Sweet Mary

August 19, 2006

If Morbo weren’t out of town today, I’m certain he’d be here making fun of this.

Workers at a chocolate company [in Fountain Valley, Calif.] have discovered a 2-inch-tall column of [tag]chocolate[/tag] drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to traditional depictions of the [tag]Virgin Mary[/tag].

Since the discovery of the drippings under a vat on Monday, employees of Bodega Chocolates have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it.

“I was raised to believe in the Virgin [tag]Mary[/tag], but this still gives me the chills,” company co-owner Martucci Angiano said as she balanced the dark brown figure in her hand during an interview Thursday. “Everyone should see this.”

Apparently, a kitchen worker came in to clean up drippings that had accumulated under a large vat of dark chocolate on Monday when she noticed this blob. She said she picked it up and, “I felt emotion just come over me. For me, it was a sign.” The woman added that she’d been considering giving up her faith, but the chocolate has given her “renewed faith.” (CNN has a picture of the blob in question)

I’ve heard of people worshiping chocolate, but this is ridiculous.

The one thing that’s always struck me as odd in seeing religious imagery in trees, warped glass, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and chocolate blobs is that they’re depictions of depictions. No one knows what Mary looked like, of course, but people have seen artists’ renderings of what they imagined she looked like.

With this in mind, are these “signs” from God or signs from 16th century painters?

For that matter, if Mary, or Jesus, or whomever, really wanted to offer believers a sign, couldn’t they come up with a slightly less oblique method? And if it is a sign, what is it a sign of? That we’re supposed to eat more chocolate? Or less?

Ave Chocolate Blob, gratia plena Dominus tecum; Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.

  • It’s all beautiful, just beautiful beause I feel the same way each time I eat a plate of spaghetti as it reaffirms my faith in the Flying Spaghetti monster.

    This is the kind of story that gives atheists (and the more sensible believers) fits. It is one thing to believe (regardless of what I think which isnt’ much) but to proclaim that it manifests itself in random droppings of chocolate? What if the droppings looked Satan?

    Almost as bad as the Face on Mars.

    Not being up on my ten commandments, isn’t there one about worshiping false idols?

  • “Not being up on my ten commandments, isn’t there one about worshiping false idols?”

    If that one was on the “enforcement list,” the followers of a here-unnamed Christian sect would be in biiiiiiiiiiiig troule.

  • It kinda looks like an owl to me.

    This new film delves deeply into the history of the [Bohemian] Grove where powerful men make decisions that affect the world but are completely hidden from public scrutiny. The Order of Death details how the Grove has been the backdrop for some of the most earthshattering events in human history including the development of the Starwars program and the Manhattan Project.

    Jones’ newest forray into revealing the occult also had him butting heads with local protesters of the Grove who, like the owl-worshippersinside, try to conceal their own occult practices.

  • Silly yes, but I wouldn’t begrduge the troubled girl her illusions. Bush’s religious illusions cost lives, hers has brightened up her life for a little while. I’d say half the things in our lives that we believe, are illusions to some extent, even political beliefs.

    And then on other days I just rage against religion. 🙂

  • Good lord, if this is the Virgin Mary, think what Adam must have looked like! Sculpture is not one of God’s strong points, evidently.

    I go with the rege’s bird interpretation.

  • Gosh—I saw that exact image outside my livingroom window the other night. It was perched in a tree, looking to its right (to my left)—and then, it swooped down and snatched a fieldmouse.

    And I thought these things were called ‘Peregrin Falcons.” So if the mother of the Nazarene Carpenter was a Peregrin Falcon, then what was his paternal heritage? Maltese? Does this mean that the Christian church has been worshipping the image of Humphrey Bogart?

    Shame on you people. You know full well that God is really a 6-foot-tall rabbit—named “Harvey….”

  • Considering that we are all walking on our hands with Dick Cheney’s gnarly hand stuffed in our arses, yanking our organs out to sell for Halliburton – all while we rain misery and destruction on far off lands and put the petal to the metal in our race to render the planet itself uninhabitable, it’s nice to see that we can take a moment to relish in the sort of behavior that poor sap who got nailed to a stick warned us against.

    In fact, I’m anxious to try it myself. On the one hand you have relatively poor people working low paying jobs finding some spiritual rejunivation with a simple side effect of the physical world, right in their daily life. These simpletons don’t recreate right! The spend evenings at things like Novenas and volunteer for ministries that administer to the sick and poor.

    On the other hand, you’ve got smart, relatively affluent folks who spend every waking moment doing the modern, high tech equivelent of pack animal behavior – that is, each spends huge amounts of time sniffing the alpha creature’s ass and licking its genitalia – all to improve pack status. The reward, of course, is that for a week or two each year, they have enough money to zoom off to some exotic local – where they will find spiritual rejuvination in a rock formation, sunset, or some other simple side effect of the physical world.

    I’d say you’re all the same. One side mocks the other’s simple faith. The other mocks the shallow, materialistic existance. The one difference would be that Christians worship a God who told them not to feel morally superior – a lesson lost on TV Evangelists and other douchbags who seem to have found (for them) the best of both worlds – exploiting simple faith for a shallow, materialistic existance…

    -jjf

  • sorry for dragging down the level of discourse here, but i double, no i triple dare anyone of these deluded morons to publicise the image of whichever deity they ‘see’ if they dare examine their turds closely.

    when i lived in Germany, their toiletbowls have a handy shelf-like thingy, so all expulsions can be examined. i actually saw the preznit once or twice.

  • CB, your heading should have read “Grilled Cheese Redux”.

    Great marketing campaign. Create a chocolate Mary, stick it where your Spanish employee will find it and bingo, you are in business. Not a crack on Spaniards, but they are always the ones finding this stuff.

  • Hispanics (i.e. Spanish-speaking), not Spaniards; the latter means from Spain, whereas these workers are almost certainly from Mexico or Central America.

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