Vision 5
Ben was distracted during Mass. It almost never happened, and when it did it was never on purpose. But he found himself unable to concentrate on this particular Sunday. He had come to the Cathedral of Saint Andrew early, as he did every Sunday, to say the Holy Rosary, recite the Divine Praises, and pray before the Blessed Sacrament. This was the time when he summoned and directed his focus in preparation for Mass. Sometimes he was even there as early as first light, praying alone in the dark, reverent quiet, the only light that of flickering votive candles encased in red, white, and blue glass in the shrine to the Blessed Virgin as she and other saints looked silently on.
Then dawn would break.
“Weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning”, he would often whisper to himself with a smile in these early morning prayers, watching the first rays of the rising sun stream through the stained glass windows.
But that focus, and that serenity, eluded him now. He had had another dream.
The choir was singing the Sanctus, as they usually did, in Gregorian chant:
“Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the Highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the Highest”.
Ben had always sensed the higher world, as he called it. The realm of angels, wherein dwelt The Light. Ever since he was a young child, even in his earliest memories, he had known it was there. Even though his infant mind could not articulate what he knew, he had known it intuitively. When he was four years old, he had been walking alone in his back yard on an afternoon in the summer. At least, he thought it was in the summer. Maybe it was spring. The flowers were blooming, the grass and the leaves were radiantly green, and the sun shone down with a deep brightness that made everything brilliantly, livingly colorful. Birds were singing, and he thought he remembered the sound of buzzing bees.
It was then, as he was walking, that the wind had blown. He remembered hearing echoes in the wind as it wisped past his ears, echoes of laughter. The wind grew stronger. It blew around the back yard, making the swings on the swing set leap out on their chains, causing the flowers and plants to bow and the trees to bend their limbs downward. The wind grew so loud that it overpowered the sounds of the birds and all the other creatures there. The wind swirled around him, and nature sang with the laughter in the wind. He fell onto his back, and it was then that he remembered thinking the thought. It was quite a thought for a child of four. And it was also more than a thought. It was a realization. An affirmation.
“God is in the wind!”
A wellspring rose up inside him. It started down deep inside, somewhere in his lower torso above his legs, and he felt it rushing upward. It burst through his lips like a raging river breaking through a dam with a forcefulness that is impossible to contain any longer. It was laughter. He laughed and sang with the wind for a long time until the wind subsided and the yard grew quiet. Then he lay there smiling, content, alone but not alone.
That is how Ben remembered it.
That knowing had been with him his whole life. When he grew older, he had often thought of entering the seminary and becoming a priest. In fact, he was sure that is what he was to do.
That is, until he met Razia.
Now he wasn’t sure. And that, for the moment, was okay.
He stood for The Lord’s Prayer, taking the hands of those next to him.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”
Ben had had another dream.
Another nightmare.
The nightmares had come to him his whole life.
The first one came when he was three years old. It had been in a dark place with rusted iron walls, laden with dark, heavy metal bolts, bathed in crimson light. Fans with rusty blades spun, casting oscillating shadows. There were loud, vicious, jabbing noises of metal banging on metal. There was also loud, agonized, visceral screaming coming from nowhere. Painful, hopeless screams in the dark.
He had run through the hallways trying to escape, but there was no way out. Always chasing him was a hideous, pale thing in deathly white that hid its face behind a maroon mask. It had long, scraggly black hair that looked like broken spider webs. And claws. And a large, rusty metal knife dripping with blood. It cast a long, thin shadow, and it loomed up in front of him as he turned corners. It would scream indecipherable things at him in a high-pitched, terrible voice, black laces of obscenity lunging to strangle him to death with sharp, hissing teeth at his throat dripping acidic saliva.
It would kill him if it caught him. Tear out his throat with its teeth and slash him to pieces, tearing him open with its claws, ripping out his insides.
It was a woman. He didn’t know how he knew that. He just did.
She had no name. It was not that he did not know her name. She was a nameless one.
That had been the first nightmare.
