“You had an unusual introduction to being with me, Philly, so I want to leave you a connection between this way of seeing me and having me inside you,” he said stepping up in front of Philly. Jesus gently touched Philly’s chest, in the recess below his left collar bone.
“Receive my spirit to live inside you now,” Jesus said.
Time and space disappeared for a moment. Philly no longer felt the floor or chair beneath him, nor saw the room around him; he heard nothing except a heavenly music that didn’t pass through his ears. He didn’t spin, shake or fall, though he couldn’t explain why not. And he didn’t scream out from pain or intense pleasure, though he didn’t understand that either. Without leaving a mark on his skin, to Philly’s amazement, Jesus branded him both mind and spirit, leaving a handle to grab whenever Philly felt the presence of his friend slipping away.
Jesus removed his hand and spoke to Grandma. Philly knew that much, but no more. He remained suspended in between Heaven and Earth during Jesus’s final interaction with her.
When he began to emerge into ordinary earthly sensations, Philly saw Jesus standing there waiting. He said very simply, “I will never leave you.” And then he vanished.
That night, just past midnight, Theresa awoke and couldn’t get back to sleep, an unexplained sense of anticipation keeping her awake. She slid out of bed and went to the bathroom. When she began to wash her hands, she started to wonder at the odd sensation of vertigo she had been ignoring since she woke up. Suddenly, she blinked her eyes. In the yellow glow of the nightlight next to her sink, she looked at herself in the mirror and then closed her right eye. She opened that eye and closed her left. With both eyes opened she stifled a scream of delight. She could see perfectly, with both eyes.
Chapter Eighteen
Philly plunked the TV remote onto the coffee table. He scratched at two weeks growth of beard and contemplated whether his stomach was expanding or whether that was just his imagination. He had a very active imagination, as it turned out.
But some things had to be real, he reasoned, such as Theresa’s sight restored to her nearly blind eye, his dad’s hearing restored and, of course, Grandma waking from her coma. He hadn’t merely imagined those things.
Theresa’s place on that list distracted Philly down a dark tunnel leading to the lowest level of his depression. He remembered that day, a week after Jesus disappeared, when he saw the picture on Theresa’s computer.
He sat at her kitchen table drinking skim milk and eating homemade cookies, while Theresa checked her email. Philly’s attention swayed between the sunset tint of the yard outside the window, and his cookies, the laptop screen taking a distant third.
Theresa opened a message nonchalantly, clicking away, when a photo of her at work popped up. Her muted gasp drew Philly’s attention. In the photo, taken with someone’s phone, she stood with her hand on the posterior of a male staff member. Immediately, Philly could tell she was embarrassed that he saw the image, but some part of him noted that she was not as embarrassed as he would have been, were the roles reversed.
Philly’s cheeks turned red, in that humiliating way that made his face burn and caused him to look like a failed experiment at a cosmetology school.
Theresa tried to force a laugh and closed the photo. “Oh, that’s embarrassing. I didn’t know she got a picture of that,” she said, her voice quavering very slightly.
Philly stared at the screen, though the offending image had vanished.
Theresa squirmed in her chair, absorbing the sick look on Philly’s face
For Theresa, the window on her flirtation with the handsome guy at the hospital revealed a feeling she had kept submerged, the feeling that she needed to struggle for breath, like someone suffocating in a sealed room. Though her adult, rational self knew that life with Philly wouldn’t suffocate her, reason didn’t silence an echoing voice from faded years past. That voice cried out for freedom to breathe. Of course, she didn’t mean to hurt Philly, to make him back off; at least not in her responsible, rational self.
They parted that night earlier than usual, a smothering silence weighing between them. Philly knew he couldn’t find fitting words. Theresa tried to laugh off the incident, to attribute it to office culture and “Good clean fun.” But, in the midst of her attempt, she discovered that she too couldn’t find sufficient words.
