alanajoli | Candles, Jingle Dresses, Kites, and Prayers

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how I used to go to St. Teresa's (the Cathedral of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, MI) every so often to light candles. The had a lovely little chapel off to one side where you could go and sit in the warm glow of prayers. I always liked the idea that when you said a prayer over a candle, your prayer would become embedded in the wax, and even after you left, the candle continued saying your prayer until its wick burned out.

I suspect that I got the idea of continual prayer from the story of the jingle dress, which I learned while I was working on Isabella Reservation in Mt. Pleasant. The story goes that the first jingle dress dancers were healers. They would take each small, round piece of tin that they stitched to their cloth and pray healing prayers over it while they sewed. Then each time those pieces of ting jingled while the dancer wore that dress, those prayers were getting sent back up to the target of those original healing prayers. It didn't matter who the original speaker was--the jingles contained the prayer and the power to heal once they began making sounds.

A friend of mine developed a similar idea about kites for a D&D character he never got to play. I really hope that someday we get to see that character in action, as the spiritual kite maker is practically a magical idea all on its own.