Grandma.

  “Oh, Philly,” Mrs. Thompson said, shaking her head as she looked at Grandma.

  Philly took a deep breath and stood up, forgetting about Jesus momentarily. He wanted to leave as soon as gracefully possible. He could tolerate his mother in most situations, but in the atmosphere of the hospital, he felt a grating ache, as his ma dragged Grandma’s coma into her emotional drama and sought to pull Philly in as well.

  Mr. Thompson stood silently at the foot of his mother’s bed, looking curiously at her. Then he said, “She looks better. She sorta looks happy.”

  Philly and his mother turned from each other to look at Grandma. Philly did see a sort of serenity in Grandma’s expression that he hadn’t noticed before. Then he remembered Jesus and wondered again what Jesus had been saying about touching Grandma. He also remembered Jesus humming to her.

  “She just looks unconscious to me,” Mrs. Thompson said.

  Philly glanced at his mother and then back at Grandma. Apparently his mother couldn’t see through the gloomy cloud she carried with her. Philly just shook his head, walked to his dad and shook his hand. Then they both looked at Grandma, still holding hands for a moment.

  Jesus took the opportunity to join them, touching both of their hands briefly as they touched each other. While still looking at Grandma, both Philly and his dad brightened slightly, feeling a lift in their spirits.

  “I think she’s gonna be alright,” Mr. Thompson said.

  Philly nodded and patted his father on the shoulder, a slight smile on his face.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?” Mrs. Thompson whispered hoarsely, as Philly moved toward the door.

  Philly’s ma stood about five foot two now, in her mid-sixties. She wore a pale, copper colored wig, painted on eyebrows and smudgy lipstick. There, in the half light, Philly saw her and took pity. He stopped, turned back to his ma and gave her a brief hug, bending at the waist so that it required minimal physical contact.

  “I’ve been here a while,” Philly said. “I’ll leave you two to talk to Grandma. We’ve said our piece.”

  Philly’s ma looked doubtfully up at her son. “We?”

  “I,” he said quickly. “I meant, I’ve said my piece.”

  She furrowed her thin, brown eyebrows and looked at him over her gold-rimmed glasses. “Are you okay, Philly?”

  “I’m fine, Ma. I’m doing really well.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I gotta go. I’ll bring Eileen over tomorrow night.” Again he hugged his ma.

  “I’ll make some of that chocolate cake you two like,” his mother said, half into his shoulder.

  “That’ll be great,” he said, backing toward the door, careful not to bump into his dad, who had dutifully melted into the wall.

  “See ya, Dad,” Philly said, patting his father’s shoulder again and making his escape.

  Jesus walked close to Philly down the hall. “She steps on your soul, when it’s out of hiding, like when you see your grandma,” Jesus said, obviously referring to Philly’s ma.

  Philly looked over at Jesus and then quickly turned back to face forward, lest he be mistaken for a psychiatric patient. He responded via thoughts alone. “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “It’s okay, Philly, that you feel the need to defend yourself against her. It’s no shame on you,” Jesus said.

  Philly had not known that he needed consolation about this, until that moment. He was relieved when they got on the elevator alone, because Jesus had, once again, struck a deep nerve with simple words. On the elevator, however, Philly just looked at Jesus, lost in silence. He actually had to concentrate on not welling into tears. He sniffled hard, and briefly wiped his eyes, as the elevator door began to open.

  A kindly, older woman, carrying a bouquet of flowers, stood waiting for the elevator when the doors slid open. She smiled sympathetically in response to Philly’s leaking emotions. Philly smiled slightly in grateful response. Then he walked down the marble corridor to the open lobby area and out into the early evening air. Philly purged his lungs of the hospital and shrugged off some of the frustration with his ma. For a moment, in spite of having just visited his comatose grandma, he felt lighter.

  He looked at Jesus. “I don’t hate my Ma,” he said. His tone sounded less like a denial than a clarification, perhaps for himself.

  Jesus nodded, turning his face toward the setting sun and smiling. “You’re gonna be just fine, Philly.” Even as he basked in the sun his voice rang with confidence.

  Philly envied Jesus’s effortless self-assurance. He felt its absence in himself, like a dehydrated marathon runner, longing to absorb what his rigorous journey would not allow just yet. As he thought through this, he knew that Jesus could hear all of his frustrations and longings, unspoken and unfamiliar. In that knowledge, for the first time, he took comfort. He smiled silently at Jesus, stepping off the curb and heading back toward the train.

