I’ve been chewing on the dichotomy of being a priest lately. There’s lots of dichotomy to embrace and work through, but the one I really have been thinking on in a variety of ways keeps getting presented to me in all sorts of ways.
On the weekend of Gede’s fet, I had a long, late-night chat with one of my brothers about the reality of being a houngan. A lot of times it can be lonely because folks in the rest of our lives can’t really know what happens to us. Not that it is particularly secretive, but that it is hard to conceive of something when you don’t have a container to put it in. Like, no one--not even your siblings--can always grasp what your dreams are and what they mean for you, the intensity of what it is to know that your are on the bus of your life but are not the driver, and sometimes the weight of what that all means. In that way, being a priest can be lonely because it can be so individualized and non-universal.
Our work as priests can also be so very different. I have particular things that my spirits call me to do that are not the same as what my brother is asked to do. Wildly different, in fact, but perfectly suited to me, who I am, and how my spirits move in the world through me. He does things that are pretty far beyond my reach, at least for now, because he is, in some ways, a very different person...and yet we are bound by our similarities. He is my brother and we descend from the same spiritual mother, and we have similar understandings of what Vodou is and what it does in the world. We are both bridges, which in some ways all priests are, and we understand how we each serve as bridges. In some ways, I think that is often unique to our lineage and the line we descend in, but who knows.
He and I also speak a common language on the deeply intimate relationships we have with our spirits. He is a little more publicly circumspect whereas part of how I love my spirits is talking about them and how I relate to them. That’s the dichotomy I have been chewing on the most: the push-pull of the priest as a public fixture in that we serve a community, and the personal relationships we have with our spirits. There is the public priest ‘face’; the facilitation of community work and the work for clients and ti fey/children where we are the public sèvitè/servant. There is also the private face; where we foster the relationships with our spirits that allow us to be the public sèvitè. For me, being the sèvitè who works at ceremonies and shows up for community is one way that I love my spirits and seek to provide the space for them to do for others what they have done for me.
The personal relationships are profound for me and it is where I find myself the most speechless and the most embraced at the same time. Through how we meet each other in the space in between, I get the spiritual ‘gasoline’ to go out and do the work they have prepared my hands for (which is saying a lot...I am an introvert who is pretty quiet and shy when left to my own devices). It’s often hard to really talk details about that because it is so immeasurable--how do you really describe that in ways that folks can understand? It’s intimate, too, in that it is something that touches the deepest parts of who I am and lays them pretty bare.
I watched a documentary last night about a nun who died in the earthquake in Ecuador in 2016 (feeding my Catholic monasticism fascination...) and part of her making her final vows of commitment was her receiving a personal motto from the founder of her community to guide her personal spiritual development and relationship with her divine spouse. She was given ‘alone with the Alone’, meaning united in a relationship solely between herself and her divine spouse.
I found that really compelling and touching, and the documentary showed a lot of footage of her life and service that spoke to that. She was an apostolic nun, which meant she facilitated mission work at schools in poor areas, and so she worked with children. When she worked with them she was outgoing and funny and high energy, but the shift when she was praying and meditating was notable. Everything about her changed and the only thing that existed in that moment was her and her divine spouse, and it was beautiful.
I often feel that the core of Vodou for me is like that, which is probably why I have such a fascination with the contemplative style of Catholic monasticism and . Strip everything away, and what remains is me and my spirits. I am happy with that. In some ways, I am happiest with that. I love attending/working ceremony to support and engage the community so the lwa can bless them as well, but me with my spirits are the moments I cherish most of all. I feel most myself when I am firmly grounded in them before most other things...and those other things both matter quite a bit and matter not at all.
In some ways, the biggest give of Vodou (from where I sit) can be that personal relationship where there is a deep and abiding investment on the part of the spirits. For me, I really understood what that meant through my maryaj lwa which was its own transformative moment of boiling things down to that most important essence.
I sat with someone today to do a leson/Vodou card reading and we talked a lot about how the spirits often come for us personally. Like, they can ask us to make ritual ties to them, but they come for us personally for our own betterment. This person is a priest in another religion, and we talked a lot about what boils down to spiritual burnout. Priests can do a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of others and part of balancing that out (which is a core function of Vodou) is having that place of personal container where there are things that exist for the enrichment and development of us as individuals. In a lot of ways, that’s how we get ‘paid’ as priests. Yes, priest work costs money but that is money that belongs to the spirits. Instead, we get ‘paid’ from what our spirits bring to us through our personal relationships and they feed us that way and make sure we are cared for. One does not exist without the other--how we function personally with our spirits feeds how we function in community.
