Theresa agreed to Philly picking her up at Noon. He planned to take her to an eclectic restaurant not far from her place, where she could order from a variety of ethnic foods, a safe place for a first date. Philly was assuming that this was a first date, but reserved the possibility that Jesus was doing more than teasing him when he cautioned about assuming the nature of the relationship.
After they said goodbye, and Philly took a deep breath, Jesus looked at Philly in all his anxiety and insecurity. Jesus addressed Philly’s buffeting fears. “You don’t have to carry all that baggage around with you, you know.”
Philly scowled at the obscure reference. “What baggage?”
“All of those years of expecting to be misunderstood and rejected, just because your ma and dad said they didn’t understand you,” Jesus said.
Philly didn’t go to sleep that night until well past eleven, staying up late to slog and slash through some emotional history, with an expert guide. Several times during the two hour conversation, Philly felt as if major internal organs were swapping places inside him, or that several burrowing animals were trying to emerge from his gut into the fresh air. But he didn’t cry nearly as much as he did that first night with Jesus, tears not being essential to the new reconstruction project underway in his soul, apparently.
That night, Philly slept more soundly than he ever remembered. When he awoke in the morning, he recalled nothing after laying his head on his pillow and saying, “Goodnight,” to Jesus. He slept until nearly nine a.m., clearly a record in his adult life, being a natural morning person who generally awoke before his alarm.
Philly rolled to a sitting position, looking over his shoulder at Jesus holding Irving in his lap. He wondered if Jesus had fed the cat to keep him from waking Philly up at the usual time. The lingering weight of sleep prevented him from pursuing that question and he had more urgent business to transact in the bathroom.
A Friday off might have looked a lot like a Saturday, for Philly. But he had promised that this Friday would follow Jesus’s agenda and Jesus suggested he take a shower and get dressed right away. Sensing that this promised some unusual activity, Philly complied and asked no questions.
All cleaned up, and fueled with coffee and toast, Philly looked at Jesus and said, “Well, what next?” His tone lacked the whiny protestation it would have carried two weeks ago, but it still said, “I’m not necessarily looking forward to this.”
Jesus looked at Philly like a doctor doing an exam, then told him, “I think you should go and knock on Mrs. Kelly’s door, downstairs, and ask her if she needs help with anything.”
Philly stared at Jesus. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to old Mrs. Kelly. He knew that he had never knocked on her door, and certainly had never randomly offered to help her with anything. But he did remember coming up the back stairs once, a couple of years ago, and finding her struggling to get her groceries up to her second floor porch. He had lent a hand without even bothering to offer, the need being so obvious. That memory included the relieved and grateful look on her face, which helped the various complaining parts of Philly’s mind to fall silent and allow him to continue to follow Jesus’s agenda.
Philly stepped down the back stairs and knocked on the kitchen door, feeling that knocking at the front door would be too creepy. Mrs. Kelly, an octogenarian with very poor hearing, stood by her kitchen counter and looked around, as if to detect the source of an alien noise. Philly knocked louder, hoping she would recognize him right away and not be frightened by his strange encroachment into her quiet, little world. This time, she looked at the back door and then startled, before donning a relieved look. She stepped laboriously across her linoleum tiles to the back door, fumbling with the lock and the doorknob simultaneously.
“Yes?” she said, when she swung the door a few inches, banging into the toe of her right foot. Fortunately, her sensible shoes took the blow painlessly.
“Hi, Mrs. Kelly. It’s Phillip from upstairs,” he said.
She nodded, having no difficulty recognizing him.
“I have the day off and it occurred to me to ask if you might need help with anything around your apartment?”
Mrs. Kelly nodded slowly, as if absorbing the offer, then she smiled slightly. She stepped back and swung the door the rest of the way, motioning for Philly to come in. “God does answer prayer,” she said simply.
Philly smiled back and cocked his head, in question. He could just see Jesus out of the corner of his left eye and knew everything had been prearranged.
