A Kludge for the Holy Souls

Good luck finding a real candle around these parts, much less an unbleached beeswax one. (We use the kind--oh horror!--you unscrew and fill up.) For my own use in my room I've been working on a case of paraffin votives that I blessed all the way back on Candlemas 2008.

But today for my day off I was doing some errands when I decided to stop and pray at a local Orthodox chapel. You can trust the Orthodox to do candles right, so as I put my beeswax taper into the candelabrum around the Blessed Mother, to be lit during the next prayer or Divine Liturgy, I began to think. During this month of November, wouldn't it be nice to have such unbleached beeswax goodness to offer before my own little shrine to the departed? I presume that when you make an offering for a candle in church, you don't have to burn the candle on site, but are free to take it with you. And that's just what I did, making another offering and taking two more candles home with me.

Trouble is, how do you get this



Into one of these?



Well, borrowing a few of the pellets we use to surround charcoals in our incense brazier, I stood the taper up in the votive candle stand:



And here it is: my kludged up shrine to the deceased friars, complete with unbleached beeswax candle for the rest of November:



Perhaps I should start a Catholic version of one of my favorite non-religious blogs, There, I Fixed It.