The "Jesus Rock"

... Actually, a stone.

The story is, I tend to bring home odds and ends from my wanderings. Sticks, leaves, bugs, mushrooms, seeds, feathers, bones. And often, stones, usually because of their unusual patterns or good colours. (I have a small collection of almost perfectly round stones, too.)

Usually, they end up in a corner of the living room, where I have a couple of plants and a large "Mother Earth" carving that Laurie did some years ago. Things collect around her feet and up the wall around her, her "earthy children", making a sort of improvised altar or meditation centre. Not that I associate it with any ritual, mind you; it's just my little celebration of the wonders "out there".

Another odd quirk of mine: I shuffle my collections around, so that I always have something new to look at. About once a month, I change the grouping on my kitchen table. One month, porcelain, next a bowl of yellow leaves, then assorted Tonala pottery... This month, I piled a handful of favourite stones on an antique, well-worn, tattered crocheted tablecloth inherited from my grandmother (1888 - 1965). A clay pot full of pussy-willows and a salt-shaker in the form of a cairn that I dug out from the garden of my son's 1930's house finished the arrangement.

Nothing new there: I had lived with all those items, except, of course, the pussy-willows, for years. But Laurie had not really had a chance to look at them. Now, they were staring him in the face for weeks.

And in one of those stones, he saw, plain as the sunburned nose on my face, a crucifix with the figure of Jesus hanging on it. And while I looked with him at this apparition, I turned over the stone and saw a face I knew well from history books; the face of one of the penitents at the time of the Black Death.

It took me a while, but I found the picture. And here is the procession. (Lousy photos, sorry.) Note that one man is carrying a crucifix. It is the same pose as the "Jesus" on my stone! And his is the face on the back!

Alas, and alack! I am bound for destruction! I have no faith, no faith at all! I think this is just a quirk of our minds, of the patterns made by ages of sedimentation and pressure; a coincidence, nothing more.

(And I wonder; did all their piety save these people from the plague? I doubt it. Ah, me!)

Here is the stone: do you see the figures?


(Part III of 4: Part I, Part II, Part IV)