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Over the past few days, whenever I’ve passed under the 90/94 overpass on Fullerton, I’ve seen people crowded under the north side of the overpass, in the little accident recovery site. The first time I saw the crowd, I thought there had been a bad accident, so I just tried to move on so as not to cause traffic to back up anymore than usual. After seeing the crowd still there days later, I figured something was up. Saturday night after the Kushal Das/Vishwa Mohan Bhatt concert, I was driving back to the hood with my friend Sarwat, and we passed under the overpass again, and I asked her what was up with the crowd. She said a few weeks ago, someone saw a salt stain on the walls of the viaduct, and said it looks like the Mother Mary. Word slowly got around, and over the past few days people started flooding to the wall, to light candles, leave flowers, and pray in front of the image on the wall. Sunday night I went to Cub Foods to pick up some tomatoes, and since I was passing by I figured I might as well stop to check it out. Sure enough, the salt stain looked a lot like Mother Mary, with her head covered, looking down, with her hands in a prayer position.

That picture only shows a few candles in front of the image, but by the time I had seen it, there were proly 150 candles in front of the image, including a ton of flowers, posters of the pope and Jesus on either side of the image, and a few big flags put up next to her. The police had barricaded a line off, so people could single-file style go up to the image and get a closer look, or pray. There were probably about 50-60 people there when I went, and the tone of the crowd was mixed. It seemed some people for sure believed this was a sign of God “telling us something,” others seemed somewhat confused, trying to figure out if they should believe something spiritual had happened in this viaduct, or if they should discount it as one of thousands of salt stains on the walls of overpasses in Chicago that could resemble anything, if you believed in what you saw.

Either way, the image brought a bunch of people together in a peaceful, warm, unified way. rich people, poor people, deep religious people, people still trying to figure it out, all collected under the overpass to get a glimpse of what “everyone was talking about.” That’s a beautiful thing, and God does things like this everyday, we often just don’t listen. At Fullerton just east of western, people started letting themselves listen. If God is everywhere, and in everything, is all-powerful, all knowing, and exists in all facets of the universe at all times, its no wonder he’d be found manifested in the most random of places. He always is, we just rarely choose to pay attention. It’s a powerful things when so many people recognize God’s magnificence in one place at one time.

Jai Shri Krishna

Insha Allah

May God’s blessings be with you