An Age of Miracles

You may not have noticed (it’s yet to make the front page of the New York Times or the cover of Newsweek) but we seem to be in the midst of a New Age of Miracles. Consider the evidence of events, all having been reported in recent years:

In 1977, Maria Rubio discovered the face of Jesus burned into a tortilla she had made for her husband’s breakfast. The family built a shrine to the Jesus tortilla in their backyard where it stayed for years before time and hear warped the image until it finally it was dropped in 2006 in an elementary school’s show-and-tell.

In 1986, masses of the faithful assembled before a silhouette of the Virgin Mary that appeared on a wall of an empty house in suburban Hanover Township, Pennsylvania, following the installation of new street lights.

In 1994, Diane Duyser almost bit into a grilled cheese sandwich she’d just made before seeing the image of the Virgin Mary staring back at her. After being in a plastic bag in her freezer for nine years, Duyser finally put the Mary sandwich up on eBay, stipulating that it was “not intended for consumption.” It was sold to the Golden Palace Casino for $28,000.

In 2004, Steve Cragg was munching on Cheetos when we came across a cheesy, chemically infused morsel that he was certain was in the shape of Jesus. “I do not think that God makes Cheetos that looks like Jesus,” Cragg said understatedly, “but I do know that God reveals himself in amazing ways.” He named his find “Cheesus.”

While cooking pierogis for her family on Palm Sunday, 2005, Donna Lee flipped one of the dumplings and her husband exclaimed, “What? There’s Jesus!”

On Easter 2009, Eric Peterson purchased a See’s Candy chocolate and peanut butter egg, and removing a decorative flower he unveiled an image of Jesus in a piece of chocolate on the bottom of the flower. “I have to admit,” Peterson said,” finding an image of Jesus on Easter was a great experience, and I’m sure it will become a tradition to talk about it on Easters to come.”

And just last week the image of Jesus appeared to Chyanna Richards in mold growing in a shower in her Splendora, Texas, home.  “Maybe it means something,” Richards said. “Maybe look into yourself and see if you need to change something in your life.” The mold is reported to have started growing a couple of months ago. Maybe the change should be to start cleaning the bathroom.

These are only a few of the examples of the resurgence in the past few years of holy visions and apparitions. According to a New York diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Church (most miracles tend to emanate from the Catholic faith) is investigating some 200 reported miracles at any one time.

To be sure, if ever there were a time in need of miracles it’s now. What with the threats of terrorist attack, climate change, computer viruses, and a zombie apocolypse (how would the prophets deal with such worries?), we can use all the reassurance we can get from some Divine Plan that promises things will all turn out peachy in the end, even if we do have to suffer the inconvenience of death in the process.

But the miracles we’ve been given of late – images on tortillas, grilled cheese sandwiches, pierogis, and shower mold – strike me as being a tad feeble, certainly nowhere near the magnitude of those found in the Bible – Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, Elisae’s curing Naaman of leprosy, Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead or his walking on water. (You can find 120 such Biblical miracles here.)

Perhaps it’s that ours is such a paradoxical age, that we are such a schizophrenic folk. On one hand we are unboundingly hopeful, yearning for whatever sign we might receive that there is some Greater Being watching over us – be that being divine, extraterrestrial, or whatever – that might one day make clear for us all this apparent chaos and confusion that we know only as “Life.” On the other hand we are prudent, wary sorts. A sign in the post office warns us bluntly that “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!” In the New York subways, signs command us, “If you see something, say something.” Were Jesus to return and resurrect a latter-day Lazarus, we’d probably have to rely on Entertainment Tonight to cover the story: HUBBY BACK FROM DEAD – WIFE SUSPECTS ALIENS. Intrigued, we’d watch. But we wouldn’t believe it.

I guess the point is we have to take what we can get, meager as it might be. If we can’t get seas to part or the dead to rise from their graves – or even corporations to stop polluting the environment or fanatic religious zealots to stop blowing themselves and others up – then we’ll just have to settle for skillet burns on tortillas and mold on the walls of showers.