REVELATION



What happened this morning has changed the world forever? What started out to be a regular everyday event, a funeral, became a turning point for humanity; nullifying centuries of philosophy and devastating not only my religion, but also religion in general.

As a priest I found it most unsettling, and even now as I write I’m still feeling the tremors, too intimidated by the experience to look around me at the religious symbolism that has no longer the validity it so recently had. But it’s not only me, or the clergy. It is everyone.  If they believe what a few hundred of us witnessed earlier today.
He was a pious man, and not only pious but truly a believer who lived as he knew he should have. I’d spoken to him in the hospital just a week before.

He knew his days were numbered, most likely in single digits, but except for expressing an understandable level of grief about leaving his wife of almost forty years, and his grown children who he loved just as almost any parent does, he seemed to hold no fear of death. Of course then we spoke about it in the usual terms of god’s mercy and heaven, and such things, his confidence obviously derived from years of community service and christian living. Not to mention the many donations to the church.

Anyway, so there we were. Father Simmons, Lenchki, and me, performing the service. Mr. Evans, or George as I was far more used to calling him, had been dead since late on Thursday night, and he'd been kept in the hospital's morgue with arrangements made for him to be lain to rest in the Catholic section of the cemetery, in a plot set aside close to his older brother who had passed away just eighteen months before.

So, yes, Father Lenchki was in the middle of the liturgy, even now it is hard to give it credence and I feel so torn between my loyalties, but I saw it, and heard him, like everyone else there, and can’t waste any time or effort to deny it.

George sat up! So suddenly. As if he'd been released from a trap, Bolt upright from the waist in the open coffin with the bouquet from his chest being thrown onto the marble floor.

Everything stopped except the smoke drifting up from the incense, and even as the commotion started in response, it ceased as well. 

George’s eyes opened and he began crying out words! A message he seemed absolutely determined and compelled to deliver, despite the obvious effort it was taking him; if that makes any sense at all. 
But he struggled and flinched as he screeched out his message. And then just five or ten seconds later, just the time taken to deliver those few sentences that have changed all of our lives and outlooks he slammed back into the coffin and except for a crushed look that had replaced the embalmered smile and the flowers missing within the wooden timber casket nothing seemed to have changed.

Everywhere else had though, or soon would, or was about to be changed as word of the first returnee from the afterworld spread so rapidly around the globe.

“Horrible!” George had yelled from his guts as soon as he was sitting upright.

“Nothing's true!” came vomiting out of his stretched head next.

“Horror beyond imagining!” He screamed as though he was that very instant being impaled upon something thick and sharp.

“Don’t die! Don’t die! Don’t…” trailed off until his jaw snapped shut as he collapsed a fraction, before slamming back down into the decorated box.

We were stunned to silence! Stunned to say the least. Doubly stunned by the occurrence and even more by the implications of his ominous message.

“Don’t die, don’t die!” Seemed to echo around and around the upper reaches of the cathedral while unharnessed clamor and confusion quickly took over the congregation and after only one tiny gesture, the raising of his bent arms toward regaining some order Father Simmons slumped onto the railing, arms crossed at the wrists profoundly, as overwhelmed as I was; just watching, saying nothing, staring straight ahead at the previously silent and well-mannered crowd jostling each other for the nearest doorways. Generating all sorts of unintelligible sounds.

For a few minutes between the evacuation of the congregation and the invasion of the media and police we had time to gather our wits, not really as priests by then, because it was though we'd been stripped of our clergical costumes and demeanor by the shattering outburst. But as men face to face with mortality, in the presence of someone briefly back from our shared destination, old George was able somehow to reveal the truth of it; if that’s what it truly was. We hesitantly peered in at poor, poor George, and as if we needed any further proof of it, one look into the coffin showed George’s tortured features and twisted body. His arms obviously broken and his skin and clothing marked by what could've only been teeth or claws.

Already the message brought to us today by Mr. Evans has changed the world and the way we live in it. Suddenly the traffic has halved and it's noticeably sedated. People are staying at home, all forms of risk-taking activities have been reduced dramatically, and as for the usual cluster of Saturday night suicides; there hasn’t been any.