They had come to him in childhood and even into his adult years, though they were less frequent now. He had been tortured, chained to a wall in dark, subterranean depths where no light reached. He had run through a forest at night being chased by a living shadow that took the vague shape of a man with luminous white eyes without pupils or irises, a mouth full of serpent’s fangs and a forked tongue. It would hiss at him as he ran on the dark forest path. He could hear it breathing behind him as its feet hit the dirt behind his. The dream had always ended when he came to a clearing. He would look up at a starless sky, seeing only by the light of a baleful red moon. Then he would wake up.
There were many, many more besides. These were not like normal nightmares. He had those too, and he knew the difference. These were always so much more vivid, so much more real, and the fear. The fear was so much more tangible. It was palpable. His heart would beat fast in his chest, and he felt terror for his life. When he would wake up, he would not feel alone in his room. It was the antithesis of the presence he had felt in the back yard that day.
It was evil.
Another nightmare had come last night.
This time he had been in a dark cave deep in the earth. Shadows and stalactites hung over his head in the silent gloom. The cave was lit be a dim light without a source.
He was crouched at the edge of an abyss, gaping darkness with no end, surrounded by rough, hard, grey stones. A soft, cool breeze came up from the abyss, softly blowing his hair, Except for the wind, there was silence, save for one other sound.
The abyss whispered.
It did not whisper with words, at least, not words that his mind could understand. But he nonetheless knew what it was saying. The abyss whispered to him of knowledge. It promised him knowledge. Wisdom from the keeper of secrets. It beckoned to him, blowing softly and coolly up into his face.
“Come,” it said. “That which you seek awaits you”.
He was tempted. There was a part of him that wished to dive into the abyss and be swallowed up in its depths. Such is the price of knowledge, after all. It all depends on what you are willing to give up.
“Come to me,” it said.
He resisted.
It whispered more.
“Come to me,” it said. It exhaled a breath up to him, a long, hollow sigh.
He stared into the abyss. He gazed long, and hard, not mesmerized, but tempted. Gradually the abyss fell silent. He stared still. He stared for a long time.
Then, suddenly, he knew he was not alone. Someone was in the cave with him. Someone was standing behind him. He did not have to look. He knew who it was.
The presence behind him was strong and merciless. It looked on him with a dread gaze that he dare not meet. He could not look into those eyes. Those mirthless, empty eyes. Those horrible eyes.
A flame appeared in the abyss. A dark, dancing grey flame, undulating against the blackness. It writhed sensuously, as if to perverse music that he could not hear, hanging there, suspended in nothingness. He heard millions voices whispering from far away, as if from behind a veil. A dark cacophony of voices layered one over another, whispered by hidden multitudes in the dark.
Then he saw it.
It rose up from the abyss, formless, but great and unbelievably powerful. The flame danced where its forehead would be, if it was to take on such a shape, but it did not. It was too great, too large, too massive to be embodied by a single shape, even a great, hulking, beastly, powerful shape.
It stretched invisible, titanic arms up, reaching from the abyss. It was formless, but made of iron. Ten thousand soldiers of Light would not prevail against such a terrible thing as this. It was a mighty abomination. A great behemoth, a being of unrelenting, utterly crushing, terrifying, merciless power.
“Slouching towards Bethlehem,” Ben thought.
Ben had a choice. He could stay there staring, and meet the monster that would certainly destroy him. Or, he could turn and look at the figure that stood up behind him, glaring down at him, arms crossed, with the face of a lion and those horrific eyes.
Living death was in those eyes.
He could not make that choice. He was frozen in terror.
Then he had woken up.
Ben was roused by the sound of moving feet. He looked up to see that everyone in his pew except for him was now standing, and a line was forming in the aisle to the front of the church. He stood quickly, shaking of the vision of his nightmare.
He redirected his focus, raising his hands level with his throat, palms together, and the tops of his fingers lightly touching the bottom of his chin. He closed his eyes and began to pray. He walked out into the aisle as he had so many times before, and prepared to receive Holy Communion.
His foot hit stones, which moved slightly as he stepped on them. A gust of wind blew across his face. Startled, he opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the cathedral.
