Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  “Hey,” Ben said. “Hey, that feels good. It feels good. I mean, damn, the pain is gone,” he said, minus his inhibitions. Ben apologized and Philly brushed aside the errant word.

  Jesus looked at Philly and removed his hand. He nodded at a job well done.

  Philly thought, “Who’s next?”

  Jesus nodded toward Allyson. Philly stared at Jesus, to confirm where he thought he was looking. “She has another issue. Ask her about her lower abdomen.”

  Philly walked gingerly up to Allyson and asked, “Do you have a problem in you lower abdomen?” He put his hand on his own belly.

  Allyson’s eyebrows shot up, she looked at Craig and then back at Philly. “Yes,” she said, but she seemed uncertain about something. “It’s a woman thing.”

  Jesus said, “Have Mary Beth put her hand on Allyson’s belly and I’ll heal it.”

  Philly looked at Mary Beth, faded back behind the others again. “Would you be willing to put your hand on Allyson’s belly?” he said, again indicating the place with his hand on his own stomach.

  Mary Beth looked as surprised as Allyson, but she brightened a bit at the empowerment. “Okay,” she said, looking at Allyson, as if checking for permission.

  Allyson nodded, relieved that she didn’t need to say more about the nature of the problem, and at the easy escape from the awkwardness of Philly touching her there. Mary Beth stood beside Allyson and placed her right hand gently just below Allyson’s belt buckle. Allyson put her own hand a bit lower and to the right and said, “It’s here.”

  Fully accepting the notion that she should put her hand as close as possible to the problem, Mary Beth followed Allyson’s direction. The strangeness of everything that had happened since she showed up at Philly’s office door blurred the question of the appropriateness of where she now rested her hand. But, before Mary Beth could drift into that question, Allyson said, “Oh.”

  Philly could see that this exclamation corresponded exactly to when Jesus placed his hand on the sore spot. He also saw how Mary Beth’s face lit up as she experienced the electricity of Jesus’s invisible touch. Then Allyson began to bend in half, groaning slightly. Not wanting to interrupt a miracle, Mary Beth tried to maintain her touch, but finally gave up as Allison’s upper torso reached parallel to the ground. Just as everyone, especially Mary Beth, feared that something had gone wrong, Allyson unleashed a hearty laugh.

  Relieved laughter spread around the little group. Philly smiled at Jesus, who had also released his touch and stood watching Allyson. Jesus directed Philly to move on.

  “Now you can ask Mary Beth if she’s ready,” Jesus said.

  Philly nodded. When the energy of Allyson’s laughter began to dissipate, and the mood of the group turned toward uncertainty about what to do next, Philly spoke up. “Are you ready now, Mary Beth?”

  She looked at Philly, about half ready to say “yes.”

  Jesus offered some help. “Tell her that we don’t have to touch the area where the cancer is, just a hand on her shoulder will do.”

  Philly offered this proposal and Mary Beth nodded. Jesus responded to her acceptance by moving in close and placing his hand on her left shoulder. Philly mirrored him on the opposite shoulder. Mary Beth looked at Philly and then closed her eyes, like someone savoring a new taste. After a moment, she opened her eyes and glanced down at her chest, as if checking something. Philly kept looking at Jesus, determined not to screw this up. But Mary Beth’s frequent visual checks of her breast strained Philly’s determination. He got the impression that she was checking to see if someone were touching her where he never would have touched her. Philly lost his distracting concerns, however, when he saw the obvious enjoyment that the Savior absorbed from this healing, his curved lips and smile-creased eyes.

  Mary Beth started to weep. She didn’t open her eyes, but lifted her hands to clasp them in the center of her chest, now appearing to wrap herself in an embrace of unrestrained love. Philly could hear both Darcy and Sandy crying softly behind him, assuming that Mary Beth’s emotional experience had arched over to them. But whispers and exclamations mixed in with those soft sniffles, as Darcy and Sandy pulled Allyson into what was happening to them. Philly wanted to turn to see what it was, but forced himself to remain as Jesus was, still focused on Mary Beth.

