Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  This raised the issue for the first time, in Philly’s mind, that maybe he should be thinking about going to church. With a swallow and a drink of iced tea, he responded more to his thoughts than Theresa’s observation. “I should think about going to church,” he glanced at Jesus, “shouldn’t I?”

  Jesus smiled and nodded, noticing that Philly asked him a direct question, out loud, in front of Theresa. He raised his eyebrows and looked at Theresa, redirecting Philly’s attention. Philly grinned at the admiring and reverent look on Theresa’s face.

  An attractive woman by most people’s standards, by Philly’s standards for sure, Theresa looked somehow angelic as she watched him casually interacting with the Jesus that remained invisible to her. Here Philly soaked in the feeling of not only being understood and believed, but even admired. This combination intoxicated him. He stopped his vigorous assault on the chicken sandwich and just stared at Theresa.

  Theresa looked up from her plate and returned Philly’s gaze for a moment, withdrawing shyly from the intensity of the admiration he beamed at her.

  “What are you looking at?” she said. She thought she knew the look of infatuation, but reserved the possibility that some other supernatural vision had captivated her date.

  Philly woke from his trance and said simply, “Just looking at you and liking what I see.”

  In the history of Philly’s interaction with women, from high school to the present, he had never said so smoothly exactly what he wanted to say until that moment and that one short sentence.

  Theresa breathed a self-conscious laugh. “Are you always such a smooth talker?” she said with a smile.

  Philly shook his head. “Never,” he said honestly. His own embarrassed smile met Theresa at the doorway to her soul, an entry point that had remained shut since her divorce. Philly’s self-effacing manner contrasted pleasantly with her cocky ex-husband.

  Theresa changed the mood, with the thought of her marriage. “I was married once. We divorced five years ago. He cheated on me.”

  Those three short statements opened the door a bit, offering Philly the chance to enter or turn away. But Philly didn’t come from the sort of church people who would flee from the mention of divorce. For him, the facts stood alone, isolated from moral implications and character questions.

  “Are you over it?” Philly said, picking up the last bit of sandwich and delicately biting it in half.

  Theresa sipped her tea and checked her emotional inventory. “I’m getting over it,” she said. Then, thinking about it some more, she said, “I suppose asking your grandma to give you my phone number is a good sign that I really am getting over it.” She smiled again, this time not so self-consciously.

  When they finished eating, sauntering through some more casual conversation, they rose from the table, after Philly left cash to cover the food and tip. Theresa noted the large tip, which Philly didn’t do to impress her. He always tipped well, perhaps out of a longing to please at least one person on a given day.

  Outside, the sun had withdrawn under the approach of rain clouds, carried by a rising wind. Philly, Jesus and Theresa walked to Philly’s car. On the way, Philly sent a silent question to Jesus, “Should I tell her about my plan to follow you today and your idea for me to meet with her?”

  Jesus replied, “There’s no reason not to.”

  Philly knew of one reason, but apparently it didn’t worry Jesus that such a revelation may intensify the relationship at such an early stage.

  In the car, out of the wind, Philly took shelter in Jesus’s permission. “Jesus said it’s okay for me to tell you something about our meeting today.”

  Theresa perked up at that prelude, watching Philly carefully as he explained the news that Jesus would go invisible after this weekend and his determination to follow Jesus’s lead for these remaining days. She raised her eyebrows, and then nearly cried, when he told her that meeting with her was part of Jesus’s plan for the day.

  Then she did something no one else had tried, she looked at Philly and then looked in the back seat, assuming Jesus was sitting there. She addressed Jesus directly. “Why did you want us to meet today?”

  Jesus replied directly and Philly translated. “Because I wanted to be visible to Philly when you two met.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you asked me to help you get over your former husband’s betrayal and you asked me to bring you someone that you could trust, who would have a faith that you could grow with.”

