Ripples

Amazon had a sale on Grateful Dead MP3s recently, so I picked up a best-of.  I'm not a huge fan, and never have been, but I like them well enough, and - more to the point - I hang out with enough musicians that eventually, someone is going to ask me to sing "Uncle John's Band" while they jam out. It's kind of like "Hey Jude" that way - everyone knows it, no matter what their normal musical style is.

On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine.  (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed.  Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.)  It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements.  The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents.  It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense).  I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.

I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs.  This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them.  I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god.  And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.

But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that.  My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God.  She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer.  At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her.  And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would.  So - fair enough.  There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.

So what happens?  They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.

*facepalm*  Talk about your ungrateful dead!

But then, why should they be any different in death than in life?  And, at least they turned up.  And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed).  And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).