The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

The Faces of Christ

I sat in the audience, once, while a professor explained the ShroudofTurintoahundredseniorcitizens.Hehadslidesand sources. He waved a wand of light to trace the face of Jesus in case someone didn’t see it. “Look,” he said, “the eyes, the curve of lips exactly the same as in the pictures you know of Christ.” He ran overtime with the possibilities of belief. Except for the professor and me, there wasn’t a person in the room under sixty, and I was betting myself that very few of them would stay for the secondhalfoftheprogram,apoetryreadingIwasgivingtopublicize my latest book, Inventing Angels. That week a patient had discovered the face of Christ in the grain of a hospital door, and the citizens of a nearby town had witnessed Jesus on the side of their municipal water tower. People gathered, some of them joyful, some of them apprehensive about the inevitable skeptics. Those aren’t the only sightings. Certainly, they’re not the oddest. For instance, Mrs. Edward Rubio, in 1979, in NewMexico,discoveredthefaceofChrist seared into a burrito she was cooking for her husband. She enshrined it in a room in her house—flowers, votive candles—and worshippers and the simply curious came from all over to look long and hard at that burrito. If my parents had lived in New Mexico then, they would have come to see that miracle on any day but a Sunday, something that explains why the first movie I ever saw on a Sunday was El Cid. I was nearly sixteen years old. My friends were going, and some of them had convinced me this was a movie not to be missed. My mother, when the car pulled into the driveway, told me she was disappointed; my father refused to speak to me. I was uncertain then, and still am, about the logic of such belief. All the way until her death, I had always understood my grandmother’s disapproval. She refrained from card playing and restaurants as well as movies on Sundays, but my parents played CanastawithoutacareandateouteveryotherSundayafterchurch. They had no difficulty watching television, which showed films of The Faces of Christ 72 ■ g o d its own to their approval, so I’m left with the image of Charlton Heston as the dying Cid propped on his horse to lead his inspired men to victory, and the sense that I took one step closer to damnation because I sat in a Pittsburgh theater on a Sunday afternoon. Our family, in the years preceding my defiance, went regularly to the movies on Saturday night. There’s hardly a film from the 1950s I don’t vaguely or vividly recall. We saw whatever films happened to be showing in Butler or East Liberty, depending on whether we went north or south. If there was a choice, my parents opted for biblical epics, costume dramas, Westerns, musicals, or comedies. What I missed, I’ve discovered, were B-movie thrillers and film-noir dramas. If I saw them at all, I saw them on Friday nights with my Great Uncle Bill, who didn’t even know what was playing at the Etna Theater, except it was Friday and seven P.M., so off we went, walking in mid-feature or near its end—no matter, because we just waited it out to watch until the story returned to the point where we’d come in. For years, I thought this was how everyone went to the movies, knowing the endings before the beginnings. For El Cid, my friends and I were seated during a set of previews. I didn’t know about the Cid’s heroics until the final fifteen minutes. Certainly, I didn’t know there were film critics, production budgets, or films in foreign languages, but I knew movies on Sundays were sinful, and I knew a film that showed the face of Christ was blasphemous. After the first one we saw of these, my father had had enough. He started reading about movies to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. ThemoviethatchangedourviewinghabitswascalledDayofTriumph.Forthe first time, the actor playing Jesus turned to face us, instead of looking at crowds of disciples and followers who gazed at him in awe while we stared at his back andflowinghair.Theactor’snamewasRobertWilson.Itwas1954,butitwasthe first crucifixion-and-resurrection film since Cecil B. DeMille had made a silent in 1927, so my parents had sought this one out, not knowing that Jesus, played by an actor who looked old enough to be...