“What can I do for you?” Philly said, feeling the barrier of awkwardness vanish like water down the shower drain.
He stepped into her kitchen, ignoring an unfamiliar acidic smell that seemed to linger in the air over the stove. The kitchen was not as clean as Philly’s and he was no great housekeeper.
Motioning with her right hand, Mrs. Kelly turned and led the way to a large box next to her refrigerator. The box bore the name of a food manufacturer and the bright blue label, “Soy Milk.”
Mrs. Kelly explained. “My grandson arranged for this to be delivered here and I got the girl across the hall to carry it up stairs for me. But now I’m having a devil of a time trying to get the thing open.”
Philly nodded. Speaking loudly, he said, “I know what you mean. I often get packages at work that make me wonder how they expect us to open this stuff. I’ve even thought, ‘what would an older person do if they had to open it?’”
“Pray for help to come,” Mrs. Kelly said, to Philly’s hypothetical question.
Philly’s curiosity rose with her response. “So, really, you prayed for some help to arrive and I just showed up at your door?”
Mrs. Kelly nodded. “I can’t say it works every time, but it seems like it sure did this time.” She looked up at Philly as if to challenge him to deny her claim.
Instead, he told his side of the story. He told her that he had decided to do a little experiment today, to do whatever he thought he heard Jesus telling him to do and that the first order of business was to come downstairs and offer Mrs. Kelly some help. When he finished his account, he worried that he might have said too much, because Mrs. Kelly’s eyes welled up and she put her hands over her mouth, speechless.
Philly watched the compact, old woman for a moment, to make sure she was okay and then he said, “Where do you keep a sharp knife or scissors?”
In about a minute, Philly had cut through the excessive layers of packing tape, the heavily glued box and the hard plastic wrap around the soy milk boxes themselves. The work was a strain to a fairly healthy man in his thirties, he didn’t doubt that his neighbor needed his help. In a minute more, he had lifted each box to the cupboard Mrs. Kelly indicated.
With tears still brimming in her pale gray eyes, Mrs. Kelly thanked Philly, told him there was nothing else right now and escorted him to the back door. They exchanged pleasantries and smiles, both sensing that this would not be the last time that Philly would help out his neighbor.
On his way back upstairs Philly stepped lightly, just like Jesus, who jostled him at the third floor landing. Philly looked at the Savior’s knowing grin, feeling it mirrored on his own face.
“That was cool,” Philly said. “What a great start.”
He entertained a growing expectation that this weekend with Jesus could be a fun adventure, ready for his next divinely-directed good deed. But Jesus surprised him again.
“Just relax and clean up here, a bit,” he said, when Philly asked what he should do next.
The default setting for Philly, like most people in the world around him, pointed to keeping busy. One good deed deserves another and all that. Relax and do a little house cleaning, shorted out that default switch. But the soul loosening experience last night, and throughout his time with Jesus, freed Philly to flow to the unexpected, even if the unexpected constituted doing not much at all. Philly even realized that relaxing and cleaning up “a bit,” should not turn into an apartment overhaul. Instead, he put on some
favorite music, straightened up a little, petted Irving, changed the towel in Irving’s cat basket, sat for a while talking about not much at all with Jesus. He then trimmed his sideburns in preparation for his lunch date.
At eleven-thirty Jesus said, “Okay, I want you to be early at Theresa’s house.”
Philly nodded, did some primping in front of the mirror, checked his breath, swigged some mouthwash, tied on his shoes and headed for the door. When Philly looked in the mirror one last time, on his way to the kitchen, Jesus imitated his hair adjustment and said, “Maybe she’ll have a friend for me.”
Forgetting his frustration at realizing that he still needed a haircut, Philly laughed all the way down the back stairs, thinking about a double date with Jesus.
Though Philly had assumed that Theresa lived in an apartment, like he did, the address she gave put him in front of a red brick, ranch-style house something like Grandma’s. That started him wondering about this woman of whom he knew so little.
