This is nuts.

 “This is nuts.” 

“This is nuts, you know that, right?” Uncle Albert is looking over my shoulder at what you will see below. “It’s one thing, your dead sister.” He’s talking about Moira from whom I get letters from time to time. “But who is this guy?” he says.
     “Stephen,” I say.
     “I can see that.”
     “He has something to do, I’m not sure what, with the salvation of my soul.”
     “I didn’t think anyone but Jesus had anything to do with that.”
     “Jesus has helpers, apparently.”
     “I know, the Blessed Virgin, but who else?”
     “Why, this Stephen. Anyway, I hear from him from time to time as well.” I mean as well as Moira. I hear from Stephen as well.
     “You need to talk to Feight about this,” Uncle Albert says, Dr. Feight, my psychiatrist, whom I continue to see twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, albeit for the last year and a half by Zoom.
     “He writes in red?” Uncle Albert says.
     “Yes,” I say. “I don’t know why.”

Dear Dr. Faux-Theologian Riich,
     You are not as powerless as you would have yourself believe though the power you have is not yours. It is not in you, but it could work through you if you were not in the Enemy’s grip. Free yourself!
     Okay, yes! You are powerless to free yourself, only Christ can set you free. And you cannot make Christ set you free.  But if you are not open to the possibility then how can he act?
     Okay, yes!  He does act independently of you and your openness, and his Grace is irresistible: When he chooses to act, your sorry ass will not be able to stop him.  For you are a miserable sinner and without the grace of God, you remain miserable from before you were born – into sin! – until you die – also in sin!
     For what power you have is in your weakness. Your power is having no power before Divine Grace. But there is this difficulty: you need to get in the way of it. Like you would a truck. You can’t get hit by a semi lying on the couch in your pajamas into the middle of the morning! Still drinking coffee and watching your cat watch for birds. Which she cannot catch just by staring out the window. She must get out: you see the analogy.
     Okay, right! I can’t explain this to you because it is inexplicable. And maybe you can’t do anything because it is God’s to do and not yours. But you need to get off your (same) sorry ass anyway. Miserable sinner that you may be, you don’t have to wallow in your misery!
                                                                                                         STEPHEN+
ssnm*

In order that this not be completely nuts, I don’t tell Uncle Albert, I imagine that the heavenly censors are overseen by Jesus, who circulates among them and who smiles when he sees what Stephen has written me. “Ah,” he says. He has Stephen’s letter, sent up the chain of command, in hand. He stops by the censor’s desk to talk with him about it. “Ah,” he says again, “you are angry, and it is a righteous anger. The man – he means me – is a fool as well as a sinner – a miserable fool. But do you think his contemplating an illogical theological tenet is going to bring him out of it?” He speaks to Stephen in Stephen’s language, the thorny polysyllables of Reformed theology.
     “No, sire. I guess not,” Stephen replies.
     “Okay, right.” Jesus answers. “Then, let’s put the letter in the files. Make a copy, and put the original in your file and the copy in your friend’s. But let’s not send it. At least, let’s not send it now. Maybe another time.
     “In the meantime – after you’ve made the copy and done the filing and taken the afternoon off – and tomorrow; yes, and the day after, too: take some time off. After that, write something along the lines that I love him, like the man born blind, not the scribes and Pharisees that interrogate him. Write him that I love him like the scribes and Pharisees that interrogate the man born blind, as much as the man himself. Okay?
     And he passes on – he seems to melt away – before Stephen can say what is on the tip of his tongue, “What the hell does that mean?”

 12.06.21 

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 * scriptum sed non missum  (written but not sent)