Face of Jesus
Buried in Guatemala
I have heard it said that if you want to be creative play with children, who are naturally creative. For a while today I was left in the living room with my three grandchildren, three of their cousins and about 5 Muppet puppets, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Animal, a bear and dog. After a few minutes of playing around we developed a Muppet Idol contest. Three of the children became the idol judges and the rest sang songs from behind the couch in the character of their Muppet. Following the Idol script the judges praised all the performances of the Muppets and sent them “on to Hollywood.” We went on to the second round where one of the cousins automatically became very quiet in singing his song for his Muppet. The three judges noted this but his excuse was that he had ‘stage fright’. About this time adults came filtering into the living room and slowly children lost interest in this game. We went on to the egg hunt outside where adults had provided lots of plastic eggs with candy and money inside.
In between the food, conversation and the play of 22 children and adults over for Easter, my 10 year old grandson and I managed to finish watching the rest of the video on the The Real Face of Jesus. The face extrapolated by computers from the Shroud of Turin was of one bloodied by torture yet it had a certainly dignity about it. One could only imagine the beauty and innocent of that person as a child.
Looking for a picture of a child to reflect the face of Jesus I recalled a picture of a child I took on Good Friday in Guatemala a few years ago. I had been watching the stations of the cross with her and her family when, after the stations passed over one of the street decorations, street carpets, made of fruit, vegetables and flowers, the children in our group all ran up the block. I wondered what was happening but when the children came back with fruits and vegetables I knew what had just happened. After the procession passed over an alfombra (street carpet) the children were allowed to take the fruit and vegetables. As I described in Buried in Guatemala. “The parents and all of the family were overjoyed with the bounty brought back by the children. The parents and elders stuffed some of the vegetables and fruit in bags they had brought with them and the children were allowed to eat pieces of watermelon and other fruit.” One of the girls showed me the pineapple she had snatched from the street carpet and was overjoyed. This is the face of Jesus, the face of this child.
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