  Philly had done dozens of difficult things on Jesus’s behalf, over the past several days, repeating this answer word-for-word ranked near the top. But Theresa didn’t trip over the appearance that Philly was recommending himself, rather she recognized from his mouth, the exact words she had used numerous times in prayer. This time she did burst into tears. The outburst unsettled Philly, but didn’t panic him. A glance at Jesus, along with Theresa’s body language, told him that the words he had relayed landed deep in her heart and that her tears sprung from that heart being tapped by the one who truly loved her. The tears weren’t really about Philly.

  Looking back at Jesus for directions, Philly caught a nod and heard him say, over the tears and sobs, “Go ahead and put a hand on her shoulder. Even in receiving good news she can use a comforting hand.”

  Philly gently rested his right hand on Theresa’s near shoulder. Jesus leaned forward, placing his hand on Philly’s elbow which now pointed toward the middle of Jesus’s chest. No electricity jolted or buzzed through that touch, but Philly did feel a warm flow from Jesus, through him, to Theresa.

  Theresa looked at Philly and smiled through her tears and running makeup. “This is a lot for a first date.” She blurted the words, half-laughing now.

  Philly laughed too.

  Jesus said. “I didn’t have much time and a lot to cover.”

  Philly repeated this for Theresa. She reached up and held Philly’s hand on her shoulder. “Mission accomplished, I’d say.”

  “Yep,” Jesus said.

  And Philly laughed again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After they walked and talked in a park along the canal that marked the border between two suburbs, Philly dropped Theresa off at her house later that afternoon, under Jesus’s advice. The unexpected depth of their connection left them both floundering about what to do next. Jesus advised some time apart to allow the experience to soak in. Philly welcomed that suggestion, like a thirsty man receiving a swimming pool worth of water in one dump. It’s only too much of a good thing if you have no capacity to process it.

  The brand new couple parted with a hug and brief kisses on the cheek, after a stuttering on-and-off effort by both of them. Having avoided banging heads and obtaining the desired contact, along with smiles and warm words, the first date ended. Jesus had offered to stay in the car, but Philly insisted he accompany them to the porch, though he had no particular reason in mind.

  These ten days with Jesus had bonded Philly to his constant companion, the man who would be the perfect foil for any personality. With Jesus at his side, Philly began to feel as if he could do anything. He already started dreading Jesus becoming invisible and inaudible. He had become dependent on his eccentric shadow.

  As the pioneering drops of a substantial rain storm began to spatter the two men, Philly said, “So what do we do now? Conquer a castle? Slay a dragon?” He laughed as he unlocked the passenger door for Jesus.

  Grinning about his date with Theresa and the prospect of two more days with Jesus, Philly watched Jesus open the car door. Not until Jesus had closed the passenger door, did Philly reach the driver’s side of the car and glance back at Theresa’s house, where he just glimpsed her dim image in the picture window, still watching him. He thought he saw her eyes staring wide, like a nocturnal animal, but couldn’t be sure. He was pretty sure that she had seen Jesus open and close the door, with his invisible hands.

  “Why did you do that?” Philly said, still in good spirits.

  Je
sus answered Philly with a wink and then a glance back at Theresa’s window. “She’ll be okay, my friend. And the more she trusts you, the better.”

  Philly sobered at the thought of someone truly trusting him, diverting a mental stream toward Brenda and her trust issues and then returning to the present. He nodded and looked at Theresa’s house one last time before checking for traffic and pulling away from the curb.

  “To answer your first question,” Jesus said, “let’s go back to your place for a while. We can deal with the dragon later tonight.”

  Laughing at the joke for just a second, Philly lost his humorous momentum with the thought that Jesus might be serious about the dragon, in some metaphorical sense, he assumed.

  Reading his thoughts, Jesus just smiled.

