The Ultimate Votive

These were never part of my Catholic upbringing, probably because my family wasn't sufficiently Spanish, but when I saw this in the bathroom of a party I was at in July, 2010, I knew that I needed at least one. Granted, the teachings of Catholicism are painfully outdated at best, but the pageantry and artifacts of the religion can be beautiful and fun. My friends told me to poke around my grocery stores to find them, but I live in Berkeley and go to hippie Berkeley grocery stores, so I didn't think I'd find them there.

Actually, I never looked for candles a those stores, but one afternoon that fall, I went to a Safeway in Oakland to get groceries and see if they had these candles. I found two, one with Jesus, and the one I got, with St. Jude. I couldn't get the Jesus candle, because it didn't exactly scream "Catholic" the same way that any saint candle would. An added bonus to these candles is that they all come with prayers on the back, in Spanish, then English. Over the next few weeks, whenever I lit the candle with friends, we would recite the prayer for fun.

Having been an atheist for now nearly half my life, I have absolutely no idea what it must feel like to say something, light a candle, and assume that something or someone can actually hear me. I've had experiences that could be considered religious, like the time I "found inner peace" on a cross-Atlantic flight after some significant sensory deprevation, but I've never heard voices or felt presences. Not that I am lamenting my lack of mild schizophrenia. My approach to solving my problems involves things like talking to real people about how to realistically solve them.

Of course, a pretty candle is a pretty candle, and I have been determined to build a respectable votive collection. So in the following months, I found the ultimate in Mexican Catholocism, the Our Lady of Guadaloupe candle. That was when I allowed myself to buy a Jesus candle, but I decided to go for the gory angle.

But today, after taking Steve with me on my weekend morning walk, we stopped at the corner store to mainly get some B&J, but browsed through the store too. We saw the votives section, and found the goriest, creepiest votive, that I obviously had to buy. The prayer on the back is more or less a prayer to exact revenge on someone. It seems like some kind of fusion between Catholicism, Aztec death stuff (a la Day of the Dead), and maybe a bit of voodoo. So, I present the Zombie Votive.