Robert Fromont

Stranger in an Even Stranger Land

Nothing to write home about

Sacred sightings

Saturday, 28 Nov 2009 - 20:05PM

The headline reads US woman sees image of Jesus on her iron - apparently a down-and-out Massachusetts woman noticed, when entering her daughter's bedroom, that Christ had come again, this time manifesting Himself as brown scum on the bottom of her iron. Mary Jo Coady has resolved forthwith to stop using The Holy Face Of Jesus for pressing her laundry, and buy a new iron instead.  Which seems fittingly pious to me. 

But on closer inspection, it also seems to me that even squinting really hard, you'd still have to really want to see Christ Our Saviour here:

Saviour manifest in laudry residue

 

AOL news has, it turns out, a small compendium of similar sightings of The Son of Man:

Jim Stevens stands next to his truck that has an image on the window resembling Jesus Christ. In April 2005, an Australian man said he saw the image of Jesus Christ in this frying pan after he burned lemon mustard cream sauce in it.

A 36-year-old British mother said she knew exactly what she was looking at when she opened up a jar of Marmite and saw this image on the lid.Donna Lee said she saw the face of Jesus in this pierogi, a kind of Polish dumpling, she made for Easter dinner in 2005 at her home in Point Place, a suburb of Toledo, Ohio.

A Pittsburgh man cut this water-stained piece of plaster from his bathroom wall in June 2005 Thomas Haley said in February 2006 that he saw the face of Jesus in this piece of sheet metal from Hardy's Hardware in Manchester, Conn. 

Whether your saviour is manifest in mildew, marmite, or mustard cream sauce, I reckon there's a heavy dose of your favourite flavour of pop-culture that goes into deciding the identity of the vision. While the witnesses of the above have chosen this identity (painted almost 20 centuries too late to be anything but apocryphal):

Christ at 33, Heinrich Hofmann late 19th C

...there's a similar degree of resemblance to this one:

Che Guevara

Of all blessed images of the Chosen One, only the Shroud of Turin could reasonably be claimed to be more likely Jesus than El Che, being 10 or 20 centuries too early...

Negative of the Shroud of Turin