“Like Pilgrim’s Progress?” Gladys remembered that book from her childhood. Her grandfather, the most religious man in their family, had read to it the children whenever he got a chance.
“Gladdy’s progress will be very different from Pilgrim’s,” Jesus said. “This journey won’t require you going anywhere beyond where you usually go, at least at first.”
This last note intrigued Gladys, the homebody.
Jesus continued. “Most of the journey has to happen inside you, just like it does for all of my brothers and sisters.”
“Brothers and sisters?” Gladys said.
“Yes, remember who your father is. We’re siblings, Gladdy, you and me.”
They had circled back to the hole in the fence that Gladys had inadvertently revealed when Jesus first came back into sight. She didn’t know how to respond, concentrating some effort on not returning to the same sort of open denial that slipped out before. Jesus, well aware of her struggle, allowed her to cogitate for a while, without intervening. He sat monitoring the crosscurrents and undertows that pushed and pulled Gladys’s soul. It seemed to her that her mind raced in circles,.
Finally, back at home, they parked close to the kitchen door so Jesus could help carry the TV, without being detected by a neighbor. Normally, Gladys would have asked for Andy’s help, rewarding him with cookies, but that option had fallen aside, of course. Once inside, Gladys was content to place the electronics in a neat stack by her old tube TV and cable box, waiting for Katie’s help, a project for the girls to do together. Gladys stowed the supply of toilet paper, put sodas in the fridge to chill, and tossed the new sheets onto the bed in the guest room. She had plenty of time to wash them and then remake the bed.
None of this was intended to delay the discussion they had cracked open in the car, but Jesus knew Gladys was not anxious to get it started. He didn’t need to, or want to, force her to face anything. He simply stood by waiting.
For Gladys, the afternoon approached and passed on the backs of small tasks, much like her normal days. Lunch, dishes, starting things for supper, laundry—the new sheets need not wait long—and a brief rest, carried away the hours, with little conversation passing between her and Jesus. He continued to wait.
A surprise rang out into that early Saturday evening, when they were in the kitchen preparing for supper. Gladys had been included in the pastor’s list of weekly check-in phone calls. Jim Heskett’s voice, nearly radio DJ quality, greeted Gladys when she picked up the receiver.
“Oh, my. I’m surprised to hear from you,” Gladys said.
“Well, it’s something I like to do before Sunday, to check in on people I met with during the week, or people I’ve been praying for. I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
Gladys realized, with that question, what a momentous week it had been. She marveled for the first time at the number of meetings with spiritual leaders she had managed to arrange in that one week. She looked at Jesus, as this thought coalesced; his grin seemed to take on a sly twist, as if caught at something devious.
She took a breath that was just short of a gasp, and said, “I have had the time of my life this week.” That realization stunned her to silence for a second. Then she gave Jim the news that meant the most to both of them. “I can see and hear Jesus again.”
The silence over the phone line could have meant anything, but Gladys was beginning to pick up her emotional cues, more and more, from the facial expressions of Jesus. He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, leaning on one post with his hands up his broad sleeves, like some Chinese master at rest. His content smile held anxiety at bay, as Gladys waited for Jim’s response.
Before he spoke, she could hear his exercised breathing. “Do you see him now?” he said.
“Yep. Standing in the doorway, smiling at me like he usually does.”
Jim chuckled, though it sounded a bit like clearing his throat. Few people in her church would ever have as much experience hearing the pastor lost for words as Gladys had already accumulated.
“Did you go to see Father Bob?”
“Oh, yes. He was wonderfully helpful in ways I don’t think I even understand yet,” she said, her eyes drifting from Jesus to the photo of her family sitting on the china hutch, a portrait from the Skokie days.
“That’s great,” Jim said. He sounded relieved. This, Gladys assumed, was relief that she wasn’t on her own, in this mystical experience, but that she had consulted with experts.
“And he helped me arrange to meet with Sister Alison, who is going to be my spiritual director for a while. We’re gonna meet once a week. I still need to decide how much I can pay her, or donate to the center.” She spilled all that, processing her thoughts aloud to her pastor in a way she never would have imagined before that week.
Somehow, the silence that followed those last revelations seemed less excited and more concerned. That was how Gladys read Jesus’s face, anyway. His smile had faded from joyous to patient and his eyes narrowed just a few degrees. On his end, Jim was feeling a sense of loss. Though he had no transparent awareness of its source, that loss arose from the news that Gladys had found ongoing spiritual help among people whose faith was as foreign to him as the language of the villagers he had visited in rural Mexico, the previous year with the church’s mission team.
After a long sigh, Jim said, “Well, I am glad you had such a good week. And I’m glad you found some helpful connections.” His gladness didn’t pop over the phone line, and his final question came as a reflex. “Will I see you in church tomorrow?” This was, of course, the reason or calling on Saturday evening, to encourage those in need not to neglect the gathering of the saints the next morning.
The notion of attending church with Jesus had not yet arrived in Gladys’s mind. The flash vision of it made her laugh. Without thinking of the implications, she said, through her laughter, “Oh, yes, of course. Jesus and I will both be there.”
