The Second Coming To Washington - 'What Would Jesus Do?' Gets An Answer

Barkley Ross had been a good Catholic - church on Sunday, Easter Duty, stations of the cross during Holy Week, catechism, nuns, old Father Brophy and the altar boys, incense and silk chasubles at high mass - but it all never took, and by the time he was a young man, he had lost all traces of his childhood religion. 

 

Or so he thought, for the old adage, 'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic' was no less true than it was in earlier, stricter, and more obedient times; and despite his good, progressive beliefs and solid career in social reform, Jesus kept coming into his head.  

Not in the born-again sense (Catholics did not believe in such magical apparitions and instantaneous salvation), but in the 'what if' context.  What if, after all these years of dismissiveness and downright snickering at the thought of God, heaven, and another world, there was something to it?

He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and went back to work.  As a Congressional aide, colleague of a well-known progressive from his state, Barkley was in the process of drafting a press release concerning the undoing of the progressive agenda by Donald Trump and the dark days ahead. 

Never before in the history of this great nation of ours have we seen such troubling times, times of despair, disillusion, and broken trust.  Donald Trump has ruled no less autocratically and punitively than Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. He has ruled with putsch, pogrom, and Kristallnacht fury.  He has sent the black man, the transgender, and the Mexican farm worker to the camps to be tortured, gassed, and incinerated.  He... 

Here Barkley paused and reread what he had written.  'Too much of a screed', he said to himself.  'Gotta nix the hyperbole, put it all in context'; but he couldn't write more than ten words without the same bilious prose.  The hatred for the man had simply possessed him.  He could no more write a temperate word than the man in the moon.  He needed to embrace his emotions, go with them.  Temperance was for politics as usual.  These were evil times. 

Again Jesus came to his mind and again he shook his head free of those old treacly notions of love thy neighbor, charity, kindness, and faith.  'Never worked in the past, ain't going to work now', but this time the thoughts became more than the nettlesome bothers they always had been.  They were upsetting, disturbing, and a downright nuisance. 

 

He wrote more, this time convinced of the direction.  The gloves must come off and the demonic character of the President must be revealed.  But how?  It had been ten years of every trick in the book. His colleagues had tried to try him in court, impeach him, expose his rapes and sexual abuse, his consorting with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, unearth his false, deceptive real estate deals and nothing had worked, not one single thing.  Nothing stuck.  He wriggled out of the most damning accusations ever, and won the fucking presidency again. Now what?

Yet he had writer's block.  The pen wouldn't move. He felt paralyzed, unsettled, and uneven.  Was this the panic attack that had happened to his friend Byron who one day felt the walls close in on him and a terrible sense of doom fill the room?  

'Calm down', Barkley said out loud. 'It will pass', but the awful terror only increased.  He looked down at the paper on which he had written his words, and they seemed to quaver, reconfigure, become bold and italic.  They rearranged themselves, wavered and moved like sine waves, and the whole page became a jumble of symbols and hieroglyphs. 

 

He got up and walked around the room, but the terror only increased.  Instinctively, reflexively, and abjectly, he dropped to his knees.  'Oh, please Lord Jesus, help me'; and in that one declarative moment, Barkley became a new man. 

Whether or not he actually had seen Jesus was a moot point.  At his first words of prayer, the terror had stopped, the chairs became chairs again, the prose reassembled into the words he had written, and the air conditioner clanked and banged like before. 

Of course he paid no attention to the happening.  He was working too hard and overwork was taking its toll. No man can sleep with a roiled brain, but this Trump thing was turbulent.  Waves of rancor, bilious, awful thoughts, hatred welled up from depths he never knew he had kept him awake.  He needed to reset, to reboot, and to work from a more distant and less aggravating place. 

As with most victims of panic attack, they have a residual fear of it happening again, and anything associated with the attack could trigger a re-onset.  So he avoided going back to the article on Trump.  As much as he yelled at himself and shouted 'Nonsense!' at himself in the mirror, he simply could not pick up his notepad and pen, and put off the inevitable deadline until it was almost too late. 

