Even secondhand stories will do, which is why I took so much pleasure from Robert Hudson’s “ Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present.” Images of Jesus are all around us, but Hudson’s book is about people who claim to have really seen Jesus, the way the disciples did in the days and years after his death-crucifixion wounds fresh, descending and ascending from heaven onto hilltops, blinding rays of lights all about him: the sort of psychologically upending seeing we do in our lives from time to time, as when we see our ex-husband and go ashen, or see our future wife and blush. I cherish such stories, and collect them the way others do rare works of art or first editions or vintage cars. A father who was dying of lung cancer confided that he had looked up at a crucifix years ago in a church and watched as the body hanging there writhed and wriggled, coming alive before his eyes it had been so terrifying that he had never previously told anyone. An older woman told me that Christ had appeared to her in the afternoon light that poured through her hospital window. A young man once told me that he had seen the face of Jesus in the trunk of a chestnut tree, the bark moving as if it were flesh.
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