LIT REVIEW: LOOK! It's Jesus!

Chronicle, 96 pp., $12.95, Feb. 10 The miraculous can happen to normal people all the time. Or so says LOOK! It's Jesus! Amazing Holy Visions in Everyday Life, a colorful new book from Harry and Sandra Choron. In vivid pages, these North Jersey writers document 62 accounts of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and more appearing in tortillas, windows, wood grain, sandwiches and even the clouds. Living in a cynical generation, most of us will snicker through these pages, though it was incredibly difficult for this reviewer to tell if the authors were sincere or not. Do they really see something supernatural in a chip shaped like the Pope's hat, or are they making fun of the family that found it? This question remains the real mystery behind the book, even more intriguing than how an image of Christ's mother could have appeared in a lava lamp and froze that way. Some other images, particularly ones found in wood grain, seem like a bit of a stretch. I had to look at several of them for a long time before seeing what the finder claimed to see, though many others are quite astonishing. My favorite images are the so-called "Jesus and Mary Stone" and the "Buddha Beehive," both toward the end of the book. The former is a colorful rock with incredibly convincing images of Mary holding the baby Jesus that apparently formed naturally in the stone. This is perhaps the most baffling in the whole book. The beehive is exactly what it sounds like: a small bees' nest shaped exactly like Buddha sitting down. What's more spectacular is that the bees made their home in the middle of a Buddhist monastery in Minnesota. Could the monk be right who said, "The Buddha is trying to tell everybody to seek peace in their lives"? Here, as throughout the book, the authors leave it up to the reader to determine how they respond. On that note, one man says the image of Jesus' face burned into his frying pan restored his faith, while a pastor says his Jesus-shaped cheese curl is not miraculous, just kind of a cool reminder about seeing God in the world. It could be said that this book is a study of "folk religion," looking into how spirituality affects people's everyday lives in unexpected ways.

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LIT REVIEW: LOOK! It's Jesus!

POSTED: Thursday, April 1, 2010, 7:00 PM

Chronicle, 96 pp., $12.95, Feb. 10

The miraculous can happen to normal people all the time. Or so says LOOK! It's Jesus! Amazing Holy Visions in Everyday Life, a colorful new book from Harry and Sandra Choron. In vivid pages, these North Jersey writers document 62 accounts of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and more appearing in tortillas, windows, wood grain, sandwiches and even the clouds. Living in a cynical generation, most of us will snicker through these pages, though it was incredibly difficult for this reviewer to tell if the authors were sincere or not. Do they really see something supernatural in a chip shaped like the Pope's hat, or are they making fun of the family that found it? This question remains the real mystery behind the book, even more intriguing than how an image of Christ's mother could have appeared in a lava lamp and froze that way. Some other images, particularly ones found in wood grain, seem like a bit of a stretch. I had to look at several of them for a long time before seeing what the finder claimed to see, though many others are quite astonishing. My favorite images are the so-called "Jesus and Mary Stone" and the "Buddha Beehive," both toward the end of the book. The former is a colorful rock with incredibly convincing images of Mary holding the baby Jesus that apparently formed naturally in the stone. This is perhaps the most baffling in the whole book. The beehive is exactly what it sounds like: a small bees' nest shaped exactly like Buddha sitting down. What's more spectacular is that the bees made their home in the middle of a Buddhist monastery in Minnesota. Could the monk be right who said, "The Buddha is trying to tell everybody to seek peace in their lives"? Here, as throughout the book, the authors leave it up to the reader to determine how they respond. On that note, one man says the image of Jesus' face burned into his frying pan restored his faith, while a pastor says his Jesus-shaped cheese curl is not miraculous, just kind of a cool reminder about seeing God in the world. It could be said that this book is a study of "folk religion," looking into how spirituality affects people's everyday lives in unexpected ways.

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