But Alison closed the conversation for both of them. “So, come, Lord. Reveal yourself to both of us in the way that you want.” Her voice stayed low and breathy, like a mother saying goodnight to her child. And she did add, that last word, “Amen.”
Gladys echoed the “Amen.”
The brief silence that followed was different for each of them. Alison was waiting for the answer to their prayers. Gladys was feeling shy after letting so much of her unmentionables show for so long.
“Oh, I really do sense his presence in a palpable way,” Alison said, a touch of rapture lifting that airy voice a pitch higher. She looked at Gladys, as if expecting to see some sign of Jesus appearing to her.
As strange as it may seem, Gladys had no similar expectation. Without thinking about it, unconventional prayer notwithstanding, she reverted to old habits. She didn’t expect anything to change just because she prayed, not right away. Gladys’s post-prayer sigh was as much as she could invest in the afterglow.
Alison took the temperature of the room and shifted focus. “So, Gladys, do you want to meet with me on a regular basis, say once a week or every two weeks?”
One question had never seemed to find a fitting place to enter their brief acquaintance. Gladys risked a little more and addressed it squarely. “I don’t know how this works. Do I pay you for this?”
Alison smiled in a way that harmonized with the words of her answer. “If cost is a concern, then it shouldn’t keep us from meeting. The center is supported by the Jesuit Order, and by the local diocese, as well as some generous donors. We do accept donations, and even have suggested amounts for various ministries, such as spiritual direction. But I would say, let’s put that aside for now, and you can think about whether you can give financially. Just be sure that it’s not a worry to you. Only give if it’s no burden to do so.”
Though Alison had plenty to say, and certainly had addressed similar questions dozens and dozens of times, her eyes and her steady tone communicated nothing beside relaxed honesty, and freedom from concern.
Gladys spoke her mind. “You make all of this so easy.”
Alison’s smile bloomed, and she released the prelude to a laugh. “Oh, that’s good. That’s how it should be.”
“I do want to meet again. Maybe a week would be a good idea. My granddaughter will be here in two weeks, so that probably won’t be a good time to get together,” Gladys said, gathering her purse handles and then changing her mind and devoting her attention to putting her coat back on, pulling it free from where she sat on it.
“Either way, is fine. We would have to meet earlier next week. This slot is normally taken, but a one o’clock session will be open next week.”
And that’s how it happened. Gladys acquired a spiritual director. It was that easy.
Chapter 13
AGAIN
As much as she genuinely wanted to see and hear Jesus again, the prime motive for seeing Sister Alison was to unharness that load of guilt that had been chafing her. That she prayed and asked him to come back bore less significance to Gladys than it had for Alison, though Gladys hadn’t noticed that ready-to-celebrate look on the sister’s face.
Gladys simply went back to her life with less of that sour feeling at the top of her stomach. That alone was worth the trip, if perhaps not all those tears. When she got home, she lay down for a short nap, which lasted longer than she expected, still not familiar with the emotional exhaustion she had accumulated over the last week. Gladys awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. Even with renewed hips, she was glad for an extension in her bedroom, so she didn’t have to run to the kitchen.
She answered as she sat up, grogginess croaking through her voice when she said, “Ye-es.”
“Hi, Mom. Did I wake you up?”
“Oh, hi, Dear. Yes, I was taking a nap. But it’s past time for me to wake up.” Gladys pulled her blouse around straight, as much to prep herself for facing Patty—even over the phone—as for comfort.
“Oh, well, that’s good. So, Katie called you, right?”
Gladys broke through another layer of clouds and saw more light. “Oh, yes. What a wonderful surprise. I’m really looking forward to it.”
“So it’s no problem?”
“Problem? Of course not. We’ll have a great time. I may spoil her at the mall.” Gladys wouldn’t have said that last part had she straightened out her brain as well as her blouse, but she just chuckled at the slip. She felt strangely light and carefree, even with Patty on the line.