Through her own laughter, Gladys didn’t quite catch Jim’s response, but she could tell the call had ended and he had hung up. This time she noted that Jesus’s face had a subtly sad cast to it, even though his eyes still spoke his love and acceptance for Gladys.
Allowing her laughter to slow to a stop, Gladys said. “Am I allowed to ask you what you’re thinking about?” And she moved from the phone over to the pan in which she was just about to fry up some chicken breasts.
Jesus stepped into the kitchen and took up a place next to the stove, a place that Gladys would have forbidden for Katie, fearing she would get grease spatters on her. She didn’t feel she had to worry about Jesus.
“You can ask, and I want you to ask,” Jesus said, to her question.
Again, Gladys assessed the look on Jesus’s face. All her life, she had been reading faces, assessing where she stood with a person by the look in their eyes, more than the words from their mouth. She had done that without conscious awareness of this precise and powerful skill, a very human skill, of course. But, more than most people, Gladys had trained herself to trust the body language and facial cues of the people she addressed. This explained, in part, her tendency to engage her mouth and just let it run for a while. The words she spoke served as a sort of emotional sonar, a ping sent out into the deep dark ocean of her social environment, returning information about her location, in the form of a smile, a grimace, or eyes that lacked focus or clarity.
Never in her life had she met anyone who could maintain focus and clarity like Jesus did. Her heart knew for certain the truth of his feelings toward her, even without words; maybe especially without words. In this instance, she felt free to ask a question.
“Why did you look sad when I told Pastor Heskett that you and I would be in church tomorrow?”
Jesus said, “I won’t tell you anything specific about your pastor. I may want you to deliver a message to him later, but not yet. I will tell you about me, however, about what I was feeling.” He took a deep breath and spoke forcefully to overcome
the volume of the chicken and vegetables sautéing in the pan close to both of them. “I know you’ve felt the pain of loving and not being loved in return. You were thinking that recently about Artie Muller.”
Gladys glanced at his face, rolling her eyes slightly, thinking how impossible it was to keep anything from Jesus.
“You talk about bringing me to church as if that’s a new idea, as much as a new experience. And you’re not alone in thinking that way. Let me tell you a sort of parable.”
She didn’t even look up from her cooking, just nodding slightly, thinking that telling parables was just the sort of thing she would expect of Jesus.
He said, “Imagine that it was your birthday party, and that everyone you know has been invited, and they all show up ready and expectant to celebrate. But you notice, before long, that very few of them speak to you. Some who do address you only do it as a shout across the room. Others are clearly there to celebrate themselves, their own lives and concerns and possessions. Still others are seated at the table waiting for the birthday dinner and the birthday cake, but the table is empty. They were sure that this was the place to celebrate, and to be fed, but no food has made it to the table. Most of them seem to have forgotten you are even there. Imagine how little you would look forward to birthday parties after that.”
Gladys looked up at him. “You’re talking about church?”
“Yes, the gathering of the people of God, my people, my brothers and sisters. It is far too rare that, when people gather in my name, they actually bring me with them, as you said you would.”
“Well, you said this was an unusual experience,” Gladys said, “me knowing you’re right here with me.”
“That’s true.” Jesus focused on Gladys’s eyes, even though her eyes didn’t rest on him. She felt him looking into her.
He continued. “Your experience is rare, in some ways unique, really, but everyone’s experience with me is unique. No one brings exactly the same thing to the relationship. But what’s not unique is that I only participate in a meeting when people bring me there. I don’t live in the church building. I live in you, in the ladies from your prayer group, in your pastor, in your congregation. I am inside each of them. And it is the responsibility of each of them to bring me to their meetings. When they do that, they say, ‘oh I felt his presence there.’ But that’s not because I decided to occupy the church building for a couple of hours on Sunday.”
Fortunately, for Gladys, frying chicken and vegetables in a pan was second nature to her. It had changed over the years, from when the chicken would be batter-covered and the meat less free of fat. But she still knew the temperature of the bright blue flame, at just the right height, no matter the markings around the knob that controlled the gas. If she was not unconsciously familiar with these things, she would certainly have burned her dinner. Jesus was saying things that raised a hundred objections in her mind.
The strongest objection, however, was a piercing protest that no one had so clearly said this to her before. She was growing to trust Jesus more, but was disoriented by the great gap between what he was saying to her and the usual dull words that fell lifelessly from her mouth, and from the mouths of her friends, when they gathered in church. Then she returned again to what she started to say the night before.
“I think the problem is that we just let each other treat all the words as if they’re just words and not real. Like that you really live in me, which I was told when I was little and invited you into my heart, or that God is our father, even though we think that’s just a figure of speech, not a real thing.”
Jesus nodded vigorously, stayed close, and stayed focused on Gladys’s face. She checked now and again to see that he had not changed his posture toward her.
He responded. “It doesn’t help, of course, that your fathers on earth inevitably fall short of what you need from them.”