Ben was standing on a windy hilltop. The hill was desolate, covered with stones. The sky was overcast and grey. The wind did not howl or whistle, but it blew harshly.
In front of Ben there were three empty crosses, large enough to hang men on. Two of them were turned slightly at angles, facing inward toward the cross in the center. At the head of that cross hung a small, rough wooden sign with a familiar scrawl, “INRI”. A small length of the large nail holding the sign in place protruded outward, and a crown of thorns hung from that nail. The cross was covered with blood stains.
Ben could not believe his eyes. His breath seized in his throat.
A man stood at the foot of the cross in the center. He was old but strong looking, his face weathered and covered with lines. He had a long, curly white beard that matched his hair. His eyes were clear. In one hand, down by his left side, he held a ring of golden keys. In his other hand, held level with the bottom of his chin, he held a very small disc of golden light that shone brilliantly, like the sun. Beside him on the right a rooster stood, twitching its head silently.
Ben knew who this man was. He stumbled back involuntarily, speechless.
The man smiled at him, beckoning him silently with a motion of his wrist to come forward.
Ben stepped forward with small steps. When he came up to the man, he bowed deeply and reverently. Then he rose back up, still looking slightly downward. He did not look at the man’s face, but he felt a deep sense of abiding peace.
“The body of Christ,” said the man with a voice that was somehow both gentle and firm.
“Amen,” Ben said quietly. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth. There was a burning sensation on his tongue that did not hurt, and he felt a great power surge through him.
It was a power that feared nothing, with both great severity and great, fathomless joy. .
It was a power that could have sent the great behemoth from his dream howling back into the pit, and could meet those horrific eyes of the figure behind him without a single shred of fear.
Love.
Ben chewed slowly, and then swallowed. Electricity shot through his veins.
When he opened his eyes, he was standing back in the cathedral. He fell into the seat of the pew.
Ben sat through the rest of the Mass, going through the motions but mesmerized.
“The Mass is ended. Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord”.
“Thanks be to God,” he said.
Ben sat there for some time, only half noticing that the cathedral was emptying. He didn’t noticed when the priest disappeared back into a door behind the altar. Eventually, he was alone, but he didn’t even know it.
Then, suddenly, a hand touched him softly on the shoulder. He gave a jumped a bit, startled, and looked up behind him. A pretty, blue-haired, blue eyed woman was smiling down at him.
“Hey,” she said. “How was Mass?”
Then dawn would break.
“Weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning”, he would often whisper to himself with a smile in these early morning prayers, watching the first rays of the rising sun stream through the stained glass windows.
But that focus, and that serenity, eluded him now. He had had another dream.
The choir was singing the Sanctus, as they usually did, in Gregorian chant:
“Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the Highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the Highest”.
Ben had always sensed the higher world, as he called it. The realm of angels, wherein dwelt The Light. Ever since he was a young child, even in his earliest memories, he had known it was there. Even though his infant mind could not articulate what he knew, he had known it intuitively. When he was four years old, he had been walking alone in his back yard on an afternoon in the summer. At least, he thought it was in the summer. Maybe it was spring. The flowers were blooming, the grass and the leaves were radiantly green, and the sun shone down with a deep brightness that made everything brilliantly, livingly colorful. Birds were singing, and he thought he remembered the sound of buzzing bees.
It was then, as he was walking, that the wind had blown. He remembered hearing echoes in the wind as it wisped past his ears, echoes of laughter. The wind grew stronger. It blew around the back yard, making the swings on the swing set leap out on their chains, causing the flowers and plants to bow and the trees to bend their limbs downward. The wind grew so loud that it overpowered the sounds of the birds and all the other creatures there. The wind swirled around him, and nature sang with the laughter in the wind. He fell onto his back, and it was then that he remembered thinking the thought. It was quite a thought for a child of four. And it was also more than a thought. It was a realization. An affirmation.
“God is in the wind!”
A wellspring rose up inside him. It started down deep inside, somewhere in his lower torso above his legs, and he felt it rushing upward. It burst through his lips like a raging river breaking through a dam with a forcefulness that is impossible to contain any longer. It was laughter. He laughed and sang with the wind for a long time until the wind subsided and the yard grew quiet. Then he lay there smiling, content, alone but not alone.