This crippling conflict split open Philly’s soul and his confidence in everything spilled out of him, like kernels of popping corn pouring from a damaged bag. He could almost hear the noisy little grains pelting the hard floor, as faith, love, joy and hope escaped from the opening in his heart.
Then, in the days when he struggled to recover from this shock to his relationship with Theresa, the darkness grew even deeper.
When Philly had returned to his office on LaSalle Street, back in April, after his long weekend with Jesus, he found that Craig had spent much of Friday debunking rumors that Philly had been fired, as well as rumors that he had done any number of fictitious miracles. Managers throughout the company resorted to threats in order to contain the cascade of hearsay and gossip. The clampdown simply drove the talk underground and fueled the more drastic speculations. That Philly appeared at the office the next Monday, and without boxes for clearing out his personal effects, reduced the pressure, as did a weekend away from work for everyone. Though no one in the company had access to the data, if they did, they would have been impressed, or perhaps concerned, by the number of employees who had attended church for the first time in years on that Sunday.
In the days that followed, coworkers made surreptitious requests for healing that allowed Philly to take his ministry outside the office, undercover, for a while. But the occasional production of new healings started an even broader flow of new rumors, until one day, when Dennis caught Philly talking quietly to himself, or so it appeared.
“Phil, are you talking to yourself?” Dennis said, when he checked in the network room, two weeks after Jesus disappeared.
Tired of ducking and covering, Philly told the truth. “Actually I was talking to Jesus,” he said simply, with an air of surrender. In this he surprised himself. Dennis was not impressed.
Dennis shook his head. “I know there are rumors that you believe you can see and hear Jesus talking to you, but I thought that was just crazy talk.”
Philly looked at Dennis, trying to decide how much to say. “Well, I don’t see or hear Jesus the way I see or hear you, not like a regular human being. But I do believe in talking to him and listening to him. That’s really all that prayer is,” he said.
Dennis, who had been a lapsed member of his parish for decades, resented being told what prayer is. He rolled his eyes and huffed. “Can’t you do that in church and leave it out of the office?”
“I could,” Philly said. “And I’m sorry I was talking out loud, just now. That’s not necessary; I just got carried away a little.”
Hearing the apology, Dennis toned down his disdain, but that didn’t end his response to Philly’s actions, both witnessed and rumored.
“I want you to go and see someone for an evaluation,” Dennis said, balking at saying the word “psychological.”
“Evaluation?” Philly asked, associating that word with Dennis, who had always been his boss, evaluating his work performance.
“I mean a mental health evaluation,” Dennis said, having found a phrase he could live with.
“You want me to see a psychiatrist?” Philly said, remembering that his mother had the same idea. This conjoining of Dennis and his ma represented a perverse symmetry that nearly made Philly laugh. Perhaps that was hysterical laughter.
“The health plan covers it,” Dennis said. “I’m sure you can find one that’s on the network.” He referred to the company insurance plan and its approved list of care providers.
The main benefit of this option, for Philly, was the time delay. It took several days to find a counselor and schedule an appointment and then two more weeks of visits. The proce
ss of finding a therapist would have been easier if the company had not insisted on a counselor who would report his or her findings to them. Eileen heard about this on the phone and nearly cursed in front of Philly for the first time since her visit. She was certain that this was not legal for the kind of job Philly had, with no prior agreement to such an evaluation. Though his sister certainly had grounds for these concerns, Philly had never been the sort of person to press a fight to its bloody end.
As it turned out, the counseling meetings benefited the psychiatrist, a gargoyle-like man in his late sixties. Philly healed the old atheist’s lower back pain in their second meeting. The following week, the counselor reported to Dennis that he found nothing wrong with Philly and didn’t expect to find grounds for dismissal in any number of weeks of therapy.