Theresa Bailey had worked as a nurse for twelve years, ever since she completed her schooling at Loyola University, in Chicago. For the first half of that career, she had been married to a man who worked in the hospital where she did in those days, and who found a new love of his life in that hospital. Divorced five years ago, she had made only tentative steps into dating, including joining a church in the near suburbs. Though she had found no prospective husband there, she did meet Jesus in a way that recalled early childhood experiences at a friend’s Sunday school, when she was ten years old.
The story of Philly healing his grandmother captivated Theresa for several reasons. Like most people, she had no personal exposure to miraculous healings. Further, she had long wondered why she had heard so little about the healing work that Jesus did, according to the Bible. But mostly, she considered the pain and suffering of people she met through her work, regretting her own powerlessness to relieve them and baffled that God didn’t use his power to do so.
Philly rang the door bell, a full ten minutes early. He wondered whether to apologize about being early, glancing at Jesus and considering blaming it on him. But Jesus spoke back to him telepathically. “It’s not something you’ll have to apologize for,” he said, confident as usual.
Theresa opened the front door, holding her phone in her hand. “Philly, come on in. I’m just finishing up a call with my mother,” she said.
Philly and Theresa exchanged smiles and she returned to her phone conversation, turning away from the door and heading for her kitchen, with an apologetic wave. Philly stood by the door, next to a mirror and hat rack combination. There he saw Jesus standing next to him looking in the mirror, as well. But his attention turned to the tone of Theresa’s conversation with her mother. He caught the phrase, “yes, he is a bit early. No, I think that’s a good thing, Ma.”
Though he missed the exact words, he could hear Theresa begin to disentangle herself from her mother in the same way he often had to pull free from his ma. Theresa did it very deftly, it seemed, assuming her mother was as much like Philly’s as it sounded.
When Theresa said goodbye, she returned to the living room and apologized. “Oh, I’m sorry. Come on in and have a seat. I’ll pull together a couple of things and we can go.”
Philly nodded, smiled and perched himself on the edge of the couch. As he sat there, a tiger-striped cat rounded the corner of the couch, took a look at Philly and then meowed at Jesus. Philly had to repress laughter. He looked at Jesus, who clearly didn’t intend to pick up Theresa’s cat. Philly jokingly dared him to do it, in a swift, silent banter between them. Jesus laughed openly. He didn’t have to hold back, Theresa couldn’t hear him.
As they drove to the restaurant, Philly asked about Theresa’s day off, which led to questions about her work. This led back to the event that brought them together. When Theresa asked Philly whether he had seen other healings, besides his grandma’s, he told her about some of his experiences, lingering especially on the group in Washington Square Park. If you asked Philly, he would have honestly not known whether he intended his expansive account to impress Theresa, or whether he merely needed to revisit and relish that event, for himself. He did leave out the repercussions at work caused by the lunchtime healings, however, intentionally staying positive for this first meeting.
After ordering nearly identical meals, down to the iced tea to drink, Philly and Theresa settled into an awkward silence, waiting for their food. For the first time, they faced each other for more than a passing second. One good look at Theresa’s slender, smiling face flipped something inside Philly, like a flash of joy popping out from under a dull stone. Instinctively, he pulled back, remembering Brenda in that moment, mostly because she was the last person that had inspired such a dose of romance.
Theresa noticed the subtle change on Philly’s face and guessed the source of that hesitation. “Do you mind me asking if you have a girlfriend?”
Philly smiled shyly for a half a breath and then furrowed his heavy brow. “I don’t really know,” he said, with a self-conscious chuckle. “I was starting to get back with a woman that I used to date, when she learned about what was happening to me,” here Philly hesitated. He had driven right into a corner. Disarmed by the look in Theresa’s bright green eyes, he had forgotten to conceal his big secret. Philly had made similar blunders in the past, carried away by the charm of the moment, his brain trailing along behind his mouth. In these situations, he often simply sputtered out every bit of truth at hand, whether advantageous or not.
