![]() “I saw it and thought it would be a good idea to light a candle to ol’ Saint Laz, given the situation,” I told her with a smirk. She is a Methodist and has watched my quasi-Catholic relationship with el viejo Lázaro evolve, both personally and academically, over the last few years. When my partner saw the San Lázaro candle, she gave me a puzzled look. I got home a few hours later and started unpacking all the items I had bought. While I searched the aisles for Lysol, I began to think about what it truly means to light a candle and pray to San Lázaro, the patron saint of disease and the poor, during a time when the novel coronavirus assaults the very breath we use to pray. As I looked through the various saints and virgins available, towards the back of the shelf, I found a candle for San Lázaro something inside me told me that it was important to bring home a candle for him. ![]() When news about COVID-19 began to swell and take over media outlets in the United States, my partner and I decided to self-isolate, even though neither the city of Atlanta nor the state of Georgia had issued stay-at-home orders at that time.ĭuring my last outing to procure some extra groceries and other necessities for the house, and a day before we officially began our quarantine, I came across a display of votive prayer candles at my local drug store. Due to his multifaceted identity, devotion to San Lázaro is an intersection of faiths where African and Catholic beliefs converge to form a powerful system of symbols and a symbolic language meaningfully interpreted by his devotees, regardless of religious or cultural background.Īlthough my abuela considers herself a staunch Catholic, her interactions with San Lázaro reveal a different and more complex understanding of the saint-one that strays from doctrinal teachings about saint veneration and more closely resembles the knowhow of African heritage traditions like Lukumí. The San Lázaro popularly worshipped among Cubans, Cuban Americans, and other Latinx peoples is an amalgamation of three religious figures: the resurrected Lazarus of Bethany from the Gospel of John, the poor man Lazarus from the parable in the Gospel of Luke, and the orisha Babalú Ayé. Because she was crafty, Abuela Hilda would also make arrangements of plastic purple flowers, going as far as hot-gluing a string of them to the small concrete San Lázaro altar that guarded her front door. She would buy pieces of purple satin and velvet (purple is the color associated with both San Lázaro and the orisha of disease, Babalú Ayé) and burlap cloth to make the cape, then hand-sew onto it gold embellishments like rhinestones and lace trimming. ![]() As an act of devotion, Abuela Hilda used to make the capes for her San Lázaro statue (her arthritic hands no longer allow her to make any type of craft). It is a belief that her son, my tío Leonel, also maintains. My belief in San Lázaro is a familial tradition, taught to me by my abuela Hilda, my maternal grandmother.
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