In The Company of Priests

A priest is born, as is a witch or someone who has the various spiritual capacities necessary to do magic. However, the training and the cooperation of the spirits and a teacher are necessary to take the potential someone is born with and turn it into something that can be used. My godfather compares it to a muscle—you might have the ability to build muscle well, but you’re going to need to go to the gym, to adopt a lifestyle, and to employ a trainer to get the best out of that capacity.

Part of that lifestyle is leaving your old associations (friends, acquaintances), your old habits, sometimes even your job, and all your expectations. Much of it involves being trained, which requires the humility to let someone else tell you what to do.

There are a handful of priests in my godfather’s society. He’s made twenty or so of us in thirty years of running a vodou society, and we are scattered across the world. We’re an odd bunch, and we tend to hang out for the sheer pleasure of being around someone else experiencing the strange sorts of things associated with being a priest, from middle of the night calls to the spirits’ demand for change.

If you put us all in a room, it wouldn’t be long before you noticed how different we are. Racially, we’re all over the board. Nationally, we’re also very different. Our genders are all over the place, and same with our sexualities. The spirits simply don’t care about that sort of thing. We are theirs, and they are ours.

The strangest and most fun part of being in the company of priests comes in the flashes of the spirit speaking through them. An eye color suddenly changes, the tone of someone’s voice becomes deeper. The way they speak changes, their apparent gender changes. A woman suddenly speaks, presents, and feels like a man (or vice versa), dispensing advice about a relationship or financial advice. A man blinks, makes the salutes we do for the spirit, then speaks, presents, and feels like a woman, pulling other priests up to dance before sprinkling them with alcohol—a quick baptism for their heaviness of spirit that leaves them laughing and joyful.

One of the things we give up is ourselves and the expectation of continuous awareness, living instead with the continuous knowledge that we will be gently and firmly edged aside to let someone or something else use our bodies. To be in the company of priests is to be, at any point, in the company of the spirits.