Attic Jesus

Author’s Note: You know what? The more I think about this, the worse of an idea it seems to be. A great possibility exists that this blog entry should be read by absolutely no one. If you choose to ignore this warning, do so with the understanding that the following does not necessarily reflect the beliefs and opinions of Adri’s Sanitarium nor its management, officers, employees, or residents. I hear it would be wise to never talk about religion, politics, or sex with strangers, nor on a first date. But I’m merely telling you what I saw – don’t shoot the messenger, folks.

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I’ve got Jesus in my attic.

He’s been up for a week. Or it might have been much longer; time flies with Christ around. Yeah, the Son of God’s upstairs from me, and I’ll never run low on bread and wine again. I’m not really sure what He does all day, up there above my head. I think sometimes He’s watching me right through all these ceilings and down through all these floors.

‘Cause everyone knows Our Lord, that He’s got that x-ray vision thing going – that’s how He knows who’s been naughty or nice.

It all started a few weeks back when I was up on the lake. I was staying way up north of Houston, out where the stars still aren’t afraid to shine. They say – the old ones do – that we used to have flickering stars in the skies of the big city here, but the old ones are old and their minds start to wither and I don’t believe in their wisdom at all.

Anyway, on this particular morning I speak of, at the very start of this specific day, I was standing out by the lake trying to skip stones across the surface of the waters, trying to dream up new orders in which to write the same old words.

That’s when I saw Him, and He was standing on the shore like I was. And He was constructing some sort of a giant wooden basket or some such thing, something that was about yay big with a nice, sturdy handle. You know, a man’s basket that you could really carry things in, if you had a thing that needed to be carried. And this man I saw, He was doing His building with a degree of determination and a degree of expertise that just screamed “carpenter.” To tell you the truth, I first started to suspect something the moment I saw Him hammering in a nail that He’d just carefully pulled out of His hand.

Seriously, it’s true. I wouldn’t lie to you. Not now, not with Him right there all the time, making His list and checking it twice all year long…

This guy on the shore, He was a little swarthy Jewish dude, with a long curly beard that He had braided at the end in the way that Terry Riley and LaMonte Young and those guys from System of a Down used to do. And yeah, I knew pretty quick who He was, even though He wasn’t wearing a red cape, and even though He lacked that elusive charismatic spark you would have expected from someone with His particular genetic credentials.

So me, I walked right up, and I said, “Hey man, so are you back or what? Trumpets, horsemen, wormwood, apocalypse? Seven seals, Rapture, mark of the Beast, the whole bit?”

Jesus looked up from His work and He said, “Uh uh, I’m not even here. This is nothing official, just a little getaway like we all need from time to time. I know, I know what I said, way back when long ago. But you know how it is – it’s like when you quit working someplace, and you say you’re going to come back to visit every week? But when you move on then you move on, and when you’re gone, you’re gone.”

Then He walked across the surface of the lake, and He just smiled as the fish leapt right up out of the water and into the basket He held in His arms.

“I had every intention of making a Grand Return,” He then informed me. “It was going to be at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000. It was gonna be stupendous. But then I missed it – it just entirely slipped my mind. So I moved it to the next year, which as you know was really the start of the new Millennium anyway. That summer I came down just to have a look around, and you’ll never guess what I discovered…”

“I don’t much care for you people. Any of you. Not the ones who go around wearing little dead Me’s around their necks, and not the ones that don’t. How come all the ones on the TV, the ones who talk about me so much, why do they all have crazy eyes?”

I considered his legitimate question a moment before replying, “Because they’re filled with the spirit of You.”

Jesus rolled His eyes and shrugged. “Oh, sure. Blame me. And why not? It might be my fault, the shape things are in. I said the poor and the meek would inherit this joint, so now the rich are trying to wreck it all to make sure that there’s nothing left for the poor and meek to get. I should’a seen it coming. So I didn’t come back because I didn’t want to have to go on ‘Larry King’.”

I exhaled more loudly than I’d intended. At the time, I remember hoping I hadn’t offended. “So if You’re not really here, then how is it that I can see You?”

At this, Jesus looked genuinely surprised for the very first time all morning. “Why, you don’t know? You haven’t deduced it by now? My dear girl, you are the Devil. Not just A devil but THE. You know: the Devil? Satan? Beelzebub? The Wicked One, the piercing serpent, Leviathan, Abaddon, Asmodeus, Ashtaroth? Any of this sounding familiar?”

Smoky images appeared in the air, fiery scenes apparently all traceable to me. “The Great Red Dragon, the Father of Lies, Tempter, the Archfiend, and the Fallen Angel of the Bottomless Pit. The spirit that works in the children of disobedience. He… be YOU.”

And with a wave of a heavenly hand, the images all vanished just as quickly as they’d come. “Surely you knew. You had to have guessed. At least you suspected. You’re a lawyer, a Texan, a writer of evil tales. I would have thought the fact that you sometimes eat children would have been a big clue.”

I put my hands on my hips and I tapped my toe and with a glare of my eyes and a nod of my head, I turned around and marched right out of there. I didn’t have to stand there and take that kind of abuse. No one ever carried out a Crusade or a large-scale Inquisition or even signed a pact with the Nazis in my name, after all.

So then two weeks go by and I’m home again when I hear this knock at the door. And I open it to find there stands Jesus, two suitcases at His side, asking if it’s alright if He just crashes with me for a while. What am I going to do, say there’s no room at the inn?

“You know, I don’t believe in you or even that you ever existed,” I hiss with a surprising degree of ferocity.

Jesus smiles an enormous, impossible smile, and He’s all teeth, whiter than white because Jesus doesn’t drink soft drinks or need dentists. “I know you don’t believe. But you’ve never been a jerk about it, and anyway, that’s what exactly what makes this little arrangement so brilliant on my part.”

Now I’ve got Jesus in my attic, Son of Man right up the stair. There’s a Christ amongst my rafters, a divinity right there.

All the neighbor kids are crazy ‘bout my Jesus.