The Rapture Is Not Today (Update)

It's no longer worthy of comment when Jesus turns up on a tortilla, Lent having settled upon the land and things apparently being slow even down in New Mexico. Here's the latest apparition of El Salvador en las Tortillas:

"David Sandoval of Espanola, [NM] said he was shocked to discover the face of Jesus on his food, but he has always been a believer in Christianity." Even more so now - after all, seeing what you want to is believing what you want to. Apparently Jesus was the only person in the world ever to have a beard and an air of general unkemptness. The scriptures tell us that he was not comely to look upon, and there's nothing quite so unprepossessing in aspect as your average tortilla, but I'm guessing that's about as far as you can take that.

So it's understandable that I might be suspicious about the ease and frequency with which this occurs anymore, having already commented on the phenomenon before now. It raises certain questions in the skeptical mind. 

For starters, why does the the face of Grover Norquist never appear on a tortilla? Or more to the point, the Prophet Mohammed never appears on a pita. It doesn't suffice to cite theological considerations - the Islamic proscription against depictions of the Prophet - since a pita doesn't know a fatwa from finnan haddie. Contrariwise, it's only natural that Jesus' portrait would pop up in the dough now and then, the Christian tradition filled as it is with Christ's portraiture, whether a 17th-century Flemish Christ all pastey white and sulky . . .

. . . or a well-coiffed, blue-eyed emblem of sound American enterprise:

Granted, the Islamic tradition was never rent like Christendom by warring factions of Transubstantiationists versus Consubstantiationists, trying the question whether mere bread can become flesh in essentia or only stand in for it by an act of divine allowance. Whatever side one might embrace on that thorny issue, it can't escape notice that the guy on the tortilla doesn't really resemble most common depictions of the Savior. In fact, Tortilla Jesus more closely channels the dementia of Dennis Miller . . .

. . . or the sangfroid of the World's Most Interesting Man . . .

. . . than he resembles Christos Pancrator or Salvator Mundi. Maybe it's just some crazy Jewish guy who keeps turning up on Mexican baked goods, sent to tempt the faithful and ensnare the credulous in the Allen Ginsburg Cafe of Disembodied Foodstuffs. . . 

After all, you don't have to love Jesus to love Mexican food. But for all we know, it's not even a man.

 Nice girls have beards sometimes.

Come to that, it could be my own alter ego whose benign countenance flits across a flat expanse of comestible every now and again in some specially blest oven when the planets are aligned and the stars are favorable. In other words, the Face on the Tortilla really is the World's Most Interesting Man.That being the case, the Rapture is not today.

Update: (May 31, 2012) - A family in Splendora, TX claims they have a holy vision inside their home, an image of Jesus created by mold in a bathroom. Read all about it.