James Frey - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Ben told me to go around and take Momma’s hand, so I did it. He had Mercedes take her other hand. He whispered in Mercedes’ ear, and Mercedes kiss Momma and say I love you. He looks at me and smiles and I know what he wants me to be doing and I lean over and kiss her and tell her I love her and I thank her for doing the best she could be doing. I hold her hand real tight and I tell her how much I’ll be missing her and how I’m going to do the best I can to be a good momma to Mercedes. I start crying again. I know what’s going to be coming. And even though it’s what Momma wants and is the right thing, I start crying.

Ben stepped around Mercedes and sat himself down on the edge of the bed. Momma smiled at him, first real smile of the day. He leaned over and kissed each of her cheeks and her forehead. He took her cheeks in his hands and started whispering to her, real quiet, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. She was occasionally answering yes, and after he finished he pull back and look her right in the eyes. He kiss her one more time, and he tell her he loves her, and she says I love you, too. He continue to stare at her, right into her eyes, and I see her eyes start to slowly close. I start crying harder. I know when them eyes close they ain’t going to open again. Mercedes is saying Abuela over and over again, like she think her grandma is going to be able to say something back. And Ben just stared at her, and she stared back at him, and just before she went, before her eyes closed for good and she went into the blackness, I saw peace in ’em. I saw calm. I saw happiness. And I saw that little thing you see in someone’s eyes when they got love in their heart.

More than anything else.

I saw love.

One of my parishioners came to my office and told me someone was having a seizure in the restroom. It was the third or fourth time that this exact situation had come up, someone telling me about a seizing man in the restroom, except whenever I went to check, the restroom was empty. Despite this, I immediately went to the restroom to check again, concerned for the individual’s safety, if in fact there was an individual. We had had an elderly parishioner die of a heart attack in our lobby a year or so before, and he was there, alone and on the floor, for at least two hours before someone found him. Though I believed that a church would, in some ways, be an almost ideal place to pass on, I did not want another death on the premises. The first one had brought the diocese a fairly significant amount of unwanted negative publicity, and had generated a storm of paperwork. Given all of the controversies of the past years, and my love for the church and desire to protect it, I hurried to see if it could be avoided again, or if I could be of any aid to the man who was sick.

I entered the restroom, the men’s restroom, and saw a man standing at the sink, washing his hands. I immediately thought he was Jesus Christ. I gasped and I was frozen and I could not speak. He had longish black hair, a short black beard, and alabaster white skin. He was extremely thin, wearing ragged clothes that hung off his body, and he was covered in scars. And he was glowing. Literally glowing. The restroom has no windows, as is proper for a rest-room, and only one ceiling light, and I would swear on a Bible, or anything else I hold or held dear, that the walls were illuminated, and that he was glowing.

He looked at me in the mirror and smiled. He continued to wash his hands, very slowly and deliberately, very peacefully, if it is somehow even possible to wash your hands in a peaceful manner. I can only imagine what I must have looked like, standing before the Son of God, a man I had worshipped every day of my life, a man I had spent countless hours praying to meet. I couldn’t move, and he just stared at me in the mirror. When he was done washing his hands, he turned and walked towards me. He put his arms around me, and I whispered My Lord into his ear. He held me for a moment and kissed me on the cheek and turned and walked out of the bathroom.

I stayed in the restroom for several minutes, standing exactly where I was when he left me. I was trying to reconcile what I had just experienced, which was, I believed, then and now, that I had been in the presence of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior, the earthly embodiment of the Lord God. He had smiled at me, and held me, and kissed me. He had placed himself within the sphere of my life, and my church, and my worship. I thought about how many people on earth could say that they had had this profound experience, or could say that they had been literally touched by the Lord? Though billions and billions had prayed for it, and continued to pray for it every day, Christ had not appeared, or had not made his appearance known, for over two thousand years. It was a miracle. The greatest miracle. He had returned to save us and redeem us. He had come back to bring about the glory of the End Days. There are no words for what I felt at that moment, knowing what I knew, or what words there are, are inadequate. If forced to try to characterize it, I would describe a feeling of great peace, humility, and serenity, a deep sense of hope for both myself and for humanity. A feeling of enormous satisfaction in that all I believed in had been validated. And to be completely honest, there was something electric in it, something ecstatic, something I had felt only once or twice in my life, but never so strongly. It was something that scared me because it felt like I could lose control of it. And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.

After leaving the restroom, I went about the rest of my day. I met with one or two parishioners during my office hours, older women who attended mass most mornings and whose husbands had passed away. I went to a local hospital, where I pray for patients two days a week. I had a simple dinner in my quarters, which are in the rectory behind my church. I prayed to and thanked God for blessing me with his Son’s presence. I read the Bible, focusing on the book of Matthew, where the Second Coming is addressed in some detail. I prayed again and tried to sleep, but was unable to do so. So I stayed up, thinking about my life and how I had arrived at that moment, praying to a God I had met earlier in the day.

My childhood was, to say the least, troubled and difficult. My parents were Russian immigrants who had escaped from the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Neither had believed in the Communist system, and both had dreamed of a life of freedom in America. In many ways, this is why they fell in love, or it was, in some way, one of the primary reasons they ended up together, for never in my life did I ever see any real love exchanged between them. Their fathers both fought in and died in World War II. My mother’s father was taken prisoner near Raseiniai and died in a German POW camp, and my father’s father froze to death outside of Leningrad. Their mothers both worked in factories near Daugavpils, and both were brutalized by German occupiers in the early stages of the war. My mother’s mother had a child by a German as a result of a rape, and my father’s mother was branded a sympathizer as a result of being forced to work as a prostitute servicing German soldiers. After the war, they were shunned by their neighbors and constantly harassed by the KGB. They were often taken in and held for indeterminate amounts of time at local prisons, and were denied the same rights as others who had suffered during the war. Also, because of this situation, neither of my parents was allowed to attend a decent school, or had a chance to become anything more than a basic service worker. They held jobs as cleaning people at a tank factory, where they met, and six months later they fled to Finland, initially leaving with four other workers from the factory. Though neither would ever discuss what happened during the actual escape, I know that all four of the other people they left with died during it. Once I heard mention that my father was somehow responsible for their deaths. I also know that they learned that as a result of their escape, their remaining family members were rounded up and sent to a gulag in Siberia.