Thus, the firm had to resort to firing Philly for violating company policy against proselytizing in the office. Philly ignored recommendations from Craig, and others, that he hire a lawyer and contest that interpretation of what he was doing at work, since it constituted grounds for not receiving unemployment benefits, or any kind of severance. Though he never tried to convert anyone, per se, Philly could see that healing someone in the office was even more dangerous than an evangelistic pamphlet. Nevertheless, though he didn’t choose to fight, a handful of other people actually left the firm as a result of Philly’s firing.
As he finally packed up his personal belongings and left his office for the last time, Philly struggled with a drowning sensation, as fears flooded all around and into his soul. “How will I take care of myself without a job?” was all he could think. And that familiar voice that used to reassure and comfort him, seemed a muffled shout from a far away shore, his anxiety splashing away the clear reassurance carried by that voice.
During the first week of looking for a new job, Philly stopped repeatedly to try to hear Jesus still speaking to him. But, at home, trolling on the Internet for vocational hope, he lost track of his guide.
Then desperation pounced. Philly called his grandma to arrange a visit and found her sick in bed. Her longing to go home to be with Jesus rose up in Philly’s frazzled mind. But Grandma didn’t die. She did, however, remain sick for nearly two weeks, even after Philly tried three times to heal her.
Ignoring a dozen phone messages blinking at him on his machine and cluttering his cell phone, Philly spiraled downward. He stopped shaving, bathed seldom and didn’t leave the apartment for ten days straight. The wall of emotional pain that loomed over him lacked the familiar proportions of past depressions. This depression dominated his emotional landscape like a tottering tower, much bigger than downturns in the past; because this was the first time that he feared he had lost contact with Jesus and God.
After several tries at reconnecting with Jesus, pausing to pray and trying to listen for his voice in his head, Philly gave up. Instead of stirring him back to faith, his attempts only lead to frustration.
And then there was the anger, the angry accusations directed at the invisible God, who had withdrawn not only himself, but also the budding love of Theresa. Philly also spewed his resentment that Grandma, his emotional anchor, would be leaving soon.
In that irreligious venting, Philly found an open door to God. Though he thought the heavenward howling would seal God’s absence, he was surprised to find that God recognized his intemperate cries as an invitation to reengage.
While focused on his losses, daunted by the task of finding new employment and feeling alone in the world, Philly held God at arm’s length. When he turned to complain about God’s distance, his arms dropped to his side and God drew near once again. But this time, the visible and audible projection of God, in the form of his son, did not appear. Instead, Philly had to return to that game of, “Can you hear me now?”
Like whispers in a wind-rocked forest, Philly caught only faint hopes of a voice, slim slips of sound, of which he could not be sure. To gain that surety, Philly hunkered down and waited. He planted himself on the couch and waited for God to appear to him again, to speak to him again.
If not for Irving’s insistent pleas for attention, Philly might not have left the collapsed cushions of his old couch. He ate and drank and relieved himself as an afterthought, on the heels of meeting Irving’s basic needs. The cat didn’t mind the vigil, of course, for it placed Philly right where his four-legged friend could find him—providing a warm place to sit and an idle hand to scratch his head.
After Philly’s two weeks of silence toward the outside world, except for two strange phone conversations with Grandma, Theresa contacted Dave Michaels, desperately worried about Philly. Neither of them knew where Philly lived, his phone number being unlisted and neither of them ever invited to visit Philly’s apartment. But Craig began to visit Dave’s church and, when Dave learned of his connection with Philly, Dave convinced Craig to find out his ex-boss’s address.
On a warm and sunny Wednesday afternoon, having received the information from Craig, Dave headed over to Philly’s apartment. He knew better than to ring the front door bell in the small entryway downstairs. If Philly was ignoring phone calls from everyone, he certainly wouldn’t be answering the doorbell either. Dave knocked on the glass of the back door, standing in the late afternoon shade on Philly’s back porch. When Philly didn’t answer, Dave tried the door knob, though any veteran resident of Chicago would know that it would be locked. In his mind-fuzzing funk, however, Philly had left that door unlocked, when he threw a reeking bag of garbage off the porch and into an open dumpster behind his building.