  Though the significance of the moments inflated the amount of time in Philly’s experience, Jesus healed Mary Beth in three or four minutes. When he released his hold on her shoulder, Philly turned to find smiles on all of the faces around Darcy and Sandy.

  “I’m healed,” Darcy said, full of wonder and gratitude. She twisted her torso left and right. “I can do that without any kind of pain at all. That would have hurt like mad a few minutes ago.”

  Sandy laughed and indicated the base of her throat. “I had a growth right in here, it pressed on my esophagus and made it hard to swallow. I was supposed to go in and get a biopsy to see whether it was cancer.” She giggled, “But now it’s gone!”

  Philly looked over at Jesus for an explanation. Jesus smiled knowingly.

  Craig saw Philly’s attention turn to that empty space near Mary Beth once more and blurted out a question he had been trying to answer himself. “Do you see something there, Phil? Do you see Jesus?”

  Philly nodded, pausing to wonder how Craig figured this out, given the impossibility of his experience with Jesus. He never would have guessed such a thing himself. “How did you know?”

  “I guess, I just knew. I guess, it just explains the miracles.”

  Philly nodded more vigorously now, “That’s for sure. I know I can’t heal anybody.”

  Allyson got Philly’s attention and nodded toward something over his shoulder. Philly turned with everyone else in the group and saw a short, blonde-haired woman holding a toddler. She looked curious and hopeful.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I was wondering. I thought I heard someone say something about healing. Is that what you were doing?”

  Philly glanced at Jesus again and then nodded to the woman.

  She continued, “I’m sorry, I hope I’m not butting in, but I wonder if you could pray for my little boy here. His name is Kyle. He has severe allergies. He’s allergic to lots of foods and things in the air.”

  For Philly, the answer walked toward the mother and her son in the form of an invisible Middle Eastern man from outer space. Philly said to the mother, “It’s no problem. Jesus is coming to heal him right now.” And, against his newly forming habits, Philly stood where he was and watched Jesus reach up to Kyle and tap him on the head.

  “You are well, Kyle,” Jesus said.

  Philly smiled and said, “Jesus has healed him.”

  Kyle leaned back from his mother, took a deep breath and shouted. “Yes! Mommy, I feel good. Mommy, Jesus healed me!”

  Now everyone laughed and cried, the potent simplicity of the three-year-old’s declaration breaking every heart within hearing.

  Chapter Twelve

  To his amazement, Philly arrived back in his office less than an hour from when he left. He sat down at his desk, logged into his computer, and thought, “I got away with it.” He checked with Jesus, not sure if he needed to repent from this thought. But Jesus seemed noncommittal on the point, his pacific smile undisturbed.

  What Philly failed to calculate, however, was the effect of being healed of a significant ailment. A few of his fellow employees returned to the office on a high that resembled drunkenness, something that’s frowned on in any work place. Of course, one defends oneself when falsely accused of drinking one’s lunch, even if that defense involves a miraculous healing in Washington Square Park. Add to this, the human need to spread good news, to celebrate relief by seeing it reflected back in the face of a friend, and Philly would definitely not get away with his lunchtime exploits.

  By two o’clock, three different departments in the firm bubbled with the telling, and retelling, of stories that generally implicated Philly. The tellers could each imagine some
possible negative repercussions for Philly if the story circulated, so they generally obscured some parts of their story, to protect Philly. The effort, however, lacked coordination and the net effect of the compiled discrete accounts significantly upgraded the way a large number of people viewed the network administrator. Eyewitness accounts, personal testimonies and physical proof of divine intervention in the lives of ailing coworkers, stimulated a gush of gossip unparalleled in the firm’s history.

  Unfortunately for Philly, his boss heard a somewhat alarmed recounting from his superior, the Chief Operations Officer, who picked it up from his secretary. Like most people in modern North American culture, Dennis lacked tools and training for handling the news he heard. The suspicious tone of his boss motivated Dennis to reach for the disciplinary section of his personnel management toolbox, for lack of preparation for any other response.

  At two-thirty, Dennis called Philly and asked him to come to his office.

