Tuesday, December 26, 2000

Rock of ages worth a glance
By Bill Whitaker

Turning over rocks in dried-up riverbeds isn’t ordinarily the way to encounter divine revelations.

Then again, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Such ways have been the talk of the town for several months in windswept Knox County, ever since

9-year-old Bianca Fernandez picked up a particularly eye-catching rock during a family summer outing on the banks of the Nueces River near Camp Wood in the Hill Country.

On the face of that rock was what family members believe is an image of the Virgin Mary, along with the face of Jesus, the silver chalice and a dove. The family says there was also a cross on the rock, though that seems to be disappearing.

“It was in a pile of rocks,” Bianca said. “It looked like somebody was praying on this one rock. So I pulled it out and showed it to my dad. He said it looked like the Virgin Mary.”

Since then, Bianca and the rest of 52-year-old Felix Fernandez’s rock-collecting clan have been besieged with requests to view the rock as well as questions about its divinity. After all, upon close examination, the weaving lines do seem to paint the image of Mary, Mother of God.

Of course, there are those who scoff and doubt. But if the Virgin Mary’s divine likeness can show up in office-building windows and various baked goods, why not a true rock of ages?

“To us, it’s something that God sent,” Bianca’s mom, Janie Fernandez, told me at her home in Munday. “We take it everywhere with us now. We take it to the hospitals and churches, just to show people. It’s something we want to share.”

Aside from a woman who’d suffered a miscarriage earlier and said the rock immediately made her feel better, no reports of miraculous cures have been reported. But the Fernandez clan was still invited to bring the seemingly blessed rock to a Christmas Eve service in a neighboring town.

Meanwhile, rock hounds admit the Virgin Mary rock has certain unique qualities.

“Looks like a piece of quartz,” said rock-collecting Abilene geologist John R. Thompson, who examined the Fernandez find at the request of the Reporter-News. “It’s probably conglomerated limestone that sat there in chalk, and then calcite kind of bonded it all together.

“But this one is especially unusual in that it’s so curvy in its designs,” he said of the rock, which he guesses is 200 million years old.

Felix Fernandez, who does detail work at Anson’s Lawrence Hall Chevrolet, and Janie, a 49-year-old homemaker, say they knew their daughter had found something remarkable when she came upon the Virgin Mary’s likeness in the drought-ravaged Nueces.

“When Bianca yelled, we ran over right away,” Janie recalled. “We thought maybe a spider had gotten her.”

Efforts to learn more about their daughter’s find quickly attracted attention back home, such as when they took the 3-pound, 9-ounce rock to the hospital in nearby Seymour to have it properly weighed. Two Baptist preachers have even encouraged them to show the rock off.

“We feel the rock is blessed,” Janie said. “Now, some people believe it and some people don’t. But there’s a passage in the Bible that says if we don’t obey and believe in God, the rocks will cry out. And, well, nobody could’ve painted a rock like this.”

Randy Gressett, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Munday, says the Fernandez family has shown him the rock. He agrees it’s quite remarkable in appearance.

But that’s as far as he’s willing to go.

The rock’s striking imagery, especially evident upon inspection, is a “concidence that’s at least interesting,” he conceded. “But I certainly wouldn’t suggest there’s anything more blessed about it than any other rock you might find along the road.”

Janie understands the doubts. The family has done some wondering about the rock themselves, though they ultimately view it with more faith than others have shown. Either way, it’s a prized possession they vow they’ll never sell — and, out of deference to Mary, will never charge to see.

If nothing else, it certainly tops some of the other rocks the Fernandez family has collected. Up till now, the most remarkable find they had come upon was a rock with the likeness of — hold on to your hat — Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.