Dave stepped into the kitchen, calling out, “Philly? Philly, are you in here?”
Philly lay asleep on the couch, his left hand cupped to that spot on his chest where Jesus had last touched him. At the sound of Dave’s voice, he awoke and tried to sit up. The acute angle of his arm against his chest had put that limb asleep, such that Philly couldn’t immediately move it. As he regained consciousness he looked down at his numb arm and remembered that he had been thinking of Jesus’s promise that he would never leave him.
“Philly? I’m coming in,” Dave was saying, closer now, on his way into the central hallway of the apartment.
For a moment, Philly couldn’t place that voice, but he knew that it was familiar and felt that it was welcomed.
When Dave looked into the living room, finding Philly facing away from him with hair matted on one side and flying away on the other, he expected the worst.
But Philly twisted his stiff neck and looked at Dave, to settle the answer to the source of that voice.
Dave saw a promise of life in Philly’s eyes and smiled.
“Hey,” Philly said.
“Hey, yourself,” Dave said. “Some of us were getting’ worried about you.” He continued into the living room, surveying the unkempt apartment around its unkempt resident. “But I guess we shouldn’t have worried,” Dave said with ironic emphasis.
Philly smiled at the joke. Then remembered his left arm, as the blood began to flow and a hundred needles tried to shoot their way out of his finger tips. His hand flopped into his lap as partial control returned with the pain.
“”Theresa called me,” Dave said, watching Philly try to flex his hand at the end of an arm that appeared creased like a wet shirt left in the washing machine too long.
The mention of Theresa awoke Philly further. He looked at Dave and said, “I guess I better forgive her for what she did.”
Though Philly couldn’t know it, Dave recognized the reference, because Theresa had confessed her blunder to Dave when she called to solicit his help.
Dave nodded, stepped toward an old, brown armchair, and scooped up some garbage so he could have a seat. “That would be a great place to start,” Dave said, as he sat down, dropping the small pile of paper plates, napkins and silverware on the floor next to him.
After coaxing Philly to tell his version of what happened between him and Theresa, Dave looked at Philly, rumpled and bleary before him. “What would it mean for you to
forgive her?” Dave tested.
Philly thought a moment, then said, “I guess I would give it another try, a relationship with her, I mean.”
“Forgiving her is really important, even if you don’t get back together with her,” Dave said.
Philly nodded, believing that this was true, though not precisely clear about why.
Dave seemed to sense that specificity gap and sought to fill it in. “You know, Jesus said that if we fail to forgive someone who does us wrong, then his father won’t forgive us. So it’s important, apart from whether you get back with Theresa, or even whether she stops doing things like that at work.”
A sick feeling bubbled briefly inside Philly’s emotional cauldron and Dave caught the flash of panic in his eyes. But that panic didn’t come from where Dave would have guessed. Instead of balking at the notion of Theresa continuing unreformed, Philly thought of his ma and the plethora of ways she annoyed and angered him. If he had to forgive Theresa no matter what, he would probably have to forgive his ma, as well.
“I don’t suppose this stops at Theresa,” Philly said. “For some reason my ma comes to mind just now.”
Over the course of the next hour, Dave listened as Philly cataloged his recent collapse and then recovered the back story for each of the people he realized he needed to forgive: Theresa, his ma, and even Grandma and Jesus.
Dave sought to bring Philly to a resting place. “There’s a principal around things like this, that you should start with the biggest pain first which will loosen up a lot of the others. So where do we start?”
This question was a probe to see if Philly was willing to honestly confront the core of his problem.
“Gotta be Ma first,” Philly said in a muted tone.
“Yes,” Dave said. “You need to forgive her, Philly. You need to let her go on being whatever unpleasant thing you think she is and still forgive her. Forgive her for what she couldn’t be or couldn’t give. She’s not really the source of all of your troubles,” he said with authority.
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