He sighed softly and looked at Jesus. Jesus nodded for Philly to go ahead and tell her.
Theresa looked curiously at Philly and even glanced in the direction of Jesus, trying to guess at her date’s internal dialog.
Philly stepped it up. “You see there’s something I haven’t told you about the healing stuff that’s been happening.” Then he unpacked the whole story of Jesus appearing to him, pausing to establish his lack of any miraculous experiences before it began. When he rounded the corner to the story of Brenda and the things Jesus told her, Theresa sat entranced.
In a slightly hushed voice, she said, “Can you see him now?”
Philly and Theresa both glanced toward the chair to his right and her left, where Jesus sat smiling. Philly nodded and said, “And I know what he would want me to tell you.”
Theresa sat literally breathless.
“He really loves you a lot.”
Theresa shivered visibly. Where this exchange would have gone next had to remain a mystery, as the server brought their drinks to the table. Philly thanked the server and Theresa managed a faint echo of that thanks. She looked toward Jesus again. Internally she assessed Philly’s claim in light of the miraculous healing of his grandma, but also influenced by a strong feeling that she couldn’t explain rationally.
“He is here,” she said with awestruck certainty.
Philly smiled and looked from Theresa to Jesus. From the start, this experience veered away from what had happened with Brenda. Theresa’s breathless fascination warmed Philly.
This returned them to the scene in Grandma’s hospital room, where Theresa had first noticed both Philly and Grandma looking to the side of her bed where Jesus stood. By the time they had finished weaving together their two individual experiences of that event, their chicken sandwiches arrived.
Theresa didn’t seem to notice her sandwich. Philly was hungry, and wanted to attack the aromatic food sitting fifteen inches from his chin, but he held back to allow Theresa some space.
“Go ahead and eat,” Jesus said to Philly, motioning to Theresa.
Philly passed the message on. “Jesus says to go ahead and eat.”
Theresa started to giggle, a hiccuppy sort of deliriously laughter. “Tell him thanks for the food,” she said when the laughter abated.
Philly laughed now. “He can hear you, ya know.” He stifled his laughter when he noticed people at the next table taking an interest in their strange behavior.
Theresa c
overed her mouth with one hand, glanced around at their fellow diners, and tamped down her laughter, as well.
Philly lifted half of his sandwich and bit in. Theresa followed his example, though more delicately. Her restraint reminded Philly to be careful. He checked his chin for drips with the cloth napkin from his lap.
After chewing and swallowing, Theresa picked up a loose end of Philly’s story. “So your former girlfriend said not to call her again until Jesus left? Did she mean until you couldn’t see him anymore?”
Philly stopped chewing. Theresa seemed to understand his situation, and its implications, so intuitively that it shocked him. Without a doubt, Theresa’s Bible study trained mind followed the situation, and even anticipated its impact, in ways that Brenda would not be able to for a long time. Philly saw all of that in one brief moment.
Answering Theresa’s question, once he swallowed his food, Philly said, “I’m pretty sure she meant until he’s no longer visible to me. I don’t think she has any idea that Jesus will stay with me even when he’s not visible. I know I didn’t understand that at first.” Philly kept his voice down, aware of how bizarre the conversation would seem to anyone who overheard.
Theresa had already turned her voice down, but mostly out of reverence and awe at the magnitude of the opportunity Philly had been given. She thought about Philly’s answer, along with the way he talked about his healing experiences and asked a question.
“Have you been a church-going person most of your life?” She didn’t know the best way to voice real the question in her mind, which was more like, “You don’t go to church much, do you?”
Philly shook his head as he chewed his food. When he swallowed, given time to think of his verbal response, he said, “No, I didn’t meet Jesus in church, I met him on a CTA bus.” He grinned and took another bite.
Again Theresa laughed. “I guess that’s sort of what I thought. You don’t talk like a church person, which is funny, ‘cause you seem to be having a more real experience of Jesus than the people I go to church with.”
Seeing Jesus Page 19