The Great Disappearance, Part III
The world continues to react to a mind-boggling event.
Editor’s note: See Part I and Part II of this ongoing satirical fiction series.
Sunday April 2
Ponder Why
Pope Joseph walked into the John Paul II hall in the Holy See to address the reporters the first Sunday after the Great Disappearance. As he approached the podium, he decided not to speak to them as reporters, but as parishioners who had come to hear a homily in the aftermath of a flood or earthquake.
He had spent the first night after the Great Disappearance speaking with senior bishops who were as mystified as he. His conversations confirmed that it was a global event. There was some variation, but local manifestations of the Great Disappearance all happened between the half hour before or after midnight, Greenwich mean time on March 31.
“Did anyone see anything?” Joseph asked the Patriarch in Jerusalem and the Bishop in London. No, not a thing, they told him.
“That’s impossible!” he said. “Entire crowds of people don’t just disappear in broad daylight.” When he recalled making this statement later, he winced. “Sometimes they do,” he said quietly to himself. “They do all the time.”
Joseph spent previous day in seclusion. Upon waking on Sunday, he toured the vacant home of the Chief Rabbi of Rome. His advance team portrayed the trip as a farewell gesture to an old friend and colleague, but it was more than that. He needed to see for himself that his friend was gone.
The house was empty of the rabbi and his family. He walked into the study with the cameras in tow. The vision of an open book, a pen and a notepad on the desk in the rabbi’s study hit home. He knew the rabbi and his family were gone.
He walked into the empty home of another Jewish family near the Chief Rabbi’s house. He shook his head as he surveyed a living room with an empty play pen at the center. A baby’s bottle, filled with curdled milk sat on a table nearby. He walked out onto the front step of the vacant home and sat down in full regalia as the photographers and camera operators captured the image of a pontiff sitting on someone’s front step, head in hands, mourning the loss of an elder brother.
An hour later, he looked at the reporters. There was an expectant silence as he stepped up to the podium.
“Our elder brothers and sisters have disappeared,” Pope Joseph said. “We know not how. We know not why, and we know not where to look for them to bring them back,” he said. “All we can do is pray for their welfare and return.”
He paused for a moment.
“As we pray for their return, we ought to do more than ponder why they were taken away from us, but why we were left to stay and what we are summoned to do in their absence,” the Pontiff said. “Things simply cannot go on as they have. It is the Jews who have disappeared, but maybe it those who remain who are in exile.”
“Sometimes our true selves are revealed in the presence of others,” he said. “And other times they are revealed in their absence.”
He then announced a meeting of the College of Cardinals to begin the Sunday after Easter, waved off further questions and headed to his chapel for his private devotions before conducting the Angelus.
Prayers of the Faithful
A few hours later, Pastor Nelson stepped up to the lectern to give the sermon at Boston Congregational Church on the Sunday after the Great Disappearance. Normally, there were about 60 people in attendance, but this morning, there was double that. His congregation was comprised of lifelong neighborhood townies who were left behind by most of their wealthier friends who moved to the suburbs decades before.
A smattering of young married couples who would move to wealthier suburbs once they started having kids rounded out the congregation. But this Sunday there were also a few unmarried early career professionals who probably hadn’t been to church since confirmation. He scanned the faces of the folks in the pews. He saw a mixture of fear and bewilderment. They looked to him for answers. The one time he knew he had their attention, he had very little to say.
“This morning’s reading from the Old Testament includes a passage from Isaiah where God declares he’s doing a new thing and asks us whether or not we can see it,” he said. “God has our attention all right.”
Nervous laughter from the pews. “That’s a good sign,” he said to himself.
“Then the psalm talked about God restoring the fortunes of Zion, declaring that when it happened, the people were like ‘those who dreamed.’ It goes onto speak of a reversal, that the folks who sow seeds in tears will reap a harvest with laughter.”
“Talk about reversals! Some of our Evangelical friends think they’re the ones who were supposed to be lifted up out of the mess we’ve made of our planet, but maybe it is the Jews who have been given a rest from humanity’s craziness.”
“Then the Gospel reading includes a reference to Judas, who has been a stand in for the evil Jews, complaining about a woman who anointed Jesus with expensive perfume because it reduced the amount he could steal from the common purse.”
“So oddly enough, we see all of the issues laid out for us to struggle with. The sovereign power of God, his promises to the Jews and an undeniable expression of the of the anti-Judaic impulse evident in our scriptures.”
“Today we have to ask who the thieves are,” he said. “As soon as we realized the Jews had disappeared, folks started ransacking their homes. We saw the footage of what happened in New York City.”
“We don’t know what happened to the Jews,” Nelson said. “Frankly, I’m just as disoriented as you are. I can only guess at what is going on. Maybe God is tired of our scapegoating ways. Maybe he has had enough of us blaming the Jews for everything that goes wrong in the world we live in and thinks he can get us to take responsibility for our lives by depriving us of the targets of our obsession.”
“If that was his goal, then maybe he needs a rethink, because every we’ve been talking and thinking about the Jews more now that they’ve gone than when they were here. And that’s a lot!”
More nervous laughter.
“There’s a story about a Buddhist novice headed out on a retreat,” Nelson said. “He asked his teacher for a word of advice, a word of blessing. And the mentor says, ‘Don’t think about monkeys.’”
“After three days the boy comes back down the mountain and starts screaming at his teacher, saying, ‘What did you do? All I could think about was monkeys. I failed.’”
“We think about Jews the way that boy thinks about monkeys and we do so with the encouragement of our scriptures, the polemics of the early church fathers and now, our so-called peace activists in the Middle East.”
“Today, I’m not going to tell you not to think about the Jews. I’m going to ask you to think past them and offer you the following admonition: Whenever we think that a biblical passage condemns the Jews, it might be a good idea to ask ourselves if it is a more accurate description of our internal landscape. We’ve used the Jews as symbols of everything we don’t like about humanity even as we deny the presence of these characteristics in our own lives.”
“That’s a sin,” he said.
“That will have to do,” Nelson said to himself before going into the prayers of the faithful.
