doing as the roman catholics do.

i'm jewish, but besides the seemingly all-night party that was my bat mitzvah, the extent of my religious devotion as a child was jealously eyeing the burger king milkshakes kids brought into hebrew school on tuesday afternoons and devouring the stacks of yellowing equine affair magazines that sandra, my hebrew tutor, kept in her living room.

even though my apartment is in the ancient jewish quarter of the city, there are pretty much zero jews here today. instead, it's catholic fever all the time. which i can live with.
because secretly, i've always been fascinated by catholicism. when i was younger it reminded me of gold and silk and the smell of candles burning. while i was content with the progressive, tolerant sect of my own reform judaism, catholicism had something that we didn't, and that was a little cookie you were allowed to eat during the service. i was sold.

as you can probably imagine, italians take their cookies, and their faith, pretty seriously. yesterday was the last day of the festival of st. agatha in catania, so a few friends and i took the bus up in the morning. last time in catania was two weeks ago. i feel like i've changed so much: i mean, it was only a mere two weeks ago that i was under the impression that wearing a money belt (and thus sticking your hands down the front of your pants every time you get hungry..what..) was necessary/cool. and the city had changed too: what was almost desolate now had the appearance that it had been thrown up on by a maroon-swathed elephant with an affinity for nutella (agatha's color is maroon, and for some reason catania is full of pictures of elephants. oh, and lots of nutella crepe stands. hell. yes.). it was crazy.

we spent much of the morning weaving in and out of children dressed as clowns and fairies and priests (the most popular choice), ducking in and out of amazing churches, eating candy apples, you know, regular catholic stuff. right? hundreds of vendors in the streets were selling candy, sugared peanuts, gelato, and these huge yellow candles. the point was that during the procession of st. agatha, everyone lights yellow candles, of varying sizes. if you're praying for someone who weighs 80 kilo, you carry a candle that weighs 80 kilo. and yes, they exist. which is ridiculous.

anyone can buy and light a candle, but the people in the procession were a bunch of guys (and some girls) who looked my age or younger, dressed in white robe-like things and black hats, and wearing agatha pins. i couldn't really figure out where these guys came from, but they were so interesting to kind of...how shall i put this...stare at. as it got closer to 5, when the procession was supposed to start (though we ended up kind of chilling till 6) a guy would yell out a prayer in italian every few seconds. it was kind of intense, because they were screaming so loud their voices were hoarse. so.

anyway, i got the smallest-sized candle available, which was still about 4 feet tall, and lit it for my friend spencer, who passed away three years ago this month. even though i wasn't in the procession and even though spencer definitely weighed more than half a kilo, i don't think agatha would have minded. it was so amazing to stand in a street with thousands of candles, just as the sun was setting, and realize where exactly i was, how lucky i was to be there.

besides guys carrying huge candles on their shoulders and waving around fire and dripping wax on spectators and screaming in italian, the rest of the procession was made up of five or six massive floats. these were carried from the church of st. agatha by six massive men apiece, lined up in the road, and promptly returned to the church at the end of the procession. which...didn't really make sense. but all in the name of sainthood, si?

anyway, the guys who were carrying the floats were really struggling. they wore these cap-like things which were attached to beams, which essentially meant that much of the weight was on their heads. also it should be noted that these guys allegedly pay the mafia x amount of money in order to keep their jobs as float-bearers from one year to the next. ......yeah.

so the procession started off with a massive fireworks show which made tanglewood look kind of sad (oops) and then...very....very....very...slowly, the procession began. damn, italians take their time. i was standing near the end of the procession, and it took a full 20 minutes before the candle-bearers around me started inching forward. we had a bus to catch at 7:30, and even though the parade allegedly started at 5, we ended up barely making it. so this was a long procession, you might say.

but it was amazing. i watched these people and their intense devotion to something--anything, really--and i felt a faint pull in my chest that might have been the arm of god that i imagined there when i was little, and my cantor told me a piece of god was in everyone. okay, that was weird and probably unnecessary but that's what i thought. anyway, lesson learned: catholics are intensely devoted but also wicked fascinating, and they always dress/decorate well. and they like nutella.