That is how Ben remembered it.
That knowing had been with him his whole life. When he grew older, he had often thought of entering the seminary and becoming a priest. In fact, he was sure that is what he was to do.
That is, until he met Razia.
Now he wasn’t sure. And that, for the moment, was okay.
He stood for The Lord’s Prayer, taking the hands of those next to him.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”
Ben had had another dream.
Another nightmare.
The nightmares had come to him his whole life.
The first one came when he was three years old. It had been in a dark place with rusted iron walls, laden with dark, heavy metal bolts, bathed in crimson light. Fans with rusty blades spun, casting oscillating shadows. There were loud, vicious, jabbing noises of metal banging on metal. There was also loud, agonized, visceral screaming coming from nowhere. Painful, hopeless screams in the dark.
He had run through the hallways trying to escape, but there was no way out. Always chasing him was a hideous, pale thing in deathly white that hid its face behind a maroon mask. It had long, scraggly black hair that looked like broken spider webs. And claws. And a large, rusty metal knife dripping with blood. It cast a long, thin shadow, and it loomed up in front of him as he turned corners. It would scream indecipherable things at him in a high-pitched, terrible voice, black laces of obscenity lunging to strangle him to death with sharp, hissing teeth at his throat dripping acidic saliva.
It would kill him if it caught him. Tear out his throat with its teeth and slash him to pieces, tearing him open with its claws, ripping out his insides.
It was a woman. He didn’t know how he knew that. He just did.
She had no name. It was not that he did not know her name. She was a nameless one.
That had been the first nightmare.
They had come to him in childhood and even into his adult years, though they were less frequent now. He had been tortured, chained to a wall in dark, subterranean depths where no light reached. He had run through a forest at night being chased by a living shadow that took the vague shape of a man with luminous white eyes without pupils or irises, a mouth full of serpent’s fangs and a forked tongue. It would hiss at him as he ran on the dark forest path. He could hear it breathing behind him as its feet hit the dirt behind his. The dream had always ended when he came to a clearing. He would look up at a starless sky, seeing only by the light of a baleful red moon. Then he would wake up.
There were many, many more besides. These were not like normal nightmares. He had those too, and he knew the difference. These were always so much more vivid, so much more real, and the fear. The fear was so much more tangible. It was palpable. His heart would beat fast in his chest, and he felt terror for his life. When he would wake up, he would not feel alone in his room. It was the antithesis of the presence he had felt in the back yard that day.
It was evil.
Another nightmare had come last night.
This time he had been in a dark cave deep in the earth. Shadows and stalactites hung over his head in the silent gloom. The cave was lit be a dim light without a source.
He was crouched at the edge of an abyss, gaping darkness with no end, surrounded by rough, hard, grey stones. A soft, cool breeze came up from the abyss, softly blowing his hair, Except for the wind, there was silence, save for one other sound.
The abyss whispered.
It did not whisper with words, at least, not words that his mind could understand. But he nonetheless knew what it was saying. The abyss whispered to him of knowledge. It promised him knowledge. Wisdom from the keeper of secrets. It beckoned to him, blowing softly and coolly up into his face.
“Come,” it said. “That which you seek awaits you”.
He was tempted. There was a part of him that wished to dive into the abyss and be swallowed up in its depths. Such is the price of knowledge, after all. It all depends on what you are willing to give up.
“Come to me,” it said.
He resisted.
It whispered more.
“Come to me,” it said. It exhaled a breath up to him, a long, hollow sigh.
He stared into the abyss. He gazed long, and hard, not mesmerized, but tempted. Gradually the abyss fell silent. He stared still. He stared for a long time.
Then, suddenly, he knew he was not alone. Someone was in the cave with him. Someone was standing behind him. He did not have to look. He knew who it was.
The presence behind him was strong and merciless. It looked on him with a dread gaze that he dare not meet. He could not look into those eyes. Those mirthless, empty eyes. Those horrible eyes.