  Though he certainly could afford a cab, Philly walked past two of them, maintaining his se
lf-identity by opting for the train. He simply didn’t think of himself as the kind of guy who would drop twenty dollars on a ride home, when he had his monthly pass for public transit. Looking at Jesus walking merrily next to him, he suspected that Jesus preferred the train as well. It would also be less disruptive for Jesus to attempt to heal a stranger on the train than an unsuspecting cabbie, Philly thought.

  “Hey, what was that you were saying about me touching Grandma like you were doing?” Philly said, remembering what had happened just before his parents arrived.

  His comfortable companion looked at him as if assessing his weight or height. Then he said, “You don’t believe that God can work through you.”

  Philly raised his eyebrows and looked at Jesus in surprise. Certainly, what he said was true, but why did he feel he needed to say it?

  “As I explained before, I can only work through people,” glanced at Philly. “The flip side of that is that I intend to work through people just like you. My healing power is available to you. When you see me reaching out to touch someone, you know that you only have to cooperate to make something happen.”

  To Philly, Jesus’s explanation defied comprehension, like an avant-garde jazz musician describing a composition, which, to Philly’s untrained ear, sounded like a random collection of tones and beats. He just shook his head as he walked, feeling that understanding what Jesus was saying required some hidden knowledge that had been locked away in some great steel vault. Philly didn’t know the combination.

  Still Jesus didn’t seem upset by Philly’s obtuseness. Rather than struggle directly with the implications of what Jesus said about healing power, Philly considered how this person walking with him could stay so calm and patient with him. His own level of frustration with himself seemed nearly unbearable.

  “Don’t curse yourself, Philly,” Jesus said, in response to this line of thought. “That only grinds your soul to a stop and keeps you from moving forward. It’s good to see your shortcomings, but whipping yourself over them doesn’t benefit anyone.”

  Philly wished he had gone to church more, wished he understood Jesus better, wished he had some context in which to process this revelatory relationship. Heeding Jesus’s advice, however, he didn’t stop there, instead allowed himself to enjoy the personable and patient company.

  As they walked, as they rode on the train, while waiting at Sheridan Road and while sitting on the bus, Philly worked on communicating silently with his personal Christ. Like so much of life, he found that practicing improved his abilities. The most difficult part of this new skill was not reacting visibly when Jesus said stunning or incomprehensible things, or things that tore open the fragile fabric of Philly’s heart and released stale or acrid air that lurked inside.

  While on the bus, for example, Jesus said to Philly, “You see, you’ve been living like an abandoned orphan child. The world has taught you to think of yourself as being on your own and to think of God as a neglectful father, who left you alone on the playground and forgot all about you. You’re not an orphan, Philly. You belong to my father in Heaven. He loves you and really wants to be with you.”

  This statement burrowed into Philly like a mouse seeking a warm nesting place. His heart lurched with the rocking bus. His mind seethed and recoiled. And he began to cry, right there on Sheridan Road, in a half-full bus. Still self-conscious, he hoped people would just think he had allergies, as he sniffled and rubbed his eyes. And, of course, the fight to contain his emotions became his focus and distracted him from the significance of what Jesus had said. The patient teacher looked on lovingly, aware of it all and worried about none of it.

  When Philly finished his frozen dinner for supper that night, his phone rang. It was Brenda’s ring tone.

  “Hi, Brenda,” he said, trying to sound as if nothing had happened between them that day.

  “Philly,” she said, “I owe you an apology for the way I reacted today at lunch and for not replying to your email.”

  This impressed Philly. Brenda very rarely apologized for anything. If he were keeping track, he might have noted a rise in the number of rare occurrence since Jesus showed up.

  “I don’t really think you do, though,” Philly said. “I mean, it’s all so unusual and I know whatever that was that Jesus said about your childhood must’ve been hard to take. I know he’s done that to me a couple o’ times.”

  Philly, in contrast to Brenda, apologized a lot. Letting someone off the hook by offering an apology for them was one of his specialties. It all sounded familiar to Brenda, who had often pouted or shouted in response to Philly’s past attempts on her behalf. Brenda, however, bypassed her usual impatience at Philly’s obsessive apologizing and dug deeper.