  As they drove, Jesus started to talk to Philly about his days playing chess in school and in youth tournaments. The passenger asked the questions as one who had been there and who simply wanted to revisit the memory together with his friend. The driver tripped into the topic, kicking a toe against some dark object in his mind and then regaining his balance, as he entered a corridor of his memory that he had neglected, with some effort. Jesus reminisced like a proud father, even remembering the names of the other players in the key tournaments, a detail that ignited a new set of feelings for Philly, a light of sympathy for his opponents, though not pity for the defeated challengers.

  When he had parked his car and closed the gate, Philly followed Jesus up the sidewalk, through the slackening rain. Glancing casually over his shoulder, Jesus said, “Let’s play some chess.”

  Philly asked Jesus to repeat that, though he had heard it clearly enough.

  “Come on, you afraid I can beat you?” Jesus said like a posturing teenager.

  Jesus’s teasing diverted Philly from smashing into his inner vow to never play chess again. Philly said. “Afraid? I’m absolutely sure you can beat me, all things considered.” He paused mentally to note that he had spoken out loud, reminded himself not to do that, and then he stumbled down that memory corridor that Jesus had swept him into. How long had it been since he played chess?

  In the apartment, Irving greeted his two favorite people with unending purrs and incessant rubbing against their legs, as Philly slipped his jacket off and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair to dry. Jesus, magically dry, picked Irving up without hesitation.

  “It’s in the back of your bedroom closet, at the top, in that green shoe box,” Jesus said. He spoke of Philly’s favorite chess set, of course. Philly knew. Though he still had half a dozen sets, only one was his favorite and he only thought of using that one to play anybody . . . if he could be persuaded to play anybody.

  Philly’s dad had bought him this blonde and brown, wooden chess set, with a matching wooden case that folded out to double as the board. It just fit in a large shoe box, when folded shut. The smooth wooden pieces all nestled inside, cushioned in green velvet. On that birthday, his tenth, Philly felt as if his father understood him, even sympathized. After all, his mother generally purchased the birthday and Christmas gifts. That his dad had made the effort, and had so deftly succeeded in getting him a dear and beautiful gift, stuck with Philly. The grace and richness of that association, however, had faded under that other memory, of his parents both confessing that their son was an alien to them. That shadow had arisen only two months after receiving the perfect gift.

  “The rook still your favorite piece?” Jesus said.

  Philly made a dull affirming noise.

  “I like the king the best,” Jesus said.

  Philly came out of the bedroom with the big shoe box and looked suspiciously at Jesus. “The king? Are you kidding?”

  “No. Would I kid you?”

  Philly knew he would.

  “I tell you what,” Jesus said. “I will only capture your pieces with the king. You play by the normal rules and I’ll only capture with the king.”

  Though he had not played in decades, Philly’s brain shifted into chess mode like a key in a lock. The mental click started him mapping ways to capture pieces with the king and ways to take advantage of Jesus’s offered limitation. The trick would be fascinating to see. For any measure of success at such a crippled strategy would be a trick.

  “You’re not gonna mess with my mind or anything to keep me for winning are you?” Philly said, a bit childishly.

  “You mean like a Vulcan mind meld, or a Jedi trick?” Jesus said, in perfect geek speak.

  Philly smirked. “Just trying to figure out my opponent.”

  Sitting at the small kitchen table, the faltering afternoon sun occasionally angling onto the yellow wall behind Jesus, they sat across the chess board from each other. Even as they did, Philly approached the situation on several levels. Most obviously, he touched chess pieces for the first time since his preadolescence, using a chess board that he had saved for twenty-eight years. As a chess challenge, he contemplated the modified rules of the game proposed by Jesus and mentally tracked down the most elegant way to win. More deeply, he knew that Jesus had proposed this match in order to fix something in his soul related to the loss of his early passion for the game. And cosmologically, he spun through questions, and scenarios, regarding a contest between himself and the reigning God of the universe. This multi-storied thinking revived a skill-set that had fallen into disrepair before Philly had fully grown into it. Yet that skill-set did live inside him and showed signs of restoration in the fifteen-minute chess match that followed.

