Jesus Christ: Messiah. Son of God. Bathroom Attendant?

From the May 26 Galveston County, Texas Daily News:

GALVESTON — Eight months after being displaced by Hurricane Ike, Tracy Ward found hope in a most peculiar place.

She asks her guests to sit on the toilet facing the wall tile above the bathtub.

“Do you see him?” she saked. [sic]

“Him” means Jesus Christ. She points at spots on a centerpiece of tile.

“There, you can see his beard, and a cave behind him. If you close your eyes and reopen them, you can see people walking up behind him.”

Ward’s eyes light up joyfully.

“Chances are, it could be that there’s something I’m supposed to heed,” Ward, a Baptist, said. “I try to stay good.”

…“Maybe we are being told something, and maybe we aren’t listening to it,” she said. “I’m hoping to share this blessing with everyone.

“I’ve always been a helpful person. Now, it’s more like ‘you can take my last 50 cents.’”

I know you must be shocked by this because I certainly was: Galveston has a newspaper. This implies that the city has at least a partially literate population. Who would have thought?

Ah yes, the old Jesus-appeared-to-me-while-I-was-on-the-toilet mode of divine intervention. We’ve all been there. One morning, after a wake-and-bake session, you eat seven or eight pancakes for breakfast while washing them down with Wild Turkey when all of a sudden Jesus beckons from the shitter. There, in the privacy of your bathroom, Christ reveals himself in a tile just above your soap-dish. Hallelujah.

Is this woman for real? I hope not, but I fear so. Instead of seeing the “apparition” for what it is—an utterly insignificant happenstance novelty—this lady is taking it 100 percent seriously. My favorite quote from the article: “Chances are, it could be that there’s something I’m supposed to heed.” Yeah, like how about, clean your fucking bathroom. Get some Windex and a rag and wipe that Mildew Messiah off the wall.

The really frightening part is that she is only one of thousands of Americans who have claimed to have found Jesus, literally. In a bathroom, in a window pane, in a grilled cheese sandwich, and other places no sane god would reveal himself in. This readiness to believe in the divine significance of fluke shapes in everyday objects surely qualifies as a mental disorder. It’s bad enough this woman thought she found Jesus while dropping a deuce, but it’s worse that she agreed to be interviewed about it. Clearly this woman and those like her are not well.

What this indicates to me is that subconsciously, some of these yahoos know that the Second Coming isn’t happening in their lifetimes, or ever. As a result, when chance proffers odd, vaguely anthropomorphic-looking images in commonplace objects, these ecclesiastical whackjobs create their own Second Coming by seeing Jesus in anything that their imaginations will allow—a mildly subtle way of saying, “Christ is everywhere.” Indeed he could be if only we had enough bathrooms.

-Max