Parousia
A short story. Something approaches.
Odd. The air felt odd. The wind was swirling.
In Central Park,
and along the Champs-Élysées,
and in front of the Rizal Park auditorium in Manila,
the gusts were sharp and fresh and strange.
*****
The Rev. Carlos Melendez finished his sermon and gave the benediction. “Amens” spread around the sanctuary. Melendez smiled and looked over his small, happy congregation. Handshakes, hugs, and grins all around.
Except in the fourth pew. Though the crowd was now standing and chatting, Mrs. Lucia Alcaraz remained seated. Her gray head was down, down far enough that the flowers on her hat were facing the platform in the front. Melendez noticed. He stepped down and slipped into the fourth pew.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Alcaraz?”
She lifted her head. A slight smile. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. She spoke slowly.
“I am just fine, pastor. Glory to God. Glory!” She paused. And then: “Something is happening.” Another pause. “Soon.”
Melendez looked at her, then said, “You...sense something, Mrs. Alcaraz?”
Her slight smile broadened a bit. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know this: I’m...I’m ready. Pastor, I know I’m ready.”
Before he could reply, Mrs. Alcaraz stood. She tilted her head and looked up at the ornamented ceiling and cried, quite loudly, “I’m good to go!” People standing nearby stopped talking and turned to look.
Outside, the wind kicked up, arousing the trees on South 26th Street. Leaves and scraps of paper took flight.
Everything was ready. Not just Mrs. Alcaraz. Everything.
*****
Mr. Ezekiel Criqui was alert. The wind was picking up outside his home. Sand pelted the sides of the lean-to he sat underneath for 18 hours each day, his bent leg tucked under him. Chickens shuffled off.
Criqui sniffed the air. Something new. What is it? He sniffed again. And: a sound — a buzzing? — along with the wind. He raised his hand to shield his face from the blowing sand. What was that sound?
And something was new… in his body. His bent leg — in that position since the accident with the oxen years ago — was starting to throb. Like a current ran through it.
Now, a strong pulsing in the leg. He was afraid to look. But he looked.
He gasped.
His leg...was now straight. He emitted a kind of squeal. The awful angle was gone. Straight. He rubbed his eyes and slapped his cheek. A dream, of course. An illusion. Of course.
Just then a strong gust swept over him. His eyes opened wide. The wind blew the kufi off his head. The wind was surging.
Mr. Ezekiel Criqui, he of the crooked leg for 42 years, rose to his feet.
He rose, and then kept rising.
*****
Calls to the newsroom. Jerome Bradley, the Assignment Editor, jotted notes furiously.
Many spoke of the wind. Others of a buzzing sound. Others said they had called 911 and no one answered and they were scared.
Bradley dispatched a news crew in a van, sending them to a neighborhood where many calls were coming from. But the van would not start.
*****
The twelve-year-old went to the window. From her family’s apartment on West 57th Street, she could hear the horns blaring down below. The sounds of the city. Same as every day. But today felt different somehow.
If she got her face close to the glass, she could see pieces of sky beyond the towers, and the sky was silvery, the clouds low and in motion, like a thick liquid churning. This is interesting! she thought. A big storm. She liked lightning. Maybe there would be lightning.
Another motion caught her eye.
There, in the apartment tower across the street. A face. Her eyes met the eyes of a boy about her age. They simply stared at each other for a moment. And then, the boy started to move his hands. Clapping! His face was very small from this distance, but the girl could tell his mouth was moving, and now he was pointing — for her sake, he was pointing. Up and to the east.
She couldn’t see what it was. What did he want her to see? Now he was waving his arms.
Now — a woman appeared from behind him and took him away from the window. He was gone.
She trembled.
*****
On the west end of the Central Library near the Art Museum, several people who had been engrossed in their books lifted their heads and looked at each other.
They all felt the shudder, the vibration under their feet. A tinkling sound now: something shaking somewhere above them. A head peering over a balcony in response. At precisely the same time, two young men, seminary students, had precisely the same thought. One of them — his eyes brightening, his lips relocating to form a smile — picked up a textbook and tapped his finger on the cover. On the title.
Parousia.
The other man’s mouth formed the word: Parousia. He began to laugh. They both laughed. Others began to run to their table, in search of this amusing secret.
Outside the library, on the Walnut Street side, several people stopped and looked up. One man — no, two of them — knelt on the sidewalk. A woman was prostrate.
The sounds grew louder, blending. Some of them distinct: barking, laughter, a shriek, a door slamming, the whoosh of the wind, sounds of whirring and scraping and thumping and crying.
One sound began to rise above all the others.
Something blaring. A sound like a horn. A single extended note, in fact. The drone of a horn, like trumpets and trombones in unison, in a crescendo. Louder. Very loud.
*****
Mrs. Alcaraz and Mr. Criqui (he of the once-crooked leg) were by now high above the ground, conversing, though they didn’t speak the same language. Mr. Bradley, the Assignment Editor, went to the building’s roof — though he shouldn’t have.
The wind tousled the hair of the twelve-year-old girl from 57th Street and of the boy from the other building as the two ascended.
*****
In the library, as the beams fell and the books were swept away, the seminary students’ textbooks clung, for a moment, to a tilting table, one of them open to a passage the young men had read just an hour earlier, a chapter late in the book. It begins this way, with a reference to a future event called the Parousia:
The New Testament repeatedly announces that Jesus Christ will one day be back. This will be his “royal visit,” his “appearing” and “coming” (Greek: parousia.) Christ will return to this world in glory. The Savior’s second advent will be personal and physical.1
It would be only a moment before that book was gone along with all the others, just before a darkness descended, obscuring the sun and the moon, and a shaking began, and the clouds began to part, and the trumpet sound reached a climax, like an announcement never heard before.
J.I. Packer, Concise Theology, chapter on “Second Coming,” p. 250.
Love the story and yeah, at 73 I'm ready for the glory of it all
I'm ready...something is happening