“Well, don’t overdo it. She doesn’t really need anything, and your hips, ya know.”
Gladys laughed a little harder. “Oh, my hips are perfectly fine. The doctor says the x-rays look like I’m a fifty-year-old.” This was particularly funny to say to Patty because she was just over fifty herself.
“Really? He said that? And you’re feeling okay?”
Gladys assumed this last question was Patty adjusting to the news that her mother’s hips were healed, but Patty was really asking whether this might be another symptom of increased dementia.
“I’m feeling wonderful, now that I’m finally waking up. My hips are all healed, Katie’s coming to visit, and . . . “ She cut herself off before telling about her meeting with Alison. She generally tried to customize any news for Patty, to minimize the criticism. Gladys didn’t know how to package the news of her new spiritual director. It was too soon. She was already starting to suspect that the news of her hips was somehow backfiring. She tried to recover from her change of direction in the conversation. “And I’m talking to my daughter on the phone. Everything is good.”
During the long pause, Gladys could hear Patty’s breathing intensifying and accelerating. That last bit of frosting, about talking to her daughter, was meant to calm Patty a bit, if not amuse her for its irony.
“Did the doctor give you meds for your hip pain?”
“No, there was no hip pain, and no cartilage damage on any of my joints, when he looked at the x-rays. No need for drugs.”
Patty assumed her mother was flashing back to an earlier day, when she was younger and had no pain. She tried to bring her back to the present.
“Are you still in bed?”
“I’m sitting on the edge of my bed,” Gladys said, checking the gap in her drapes and noting that the sun was setting, lending a peach color to that thin rhomboid of light.
“So what happens if you stand up? Do you feel the pain then?”
Gladys stood up compliantly. She grinned at the confirmation of her refunded youth. “What happens? I get taller, that’s what happens. And there’s no pain at all, just like I said. Jesus healed me of my hip pain.” She would have avoided that last confession if not for her visit to Sister Alison that afternoon, combined with some frustration that Patty didn’t seem able to accept her improved health.
“Jesus?” Patty said. “How did he do that?”
“One of my friends asked him to, and he did it, just the way he does those things, I guess.” Clouding the issue with Andy’s involvement was entirely out of the question. Gladys knew that, no matter how buoyant her spirits.
“Wait. So you’re saying that a friend prayed for your hips and the pain went away. When did this happen?”
“Oh, just the other day. I was down on hands and knees scrubbing the basement floor yesterday without pain. I’m all better now.” Standing alone in her bedroom, Gladys threw her free hand in the air almost as if she was tossing a bridal bouquet over her shoulder. Then she turned toward a noise at her bedroom door.
There stood Jesus, just as he did before.
Patty was rattling on, questioning her mother’s story, but Gladys heard none of it. She just said, “Oh my, it’s you.”
Patty stopped her interrogation. “What did you say?”
Gladys started to hang up the phone without saying anything more, but realized what she was doing and pulled the receiver back up to her ear. “I’ll have to talk to you later. Thanks for calling.” And then she hung
up, cutting off Patty’s stunned reply mid-syllable.
“You came back,” Gladys said, her voice girlish and full of wonder.
“I had more that I wanted to show you,” Jesus said.
“More?”
He gestured for Gladys to follow him into the living room. She followed like a puppy whose young master has just arrived home from school. Her new hips made a little bounce in her step possible again.
Jesus sat on the couch and indicated the cushion next to him. Gladys landed there, not taking her eyes off him. Though she was excited to see him back, part of her still dreaded the confrontation about the last time she spoke to him face-to-face. Against this fear stood the look in his eyes and the constant smile on his lips, even as he kept his gaze locked on her. Her mixture of fears and expectations rushed past like a wind-blown tumbleweed, keeping her mind from settling firmly in any one place.
