Be My Friend

Sometimes, these Madonna of the Toast images really grab your attention because the resemblance to an iconic face is quite striking. Other times the images are mind boggling because they resemble nothing at all, no matter how much you squint. Such is the case with this Virgin Mary agate. According to this Northland’s News Center report, Jesse Bradshaw, a devoted agate hunter, found this beauty in Northern Minnesota, though months passed before he identified the holy form.

In Bradshaw’s words: "Right here you see a face and a shadow of her eye and a nose and a mouth and a hood around her head there. . . I was kinda having a struggle and I woke up one morning and she was sitting on top of my other agates and staring me right in the face and I knew right away what it represented and I got so emotional; I just wanted to cry right away."

I see something that looks more like an extoskeletal alien. But maybe that’s just me. Bradshaw, however, is convinced that his discovery has blessed him, filling him with positive energy. Offers to purchase the agate have been made but Bradshaw won’t have any of it: “[T]he feeling it's given me is just incredible.”

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the second divine agate of the year. The first one hailed from Montana and possessed, to these well-trained eyes, a better semblance of the Mary. But hey, who am I to chide one’s happiness?

In other news, Madonna of the Toast is now on Facebook! Want to be my friend?

Roof Cross

This story from Rochester, Minnesota, as reported by KTTC, is slightly confusing in terms of details, though they all revolve around Rob Lloyd’s sick mother and the image of a cross on a house’s roof. Lloyd’s mother was admitted to a room on the sixth floor of Saint Mary’s Hospital for a throat infection that has rendered her unable to speak. Lloyd flew from Oregon to Minnesota to visit his mom, thinking about family, life and death. The article insinuates that Lloyd has made the decision to move back home to be close to his family; it also suggests that he needed to buy a house and from his mother’s room he spotted this roof, "And seeing that frosted cross, it just spoke to me." Adding to the sway of unexpected sights and happenstance, it also turns out that Lloyd’s aunt was also in the hospital, on a different floor, unbeknownst to the family.

As I mentioned a few post ago, details seem to matter less and less when it comes to these stories. People just want to know that these images appear, providing them with the ability to soldier through whatever challenges they must confront.

But there it is, a cross. Worth noting that for all of the Jesus and Virgin Mary images that have sprouted up since I got into the Madonna of the Toast project, this is only the second sighting of a cross (here's the first), which is surprising since it is a common shape. Goes to show you that what we see has plenty to do with what’s going on in our lives.

Nick Cave must have been considering higher powers and the unknown when he penned the song “The Mercy Seat.” I’ve been a fan of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for a while, especially the album Tender Prey. It was only today, however, listening through headphones that I noticed these lyrics:

I began to warm and chill
To objects and their fields,
A ragged cup, a twisted mop
The face of Jesus in my soup

Short of asking Rob Lloyd what he was thinking about when he spotted the cross, we can’t really know what was on his mind, but whatever it was, it drew his attention to this image that carries an incredible amount of significance for many, many people. Same is true for Nick Cave’s lyrics, though it seems safe to speculate that he was wrestling with how to react to his surroundings.

As for me, I knew I was going to chime in on here today, and voila!

Here’s a video of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performing “The Mercy Seat.”