Take a close look at the picture to the right—click it for a bigger version—what do you see in it? If you’re 84-year-old Antonia “Toni” Filipertis then what you see is an image of Jesus’ mother. Toni does one better than the last grandmother we talked about who saw images of the Virgin Mary in a random object by claiming not only three different pictures on her tree, but that she received instructions directly from the Virgin Mary on how to find them:

Toni Filipertis began crying twice when she recalled the vision and Mary’s instructions. She was about to get the car out of the garage in order to take her daughter to a doctor’s appointment Tuesday when she heard a voice behind her.

“The voice, she told me to look on your tree,” she related in a Polish accent. “I come out and parked the car in the front and I look on the tree and I don’t see nothing.”

Filipertis said that Mary’s voice was very soft. “She said, ‘Look at your tree. I’m in three places,’ and she was in three places .... And I look in this branch and she was very clear.”

Three stubs of three branches had pictures on them.

Now I don’t know about you, but the only thing I see suggested in that picture is some sort of bodily orifice in a sad state of repair. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which bodily orifice I’m thinking of and just what might be wrong with it as it’s much worse if your imagination is allowed to run rampant with that sort of info. What I don’t see is anything resembling the Virgin Mary. The friggin’ turtle I mentioned in an earlier entry looked more like Jesus’ mom than that tree stub does. What is it with old people and seeing the Virgin Mary?

Anyway, it turns out the VM was saving the best part for last:

“Last night, she (Mary) told me, because I am sick, I don’t have to go outside. She wants me and look through my window and pray to her. I look through the window. She was so beautiful.”

“She had a white vale and blue dress and she looked so beautiful,” she added as she began to cry.

Imagine that. In addition to showing up in three different places on her tree the Virgin Mary then decided to put in a personal appearance just for Toni! She must not have a lot to do up there in Heaven or something. Not that Toni is the only one in her family to be blessed with hallucinations visions of this sort:

It is the second time members of the family have seen a vision. Twins James Filipertis and Dorothy (Filipertis) Fitzgerald saw the Holy Family — Mary, Joseph and Jesus — in the sky on a clear night in 1960 when they were 7 years old. They were with their grandmother.

“I believe my mother,” said Jim, who is retired from Delphi. “I’ve had to live with this my entire lifetime. I have to believe. When I was 7, I saw the apparition. It was a clear night with stars. Figures were moving in front of the moon. It was Mary, Joseph and Jesus. My sister and I swear by it.”

Dorothy Fitzgerald remembers seeing the vision with her brother and grandmother. “We saw Jesus up in the sky. We thought it would come back. Now it’s out on a tree. We saw the whole thing up in the sky. It was gorgeous.”

You don’t suppose the fact that James and Dorothy were 7-years-old at the time might have had anything to do with their ability to see Jesus and his mom and step-dad flying around near the moon, would you? I mean I can clearly recall once seeing Santa’s reindeer and sleigh in the sky when I was only seven and there wasn’t anything you could’ve told me at the time that would’ve convinced me otherwise. That had nothing to do with me desperately wanting to see Santa in the sky, right? Of course not. Because Santa is real, isn’t he? Just as real as Jesus and the Virgin Mary.