House-fire Madonna hits eBay

No doubt there are some Mainers out there who consider Veronica Dennis as a sell-out, now that she’s gone against her word by putting that sooty image of the Virgin Mary up for bid on the Internet’s biggest auction site.

True believers will recall when Dennis professed last winter that the Madonna outline that appeared on her kitchen wall after a fire at her home in Mexico, near Rumford, was nothing less than a divinely inspired message meant to comfort her during a time of personal hardship.

They’ll remember, too, when Dennis insisted to the international press that she had no intention of trying to make a pile of money off the image.

“It’s not my intention to put it on eBay,” she said at the time.

But now that she’s done just that, at a starting bid of $2,500, perhaps her critics should consider cutting her a break. According to a recent Associated Press story, Dennis changed her mind about hawking her house-fire Madonna because she’s been out of work for three months and desperately needs money to pay her bills.

And if unexpected images of this kind really are capable of producing miracles, as many deeply religious folks seem to believe, then maybe a simple soot-smeared piece of wall with the potential to lift Dennis out of financial difficulty somehow meets the criteria.

Yet her eBay posting, which described the smoky apparition as having made “national and international news,” didn’t get a single bid before the deadline expired last Sunday, which could speak to Dennis’ lack of experience in such matters.

With similar holy images popping up so regularly these days – on the window of a Boston hospital, in a road-salt stain on the wall of a Chicago expressway underpass, on a grilled-cheese sandwich that sold for $28,000 on eBay, to name just a celebrated few – it would appear that timing is critical for anyone who wishes to hit pay dirt in this strange new iconography market.

Sadly for Dennis, who’s thinking of posting the image on eBay again, the window of opportunity for her once-famous Virgin Mary may already have closed. For even as the Madonna of Mexico was awaiting an opening bid last week, along came word that the Virgin Mary had been spotted again – this time on a 2-inch blob of chocolate, believe it or not, that has attracted hundreds of onlookers and media attention from around the world.

The sacred confection was discovered by an employee of a gourmet candy shop in California when she arrived at work one recent morning. There, under a dripping vat of dark chocolate, the woman was astonished to see a figurine that resembled a familiar image of the mother of Jesus. She pulled a dog-eared Our Lady of Guadeloupe prayer card from her pocket, held it next to the melted-chocolate lump and exclaimed excitedly, “They’re identical!”

Like Dennis, the candy-maker was convinced that the chocolate Virgin Mary had been created as a sign that the recurring hard luck in her life was about to end and that there really was a God after all. According to the Orange County Register, the chocolate Madonna is now perched on a glass table surrounded by scented candles and flowers, where it’s visited daily by a long line of devout pilgrims who pray to the sweet little idol and draw spiritual sustenance from its miraculous presence.

OK, so who would like to start the bidding?