“I understand that you were scared when Barbara started making accusations, the other day,” Jesus said. “And I know that seeing and hearing me like this was a shock to your system. And I also know that you’ve missed my presence over the last few days. I know all that, and more.” He reached over and took her hand. “And I came back to be with you like this again.”
When his hand met hers, Gladys realized that, blown in with the mix of feelings and hopes dashing past her, was a desire for him to touch her. In part, she wanted to know he was real. But she also simply wanted to be touched, to feel his love, to receive the healing gentleness he had shown her before.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” she said, her voice hushed and ardent.
His eyes tightened slightly, as if looking deeper into hers. “One thing I want to show you, Gladdy, is that I’m always with you, always close, always right where you can see and hear me. But I know it will take a while to convince you deep in there.” He pointed to her heart. When he did that, Gladys felt a sort of warmth begin to spread over her chest and then to deepen right in the middle. A brief fear that she was having a heart attack fell down before a giddy joy that seemed to be seeping out of that warm glow.
“What is that?” Gladys said, now clasping both hands to her chest. She was fortunate that her daughter didn’t see her now, because she had a startled and expectant look in her widening eyes and upturned lips. She looked a little crazy.
Jesus answered her. “That is what it feels like when my love and my light flow into a new opening in your heart. Your heart, or your soul, is like a house. And there are different rooms and spaces in there. Your time with Bob, and then with Alison, opened up new parts of your house, or made it easy for you to open them now that you see me. Just now, when you looked at me, you welcomed me into more than just your physical house, you welcomed me into new parts of your spiritual house.”
Fortunately for Gladys, what Jesus said wasn’t very complicated, and the image he used was one she could easily grasp, because she wasn’t thinking particularly clearly, or listening very carefully. She missed some nuances because she felt herself floating, as if a very big helium balloon had somehow found space inside her and was trying to lift her off her seat. She looked around slowly to be sure that she wasn’t actually floating, though her placid face showed no worry about what she might discover.
Gladys had never been anything like drunk in all her life. The closest exception was a dose of laughing gas at the dentist, when she was in her twenties. Fortunately, Harry had been there to drive her home that time. But the floating feeling that Jesus put inside her lacked the odd smell and the slight nausea that went with the laughing gas. It felt right to Gladys, as if this buoyant joy was meant for her, and even more, that it was what she was meant for. She felt like laughing.
Jesus had kept his eyes focused on her this whole time, and his smile had continued to grow as he monitored the progress of her heart opening to his love. He knew she was on the verge of laughter, and seemed to feel no urge at all to help her repress it. Instead, he started to laugh. First, it was a low chuckle, from deep in his chest, then a closed-mouth chortle, barely contained. Then he opened his mouth and began to laugh, teeth showing and the volume growing. In Gladys’s ears, Jesus’s laughter continued to grow louder and louder, and seemed to surround her, inside and out. But she wasn’t simply sitting and listening. Jesus’s laughter was highly contagious. And Gladys had stopped hanging on the edge of delirium and let herself slide all the way down that steep slope.
She began to laugh harder and higher, her spasms of mirth ending in high pitched notes that sounded like she was saying “who” or “hoe.” The nonsense of those sounds just stirred her more, as did Jesus rocking back in his seat and shaking the whole couch with his guffawing. Tears now ran down both of Gladys’s cheeks. She clasped her face in both hands and just kept laughing. She closed her eyes, thinking she had to stop before she hurt herself, her throat and chest feeling the strain of using muscles that were unused to such intense exercise.
Gladys panted for breath, allowing herself to say those “who” and “hoe” sounds, as she tried to regain control. Jesus wrapped one arm around her shoulders as she leaned forward to try to recover. His touch seemed to ease the strain in her chest and neck muscles and to relax her stomach and back, which had expanded and contracted more in those moments of laughter than they had since she gave birth to Patty.
Without warning, Patty weighed on her mind, as if the celebration had ended and it was time to return to the struggles of life. Gladys sat up and looked at Jesus. And the look in his eyes told her that he already knew what she was worried about.