  Philly hung up the phone and looked at Jesus, a wave of numbness enveloping him and preventing him from screaming in panic. Jesus looked sympathetic and compassionate, not carefree and peaceful, as he usually did. Philly’s adrenal glands hit overdrive when this subtle sign from Jesus confirmed his fear.

  “Am I going to be fired?”

  “Not yet,” Jesus said.

  “Not yet?”

  “Let’s go see Dennis,” Jesus said, standing up and motioning to the door.

  Philly rose from his chair, considered sitting back down and properly logging off of his computer, but lost that idea, when he realized that he was usually the one to electronically cut off terminated employees from computer access. He wondered who would block his access.

  Jesus interrupted, “Let’s see Dennis first, before you worry about that sorta thing.”

  Philly nodded, feeling a slim influx of hope, enough to get him out the door and to the elevator.

  As Philly waited for the elevator, a designer from Allyson’s department approached.

  “Hey, Phil, I wonder if I could talk to you about something in private, when you get back to your office?” the middle-aged, Pakistani man said.

  Philly stared at him until the elevator arrived with a high metallic “ting.” They stepped onto the elevator. Jesus helped Philly out.

  “Tell him, not this afternoon. Something has just come up,” Jesus said.

  Philly repeated this, somewhat robotically, unable to genuinely slip free from the crushing weight of impending doom.

  “Okay, I understand,” the man said, clearly disappointed. He exited on the fourth floor. Philly said goodbye and stayed on for the ride to the fifth.

  In executive territory, on the fifth floor, Philly had always carried himself like a large man in the porcelain and glass knickknack aisle of a gift shop. This time was different. Now he felt like that same large man after having stumbled through a display of hand-blown, glass figurines.

  At Dennis’s office, Philly knocked. Dennis motioned him in and pointed to the door knob, as the COO’s voice followed the intercom tone on his phone. Dennis picked up the phone quickly, as Philly stepped in, to prevent Philly from hearing more than he should. Careful not to look expectantly at Dennis, Philly closed the door behind him and glanced around the office, nonchalantly catching Jesus in the course of his survey. He was glad Jesus was there, though he doubted he would provide any substantial help in this situation.

  Dennis listened to his boss on the phone, made one low comment, listened some more and then said, “Okay,” and “Goodbye.” He hung up the phone and motioned to his guest chairs for Philly to sit down. Instinctively, Philly sat in the chair on the left, leaving the one next to him for Jesus.

  “We’ll wait a minute,” Dennis said. “Mr. Hazelton will be joining us, in a moment.”

  Philly nodded. Mr. Hazelton was Dennis’s boss, the Chief Operations Officer of the firm. Philly’s fears said, “I told you so,” once again.

  Dennis shuffled through some papers, looked at his computer screen and clicked something that Philly couldn’t see from where he sat. Clearly, Dennis was killing time, apparently instructed not to say anything until his boss arrived. “We’ll just wait until he gets here,” he said, glancing from his computer screen to Philly and then back.

  After a few hundred more heart beats, for Philly, Mr. Hazelton entered, closing the door behind him. Philly stood, Jesus moved and Mr. Hazelton took Jesus’s seat. “Go ahead and have a seat, Phil,” he said.

  When Philly sat down, he could feel Jesus standing behind him with his hands on his shoulders. Philly welcomed the palpable support.

  “Do you know why we’ve called you here?” Dennis said.

  Philly glanced at Mr. Hazelton and then said, “I have an idea, but I’m not sure what you’ve heard, exactly.”

  “Well, let’s start with that,” Mr. Hazelton said. “Go ahead, Dennis.”

  “Frankly, I was shocked at what we heard, but at the same time I see it fitting in with some behaviors that have been concerning me lately,” Dennis said, loading up for an all-guns assault. “You’ve seemed distracted a lot lately and I attributed that to your grandmother being in the hospital,” here he hesitated. “How is she, by the way?”

  Philly cleared his throat. “Oh, she’s doing fine. She went home from the hospital yesterday, fully recovered,” he said, trying to keep his voice clear and steady.

  Dennis furrowed his brow, “Oh, I’m glad to hear that. I guess she wasn’t as ill as they thought?” Though that sounded like a question, Philly could tell that he wasn’t expected to answer.