A flame appeared in the abyss. A dark, dancing grey flame, undulating against the blackness. It writhed sensuously, as if to perverse music that he could not hear, hanging there, suspended in nothingness. He heard millions voices whispering from far away, as if from behind a veil. A dark cacophony of voices layered one over another, whispered by hidden multitudes in the dark.
Then he saw it.
It rose up from the abyss, formless, but great and unbelievably powerful. The flame danced where its forehead would be, if it was to take on such a shape, but it did not. It was too great, too large, too massive to be embodied by a single shape, even a great, hulking, beastly, powerful shape.
It stretched invisible, titanic arms up, reaching from the abyss. It was formless, but made of iron. Ten thousand soldiers of Light would not prevail against such a terrible thing as this. It was a mighty abomination. A great behemoth, a being of unrelenting, utterly crushing, terrifying, merciless power.
“Slouching towards Bethlehem,” Ben thought.
Ben had a choice. He could stay there staring, and meet the monster that would certainly destroy him. Or, he could turn and look at the figure that stood up behind him, glaring down at him, arms crossed, with the face of a lion and those horrific eyes.
Living death was in those eyes.
He could not make that choice. He was frozen in terror.
Then he had woken up.
Ben was roused by the sound of moving feet. He looked up to see that everyone in his pew except for him was now standing, and a line was forming in the aisle to the front of the church. He stood quickly, shaking of the vision of his nightmare.
He redirected his focus, raising his hands level with his throat, palms together, and the tops of his fingers lightly touching the bottom of his chin. He closed his eyes and began to pray. He walked out into the aisle as he had so many times before, and prepared to receive Holy Communion.
His foot hit stones, which moved slightly as he stepped on them. A gust of wind blew across his face. Startled, he opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the cathedral.
Ben was standing on a windy hilltop. The hill was desolate, covered with stones. The sky was overcast and grey. The wind did not howl or whistle, but it blew harshly.
In front of Ben there were three empty crosses, large enough to hang men on. Two of them were turned slightly at angles, facing inward toward the cross in the center. At the head of that cross hung a small, rough wooden sign with a familiar scrawl, “INRI”. A small length of the large nail holding the sign in place protruded outward, and a crown of thorns hung from that nail. The cross was covered with blood stains.
Ben could not believe his eyes. His breath seized in his throat.
A man stood at the foot of the cross in the center. He was old but strong looking, his face weathered and covered with lines. He had a long, curly white beard that matched his hair. His eyes were clear. In one hand, down by his left side, he held a ring of golden keys. In his other hand, held level with the bottom of his chin, he held a very small disc of golden light that shone brilliantly, like the sun. Beside him on the right a rooster stood, twitching its head silently.
Ben knew who this man was. He stumbled back involuntarily, speechless.
The man smiled at him, beckoning him silently with a motion of his wrist to come forward.
Ben stepped forward with small steps. When he came up to the man, he bowed deeply and reverently. Then he rose back up, still looking slightly downward. He did not look at the man’s face, but he felt a deep sense of abiding peace.
“The body of Christ,” said the man with a voice that was somehow both gentle and firm.
“Amen,” Ben said quietly. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth. There was a burning sensation on his tongue that did not hurt, and he felt a great power surge through him.
It was a power that feared nothing, with both great severity and great, fathomless joy. .
It was a power that could have sent the great behemoth from his dream howling back into the pit, and could meet those horrific eyes of the figure behind him without a single shred of fear.
Love.
Ben chewed slowly, and then swallowed. Electricity shot through his veins.
When he opened his eyes, he was standing back in the cathedral. He fell into the seat of the pew.
Ben sat through the rest of the Mass, going through the motions but mesmerized.
“The Mass is ended. Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord”.
“Thanks be to God,” he said.
Ben sat there for some time, only half noticing that the cathedral was emptying. He didn’t noticed when the priest disappeared back into a door behind the altar. Eventually, he was alone, but he didn’t even know it.
Then, suddenly, a hand touched him softly on the shoulder. He gave a jumped a bit, startled, and looked up behind him. A pretty, blue-haired, blue eyed woman was smiling down at him.
“Hey,” she said. “How was Mass?”