'Get a hold of yourself', he said to the mirror, this time with certitude and firmness; but as soon as he began to finish the sentence he had begun when the attack hit, it hit again.  The words on the page began a St. Vitus' dance, an apoplectic jumping and whirling, with words he had never written appearing in huge font and dark black, unrelated words, meaningless phrases, some more like a tract from a streetcorner preacher, heavenly this and hellfire that, luminescent clouds and soft rain....

Again he dropped to his knees and said even louder than before, 'Oh, please, Lord Jesus, help me', and just as before, the horrible terror that had possessed him left.  The light again filtered through the blinds, the carpet's whorls and Persian calligraphy gave him the same sedateness and composure he always felt when he looked at it. Things hummed, buzzed, and rattled again. 

As usually happens in cases like this, the next time Barkley passed a church, he had the irresistible desire to go in.  If the episode had not been just a panic attack but some - here he swallowed the word three times before he could say it - visitation - than a moment in the sanctum sanctorum would be telling. 

At that hour of the day there was no one in the church, and it was just as it was the last time he sat in a pew, many years ago as a young boy.  There was Jesus crucified on the cross, the votive candles flickering by the altar, the communion rail, the statues of Mary and St. Francis, the lingering scent of  incense and myrrh, the stations of the cross.

  

He hesitated before walking up the aisle to the altar.  It was all too reminiscent, too intrusive, too unsettling.  He felt suspended between two worlds - the old, believing, obedient, prayerful child; and the pissy adult.  The old feelings of guilt returned.  Why had he turned his back on the church?  He could not say the word 'Jesus' because he was already shamed by his abject capitulation.  

He waited for something, anything; but the church remained silent.  An empty church has a particular, peculiar silence, an absence rather than an emptiness, and that disturbed him.  Absence of what? God was supposed to be always there, and the eternal flame flickered on every altar. 

What most behavioral psychologists will tell those suffering from panic attacks is to act accordingly - that is, either avoid the precipitating circumstances of the attack, or embrace those which mitigate it.  Since his religious experiences - as fictious and faux as they might be - seemed to alleviate the panic and remove the terror, they must continue.  If church was an elixir, a draught enabling him to continue his work without interruption, so be it.  He wasn't returning to the Church, exactly, but whatever it takes. 

So, on his way to the Capitol he stopped at the Church of St. John the Divine, just poked his head in really, but armed himself for the day ahead.  He took up pen and paper again, and applied himself to the task of finishing the Congressman's speech.

However, when he reread what he had written, he was surprised at the naked spite of the lines.  The President was nothing like what he had written, and calling him a Hitlerian anti-Semite, a Soviet murderer was not worthy of him or anyone.  What did such vileness and unmitigated hatred achieve? Only more vileness and hatred; and yet the Congressman's whole persona, his entire campaign, in fact his entire career was based on such sentiments.  Worse yet, the whole progressive agenda was based on ad hominem politics - an uninterrupted campaign of smears and innuendoes, a gutter platform. 

He never put two and two together.  His pride and self-esteem would not permit even the slightest notion of divinity in his worldview; but there was no doubt that some minor epiphany had happened in his office and the association of church and a more reasoned, temperate approach to Washington affairs was not a coincidence.  When he allowed himself to think about it, he only cited chapter and verse from Dr. Weinstein's behavioral epistle, and never once considered an actual religious occurrence. 

The religious few who had gotten wind of all this felt that Jesus had finally appeared again, this time not to Sodom and Gomorrah as his father had, but to the sinkhole of iniquity, Washington DC. He had chosen Barkley Ross as his vessel, but he could have chosen any one of a thousand feral Christians to do the job.

Not surprisingly Barkley lost his job with the Congressman. 'You've lost the juice', he was told.  

After Barkley left Capitol Hill, he left Washington, and was not heard from since. There were alleged sightings in Coeur d'Alene and Selma, but for all intents and purposes, he had disappeared.  A monk in a monastery perhaps? A sadhu in the Himalayas? Or a househusband in Peoria?  God moves in mysterious ways.