Vodou Culture 101: Sins and Mistakes

This follows yesterday’s discussion of divinity.

One of the reasons vodouizan cannot afford judgement is because judgement is a futile attempt to deny the expression of the divine in people. If the divine is everywhere, it is also being expressed in people you don’t like, whose actions you don’t like. Whether or not you like something has no relevance. A judgement, no matter how it is justified, is always a statement about how you feel—cite whatever books you like. At some point, someone looked at a behavior, a thing, a person, and said “I dislike this so much I want to codify that dislike for other people to know how to feel about it.” The feeling, the gut response, drove the original condemnation, and people just kept handing it down.

This is, at no point, the statement that you ought to ignore your feelings. Think of it instead as a reminder that those feelings drive behavior, and those feelings are driven by who you know yourself to be. If you know yourself to be separate from others, it will absolutely be involved in your feelings and judgement.

Vodou does not consider a mistake to be a waste of time. A mistake does not have the same connotations for us as it does for the larger culture. We consider it a learning experience, and vodouizans seek out opportunities to learn. If you are seeking elevation, you should be eagerly seeking to make mistakes so that you can learn from them.

Vodou does not have sins. We don’t have damnation or lifelong condemnation. There’s nothing you can do to alienate divinity, nor is there anything you can do to avoid divinity. Your beliefs don’t matter in the slightest to whether or not the divine is everywhere and in everything, nor does what you think about divinity.

The divine does not need to authorize, cosign, approve, or otherwise permit specific behaviors. If something is happening, if something exists, it was already authorized, cosigned, approved of, or permitted: infinite generosity, with which we do as occurs to us to do, with which we must do as it occurs to us to do.