Jesus Christ is everywhere during Holy Week, but one Orlando woman thought she was going crazy when she saw his image in the bark of a dead tree in her front yard.
“It’s Treesus,” the homeowner, Kim, said on the eve of Resurrection Sunday. “I find it very odd. For me, it’s unmistakable, and I’m not particularly religious. So I don’t know what it means.”
The Orlando Sentinel agreed to withhold her full name and address because she fears her home would turn into a mecca of pilgrims wanting to see the image.
Here the face of Jesus manifests as a stain on a bathroom wall.
Grilled cheese sandwich, actually this one is the Virgin Mary I think.
There are no photos of Jesus (okay maybe the Shroud of Turin) and nobody painted him. So how did we determine that he looks like the guy on the Kit Kat chocolate bar?
Potato chip
The image seems to materialize in hot places
Pizza slice
Why? Why would the Lord and Saviour, King of Kings, put his face on a bloody banana? He might only convert 2 or 3 people with this stunt. He should manifest on a giant billboard in Times Square.
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.
There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes, especially the faces of religious figures, in ordinary phenomena. Many involve images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the word Allah, or other religious phenomena: in September 2007 in Singapore, for example, a callus on a tree resembled a monkey, leading believers to pay homage to the “Monkey god” (either Sun Wukong or Hanuman) in the monkey tree phenomenon.
Carl Sagan hypothesized that as a survival technique, human beings are “hard-wired” from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being face.
Oh wow Jesus, this is really going to help people quite smoking.
And then there are people nowadays who will never notice Jesus.