  The revival of his childhood chess experience couldn’t have happened before the visit from Jesus. Philly had consciously refused to engage that part of his brain with that part of his past, until now, having spilled out of his boxed and sealed life, into an infinite existence that he glimpsed through the words and touches of Jesus. Loose in the fields of that childhood experience now, Philly began to find feelings long forgotten. The severe handicap that Jesus imposed on himself, for example, recalled Philly’s social challenge of facing someone in a competitive capacity that he knew he could easily beat. He had only to decide how to win. As they played, however, Philly could recognize the brilliance of his supernatural opponent. The king-only capture rule would have disarmed a world-class supercomputer against Philly, but winning was not enough. Philly wanted to win beautifully. He needed to win beautifully.

  Rather than exploit the obvious opportunity to simply capture Jesus’s pieces with impunity, since his king couldn’t protect most of the board, Philly worked more directly to attack his opponent’s strength, in that small realm where the chess king can protect the pieces directly surrounding it. Philly moved carefully and he knew that Jesus took more time on his moves than he needed, lengthening the game beyond the time required for the brute-force slaughter offered by Jesus’s severe self-restriction. The resulting brief match recalled those youth chess contests, just as did Philly’s inevitable victory. And, as much as Philly faced a true chess master across the board, he also faced a masterful physician for his soul. Even in the midst of the strategic and tactical flow, Philly looked at Jesus and loved him for what he was doing.

  Though Philly had never received psychotherapy, and had not even studied introductory psychology in school, he recognized the healing of his ragged heart. The tactile memory of that chess set, the transcendent thought process that awoke over the sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, knocked years of accumulated crust from one of his deepest cuts. His hands began to shake as he approached checkmate, fragmented beams from his mind willing him on, spurring him to the end, against the heavy drag of stored grief. Jesus watched his opponent more than the board and the look on his face, which Philly glimpsed on and off, grew more and more compassionate.

  Finally, as Philly placed his last piece in position to end the match, his breath lurched in gasps, which compounded to sobs when he met the eyes of his opponent and witnessed the trail of twin tears down the sides of Jesus’s face and into his beard. The perfection of his opponent, as a chess master and a lo
ver, launched the grieving soul into open catharsis. Philly lurched forward in his chair, grabbing his face and nearly tumbling to the floor. Jesus caught him before he hit the linoleum and laid his friend gently on his side. Curled in a fetal position, Philly released mournful groans and breathless sobs, such as he had experienced only once before, and that less than two weeks ago.

  How innocent it might have seemed for one friend to challenge another to a game of chess. Yet Philly’s life tottered over the fulcrum of that game. His ability to extend himself beyond self-protective containment, into an adventure that touched the outside world with beauty and grace, died when he shoved his chess sets into boxes and vowed to never play again. His confidence to triumph over challenge by reveling in the gifts given him by an invisible Creator, had surrendered to the expressionless anonymity of mediocrity. He sank with the anchor hooked to him by his soul-stuffed parents, when they threw the shame of their wasted and meaningless lives onto their only son.

  Jesus sat cross legged on the kitchen floor next to Philly, as the last light of day faded amber and red under the trailing clouds of the emigrating storm. He placed one hand on Philly’s shoulder and with the other stroked his hair like a mother consoling her child late one nightmare-disrupted night. Without spoken words, the Savior communicated liberation and inspiration to the raw and open heart of the broken man before him.

  Philly welcomed the breaking. He tasted a sweet hint of what freedom would mean for his life from that day forward; his soul sighing contently, as grinding burdens lifted off of his raw and weary shoulders. This renewal took two hours to begin and would take the rest of his life to express.

  When he could press himself up to a sitting position, Philly met Irving’s eyes first. The cat, sitting statuesque, coolly observed his master’s resurrection. Of course, Irving acted as though he had seen resurrection a hundred times, yet he still felt compelled to watch. Philly laughed at the cat’s aloof interest and then hugged Jesus for a full minute, still there on the floor.