Woman sees image of Jesus on iron. Until this week, Mary Jo Coady had never given her iron a second thought. Then she saw a likeness of Jesus staring back from its not-quite stainless steel bottom. (Boston Globe, November 28, 2009, B1.)
I don’t know what to say. I was just making a leafy salad and all of a sudden there he was staring at me as clear as day. My savior, the light of the world. I got a chill at first and then a warm feeling spread through my body. Why did this happen to me I wondered? I’m just an ordinary person, you know, no one special.
The more I thought about it though the more it reminded me of little Bernadette who saw the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes or those three kids who saw her at Fatima. I suppose I’m now like them, one of the chosen ones to bear witness. I was really moved. The next thing I thought was the gals in the knitting club were going to flip f-l-i-p flip when I showed them.
Here take a look at the salad. I’ve kept it just as it was in the mixing bowl I was using. I haven’t touched it at all because, who knows, it may be holy by now. After the initial shock I decided to call my parish priest, Father George, and he said he’d be right over after the game he was watching on TV was done. I think it was a basketball game or maybe baseball. Or else it was golf. Yes, I think it was golf. I haven’t seen him yet though. He probably had an emergency.
So look at the salad from this angle. You see the red leaf lettuce there is his hair. It’s all wavy and long just the way he wore it. The right side is a bit longer than the left, but you know they didn’t have barber shops in those days, right, so he probably cut his own hair and you know how hard it is to do that and get it even. I can imagine him holding up a little mirror and trying to trim the sides. It’s difficult to get the scissors angled in the right direction when you are looking into a mirror. Half the time you snip and you get nothing. So that’s what I think happened.
And those two little grape tomatoes right there, see where I’m pointing, those are his eyes. They look so knowing and gentle like in all his pictures. When I looked into those eyes, I mean truly looked into them, I knew this was for real. The left one, well actually his right eye if you’re him looking out from the salad, is aimed a little bit to the right while the other one kinda looks the other way, but just a little.
The chopped cucumber, which I just threw into the bowl willy nilly, are his teeth and, mercy be, they’re all in a row, not jagged or anything. In fact, they’re perfect. It’s like he had orthodontic work or whatever they did then. My guess is whatever he had done it was probably around the time he lectured to the elders in the temple because he was twelve then. Can you imagine? I bet they thought he was some bright kid. You know, a regular Einstein.
The strip of green pepper is his nose. It’s very straight except at the end where it bends to the left. I’m sure he had a straight nose, so I think what’s going on here is that he’s grinning, you know, because you can see all his cucumber teeth and his grin is pulling the lower part of his nose over. That happens to a lot of people. It happens to my Floyd even. Maybe he was thinking of something funny or maybe the Blessed Virgin was telling a story or something that made him grin. I don’t know but it’s kinda cute.
And the croutons are his beard of course. They are grizzly and rough like a beard would be and come to a point just at the right spot. You know before I noticed the image I almost ate one of the croutons. I might have ruined it. But something stopped me just in time, like when Mrs. Gerrity decided not to take that bus trip because of a strange feeling she had and the bus went into a ditch. Divine intervention that’s what it was.
Anyway, this whole thing is a miracle all right.
No comments:
Post a Comment