Immediately, Gladys pictured her own father, a man with forearms bigger than her thighs, when she was a girl. He was the son of Czech immigrants, a farmer on the plains of Nebraska, a man who favored the quiet of a field over the bustle of the red brick streets in town. She thought of him as part of a monumental species of men, known as “the fathers,” the fathers of her friends, the fathers of her cousins, the fathers of her town. They stood in defense against unseen enemies all around, around the farm and around the nation. Though her own father didn’t fight in the Second World War, because of hearing loss in his left ear, he was still part of that bastion of men that kept her, and her brothers and sisters, safe. These were the work-hardened men that you wanted fighting for you, defending you, working to feed you. But they were generally not men you would want to open your heart to, to trust with your deepest fears or failures.
If God is good, and God is love, and a father is cold and hard and distant, then God cannot be a father, not her father.
“All earthly fathers are sons,” Jesus said. “They are all boys, to some extent, even as old men. You weren’t there to see your father’s early injuries, injuries to his heart. You didn’t see the fear that gripped his soul, fear that forced him to stay hard and closed, in order to stay steady and useful for you, for your brothers and sisters, and for your mother.”
Gladys turned off the burner. Whether the chicken was as golden as she would have liked, she worried that if she didn’t turn off the fire she would lose track of what she was doing and burn down the kitchen, even with her years of experience. A picture from her memory had captured her attention, shining bright and sharp.
She could see her father sitting in his favorite walnut rocking chair, near the Christmas tree, a fire crackling in the fireplace, logs from a lightning-struck apple tree burning. Christmas was a magical time for her father, she always knew that. And, for her, it was the time when he seemed the most approachable. When she was thirteen, she had knitted him a pair of wool gloves with leather palms, palms that extended up the wrists, where she had noticed his other gloves would always wear through, from him resting his arms on the steering wheel of his tractor. Her father recognized the careful insight that went into making those gloves just so, and he looked at her, for just one moment, with more vulnerable boyish gratitude than she would collect in all her other memories of him.
She felt as if Jesus had just narrated that scene for her, as if he had just translated huge passages of her childhood for her. Gladys felt the need to sit down all of a sudden.
Chapter 15
CHURCH
That Saturday night ended a bit early. Once again, Gladys’s body cried out for time to recover from the emotional calisthenics led by Jesus. And, once again, she slept very soundly, straight through the night. She woke a bit later than usual on Sunday morning, with bright sunlight angling through her bedroom window from the south and east. That parallelogram of light illuminated a thin flurry of dust particles. The house was still waiting to be aired out in the approaching spring breezes. That Palm Sunday promised to be warmer than any Sunday yet that year. The prospect of a spring-like Palm Sunday, and the shock of the lateness of the hour, sprung Gladys from her bed.
She threw her covers off and swung her feet around. She waited a few seconds for her blood to catch up to the renewed activity, and then she startled at the sound of laughter from the living room.
“Oh!” she said. “I almost forgot you were still here.”
Jesus came to the door of her room. She was looking at him over one shoulder, her sleepy hair plumed like a fancy rooster.
“What were you laughing about?” Gladys said, sliding her feet into her slippers.
“I was enjoying the service at your church.”
Gladys stopped reaching for her robe and checked the clock again. “It hasn’t started yet. You scared me. I thought it was even later than it is.”
“Oh, you’re fine. You’ll make it to Sunday School, no problem.” His quiet eyes and dancing smile reassured her as much as his words.
“So how could you already be enjoying the service?” She pulled h
er robe on, some morning stiffness in her hands slowing her down a bit.
“You have to remember that, you’re seeing me as if I’m only standing here, in your house, right now. That’s actually just a trick. I’m in lots more places, and many more times, than just this one that you’re in. Every time is right now for me, and every place is here.”
Gladys didn’t mean to scowl at the Son of God, but it was early, and he was digging a pretty deep well for an old lady who barely finished high school. That’s what she was thinking.
As she came out of her room, Jesus eased an arm around her shoulders and walked with her to the kitchen. She got the giggles thinking about walking with Jesus to the kitchen like that, arm in arm.
“How about some eggs and bacon this morning?” she said, her voice rising for the grand gesture of something more than toast and juice for breakfast.
“Bacon?” Jesus said. “Gladdy, don’t you know that I’m Jewish?”
Gladys dropped her arm from Jesus’s waist and looked concerned. But her arched brows and startled eyes relaxed when she saw the boyish grin return to Jesus’s face.
He laughed. “Sounds great!” And his voice somehow reminded Gladys of that cartoon tiger who sells breakfast cereal. But, that was probably also because it was early and she was extra hungry.
She did manage to cook that special breakfast, and get cleaned up and dress, in time to make it to Sunday school. Jesus helped by doing the dishes and putting things away in the kitchen. He joked about the carpenters’ union objecting to his wages, but she didn’t quite follow his humor.
The Union City Bible Church, fondly known as UCBC by the faithful insiders, sat on the very north edge of town, well outside of the main strip of churches that had been in that town for as much as a hundred and thirty years. The Baptists thought of the Bible Church as young upstarts flirting with the world. The Lutherans and Episcopalians, the few who still attended, thought of the Bible Church as cranky conservatives, fitting the stereotypes of the latest trends in church and politics. But the Bible Church had been steadily growing since its founding in 1978, and was now larger than all of those other congregations combined, any Sunday except Easter, that is.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 14
