A Question, Echoing
I was asked a question yesterday that keeps bubbling back into my consciousness: I’m officially ready (well, I need to make some preparations first, which includes the necessary money to fund the initiation and time off to be in seclusion) to be initiated as a priest.
Maybe I’d better explain, because people have some very weird ideas about what being a vodou priest entails. A vodou priest is someone whose boss is everyone. Literally, a servant of their community. The person who gets kicked out of bed at 3 am because a godchild has done something stupid in a bar. The person who holds your hand as you lay dying and consoles your family, who listens to your relationship woes (the woes you’ll always have because you do the same thing over and over), and who has neither privacy nor the luxury of complaint and criticism, nor of the expectation of a whole night of sleep.
As my godfather explains it, “you won’t take a piss without someone trying to analyze it.”
A priest is the person who will always be blamed for not being nice enough, for not knowing exactly what to say despite no one listening. The person who will never be the subject of genuine gratitude, because what people mean when they say “thank you” has more to do with being glad that you’ll be perpetually around to clean up their messes than it does with any recognition of a problem that needs to be solved. A priest is someone who is the endless recipient of people’s shit, their desire to have the benefits of change and personal growth without doing anything to get it and their willingness to blame anyone else for their unwillingness to work for it.
Being ready does not mean I’m not about to fuck it up. I am, not to put too fine a point on it, prideful and I like being right, which is a detriment that I’m going to need to be publicly burned, apparently, to get rid of. I also have a temper. You’re unlikely to find it insulting me, but under the right conditions, I’m incendiary. I’m also quite judgemental, which needs to be scoured from me.
I’m not looking forward to being publicly burnt, though I am fully on board with its necessity (I hope to learn it with a minimum of awfulness.)
My godfather looked me in the eyes and asked me what I will do with the resources that being initiated will give me—and initiation confers a LOT of resources, fortified by whatever relationships you build with the spirits and your community.
I keep coming back to the answer I gave. What will I do with those resources?
The work.
It’s all I have to answer. I could use those resources to get more stuff: relationships, a new car, a big house, etc. I could use the resources to make myself popular, to make hella money. I could also use them to commit crime and force people to do the things I like, the way I like them.
The spirits are not nearly as hung up on human ideas of good and evil as we are. We make the deeds we must review with Baron, when we die, and my tally is already quite high without anything I might do with vodou.
But I have a lovely car. I have a roof over my head. I have my health. I’m decent looking. I make enough money to pay my bills. I eat regularly. No amount of magic will ensure for us tomorrow. Only god knows whether we have that, and while we can swing the odds, god has the final say.
God is also not hung up on what we suppose is good or evil, in our limited understanding of it.
What little I know of the work is the most interesting thing to ever happen to me. The most satisfying thing. It is endless change, an endless opportunity to be elevated and elevating.
It is being a tool for the slow process of all souls rejoining the divine. I remember where I came from. I’d pay that cost again for elevation and the chance to do the work. And I will continue to pay.
I keep thinking about the question, but I don’t have a better answer.
I came to serve. I came to die over and over, in the pursuit of the divine.