  Dennis continued. “Whatever the reason for your distraction, and some odd behavior, I was shocked to get half a dozen emails this afternoon about your activities over the lunch hour. Frankly, I don’t even know how to describe this.” He halted, looking at his computer monitor again. “Here, let me read what Ginny Abbot, up in Design, wrote me:”

  Dennis,

  A couple of the people in my department are telling their friends and coworkers that they have been miraculously healed of some serious health conditions and that it happened over lunch. The stories are really disrupting work up here, but I’m writing you because, according to them, your network administrator was the one that convinced them they had been healed, at some kind of gathering they had outside the office over lunch today. I don’t know what to make of all this and I’m having a hard time cutting off the conversations raging up here.

  Just thought you should know,

  Ginny

  Dennis glanced at Mr. Hazelton and then looked at Philly. “One of the other emails said that you claimed you could talk to Jesus and could see and hear him,” he said, clearly uncomfortable with the subject matter.

  Silence followed, but Philly couldn’t tell whether he was expected to answer, since this time Dennis’s statement sounded nothing like a question. Philly glanced to his right, at Mr. Hazelton and Jesus squeezed his shoulders.

  From behind he heard, “They’re really confused about what to do with all this, Philly. You need to help them out.”

  Jesus had said a lot of strange things to Philly, but this one stunned him the most. “Me, help them?” he thought.

  “Yes,” Jesus said. “Tell them the whole story about your grandma.”

  If he had not been desperately worried about losing his job, Philly never would have considered telling his boss, and his boss’s boss, about his grandma’s coma, Jesus’s appearance and Grandma’s healing. But the pressure of the silence squirted the words out of him, at Jesus’s prompting.

  Again he cleared his throat, really wishing he had some water. “I’d like to tell you what’s been happening for me lately, with my grandma and all,” Philly said.

  Mr. Hazelton answered. “Okay, go ahead.”

  Dennis didn’t look so willing, but Philly knew the shape of the firm’s hierarchy, so he forged ahead, beginning with Grandma’s coma, including his first visit to her, then the strange appearance of Jesus, and finally, Grandma’s hea
ling. When he finished describing his grandmother’s full, miraculous recovery, he stopped and raised his eye brows, inviting their response.

  Dennis and his boss exchanged one look and then Mr. Hazelton took over. “Okay, Phil, let’s just set aside religious notions that we may, or may not, share.” Philly could tell, of course, that they both definitely did not share his view of his experience. Mr. Hazelton continued. “Let’s just look at this in terms of your work here for the firm and the impact of this sort of talk on the work place. You see, we want everyone to feel comfortable at work, free to believe whatever they want and free to practice their religion on their own time. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

  Philly nodded.

  “Right, and we value your contribution to the firm,” Mr. Hazelton said. “Dennis and I were just talking today about how smoothly things have been running lately, under your management of the network.”

  The way he said this last part sounded as if they had just coincidentally been speaking about him in glowing terms, but Philly knew that any such conversation corresponded to their damage control efforts that afternoon. He thought this as he listened, self-consciously trying not to appear self-conscious.

  “So, what we’re after here is an agreement that we all want your work here to continue, for you to be free to practice your beliefs, outside the office, as you see fit, and for that practice not to interfere with your work,” Mr. Hazelton said.

  Philly’s spirits rose on a wave of relief. They had not called him there to fire him, just to get him to conform to their expectations for workplace behavior. His account of Grandma’s coma and healing had legitimized the existence of religious faith, in their minds, but had also wedged that faith between Philly and his two agnostic bosses. Jesus squeezed Philly’s shoulders again and Philly relaxed a bit more.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Philly said, sitting up straighter in his chair. “I’ll be careful to do that, to make sure nothing from my personal life hinders my work.”

  Mr. Hazelton smiled and reached out his hand. As they shook hands, he said, “I knew you would be agreeable. And now we just have to wait for the rumors to blow over. I figure by Monday they’ll die down. Any chance you could take tomorrow off, just to keep a low profile?”