“With some people, we have to take a long and winding path, that involves lots of praying, and even more patience,” Jesus said.
Assuming Jesus meant her, Gladys said. “I haven’t been much of a pray-er.”
Jesus nodded. “Prayer is just talking to me and to my father.”
Gladys tried to connect the Jesus sitting next to her to the person that she had occasionally addressed with head bowed and eyes closed. That other person, the one without the moist eyes and smiling lips, had always been on the other end of a telephone line, or perhaps the receiving end of a telegraph. Gladys was that old.
“Talking?” she said.
“Just talking,” Jesus said. “Of course, talking includes asking for the things you need, but talking also includes telling someone how you feel about them, and even how you feel about yourself.”
Gladys’s long-distance God had been much too busy for such a casual conversation. With his huge switchboard of calls coming in, didn’t God have way too much to do, plugging in and listening to each and every caller. He couldn’t really have time to hear the things buried among the dust bunnies in her heart. The giant disconnect between that old time religion and Jesus sitting next to her, forced Gladys to consider the notion that, if she wasn’t just dreaming now, then perhaps she had actually been having a very bad dream for all of her previous life.
“It just seems so different,” she said.
“Good,” said Jesus. “You’re beginning to understand.”
He turned her confession of confusion into an accomplishment. But what had she accomplished? Now, not only Patty would think she was crazy, everyone would.
“Well, you don’t have to tell everyone everything,” Jesus said. “Do you remember when my brothers were testing me about going to Jerusalem to make my ministry public?” He waited for Gladys to nod her head uncertainly. “I told them I was not going up to Jerusalem, because I wasn’t going with them or under their conditions. Then I did go up to Jerusalem, but I did it my father’s way, the way that he knew would be best.”
Gladys could just remember the edges of the story in the Gospels to which Jesus referred. Part of what she remembered was her own confusion over whether Jesus actually lied to his brothers. The way he explained it now answered that question. But she knew there was more to his point than just straightening out her reading of one verse. He was teaching her about wise discretion in her speech.
Even thou
gh she was pretty adept at knowing in advance who she might offend with certain things she could say, Gladys tended to say them anyway. Getting her mouth started, generally meant releasing the brake and just letting it run. But, then, she rarely spoke of anything with weighty consequences or eternal value. Maybe that too should change. But who changes at the age of seventy-eight?
Again, Jesus answered unspoken questions. “I am the only one you can reliably measure yourself by,” he said. “And I am wide open and fully available to you. All of the other people to whom you compare yourself are a mystery to you. You don’t know enough of the complex web of their lives, and the deep tunnels of their hearts, to make a judgment of whether you can do what they do, or do it the way they do. Only I can see all that.”
“So, it doesn’t matter if none of the seventy or eighty-year-olds I know can handle change at all?” she said.
“You think they can’t handle change.”
Gladys looked mildly chastised.
They took a break from the laughter, and the lessons, to prepare and eat supper. Gladys made a very good meat loaf with baked potatoes and carrots. While they stood together in the kitchen, Jesus explained to Gladys the true history of several people that she had known in her life, and who had passed on to the next life. He told her things she couldn’t have known about them, things that would have changed her opinion of them, if she had known. He told her so that she would begin to believe that she had only one life she could measure and try to understand, and that she could let everyone else go, to allow them to be whatever they thought best for themselves.
After sunset, a rainstorm began to release the first sprinkles that signaled a weather front, and warmer temperatures ahead, as Jesus and Gladys sat in the living room. He had the recliner tilted back halfway, the way Harry liked to when he watched TV. Gladys sat on the love seat, facing the TV, with no thought of turning it on. If this experience of hearing Jesus was real, or even if it was a sort of dream or something, she intended to give him all her attention. At least she intended uninterrupted focus. But she couldn’t shake her worry about Patty.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 12