  “You’re right, Philly. What you told me about my doll, Nancy, getting torn up by that monster of a dog, pulled up some really painful memories,” Brenda said. “Worse than the doll getting trashed, was what my father said when I told him what had happened. He was always so busy and didn’t want to bother with my little girl problems. When I cried about what Gerry Holly did to my doll, my dad just called me a ‘cry baby.’” She cut off after that, either too angry or too sad to say more.

  Philly stayed silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “I’m sorry Brenda, but I gotta say that really sucks. I would be totally pissed if my dad said something like that.”

  Brenda sniffed. Her voice hit low gear, subdued. “I’ve been mad at him for years and years over that. I never forgave him . . . until now,” she said simply, too emotionally exhausted for drama. “That’s why it hit me so hard when you brought back that memory. I knew right away that I should forgive my dad. Strange that I hadn’t thought of it before.”

  “Umhm,” Philly said, feeling that the less he said, the better, on such unfamiliar ground.

  “So, do you still see and hear him?” Brenda said.

  “Jesus?” Philly said.

  “Yeah,” Brenda said, apparently not annoyed by the obvious question.

  “Yeah,” Philly said. “He’s right here.”

  Brenda said nothing. Philly could hear her breathing and he waited for her to say more. Looking at Jesus, Philly waited for a cue of some sort. Jesus just made a gentle “Wait and see” sort of motion with his hands and his face.

  After fifteen seconds, Brenda said, “Could you ask him something for me?”

  “Sure,” Philly said, an excited chill shooting up his back and neck.

  Brenda waited a few more seconds and Jesus spoke into the silence.

  “Tell her, yes. And she need not worry about it anymore.”

  Philly looked confused, but gave it a try. “Well, he has an answer already. He says, ‘Yes, and you don’t need to worry about it anymore.’”

  The sound of Brenda sobbing over the phone allowed Philly to release the breath he had been holding. And then his heart began to resonate with her sobs, a warm melancholy robbing him of rational thought and freeing him to wait and listen in silence for over a minute. Only after she heard Philly sniffle did Brenda speak again.

  “Are you crying, Philly?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Do you know what my question was?”

  “No, he just told me the answer,” Philly said. Then he said, “Maybe I’m not supposed to know the question.”

  Jesus raised his eyebrows in affirmation of this conjecture.

  Brenda said, “Yeah, I suppose so. Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” Philly said.

  Another short silence followed and then Brenda said, “I’m tired. I need to sleep. But we should talk about what’s happening to you with all this.” When Philly offered no immediate answer, she finished. “See you at work tomorrow?”

  “Yep, see you at work. I’ll bring the coffee,” he said.

  Brenda breathed a small laugh. “Thanks, Philly.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night, Philly.”

  The conversation ended as it had begun for Philly, in his apartment, on a windy, April ev
ening, very much alone, that is, except for Jesus.

  Chapter Six

  After staying up later than he intended, reminiscing with Jesus about his childhood, Philly did remember to make coffee for him and Brenda the next morning. His head felt detached from his body, however, both from the late night and from his expanding realization that Jesus knew everything about his past, as if Jesus had lived it himself.

  Brenda looked a bit worn when she greeted Philly in front of the office, the gray sky and blustery wind doing nothing to help. She delicately removed hair from her eyes, which the wind very indelicately whipped back into her face, as she took the coffee from Philly. Holding the coffee and standing still for a moment, she looked as if her composure might wash away under a shower of tears. This time Philly helped Brenda to the front door, adopting the reverse role with greater ease than either of them would have expected. Jesus accompanied them with a proud smile.

  For most of the work day, Jesus sat smiling in Philly’s office, also following him to the network room several times. During one of their trips back to his office, Philly listened as Jesus explained to him again how he wanted to use people to touch others for healing, as well as to communicate with others.

  Philly forgot once again to respond silently. “I thought that sort of stuff ended after the apostles and saints all died,” he said, as he walked the smooth carpet from the elevator to his office.

  Dennis had stopped by to drop off some paperwork regarding Craig’s annual evaluation and bumped into Philly just then.

  “What did you say?” Dennis said, a look of consternation clouding his face.

  “Oh, sorry,” Philly said. “I was just, ah . . .” He stopped there. Not wanting to lie again, but not knowing what to say to Dennis, he locked up. Standing there with nothing to say, he looked like a school boy caught cutting class.