Magic 501: Endurance

To be a mambo is to be a mother of strength: a mother who raises people up into strength, who teaches strength to others, who is the root from which the members of the society are branched and who is the tree under which the members of the society may hide when the weather is rough or times are hard.

The lwa bury their leaders deep. When a leader grows out of that dark place, they will not be upturned or uprooted.

One of the characteristics of a senior priest is not so much being unable to be bothered as it is an inhuman endurance. Death, disaster, betrayal, every sort of suffering—what is left of you after you have grown out of those deep, dark places endures, long past the point where it makes any sense. Long past the point where you have faced your own darkness and beyond that darkness into a greater bleakness as you begin to understand the scope of the gulf between what is human and what is divine. Long past the unrecognizable, the incomprehensible, and long past where praise or complaint can do more than tickle you on the way past.

Every part of you will have held a funeral and what is left will have risen again, transformed.

I have written on death quite a bit in this series, in part because the job of a priest is all sorts of death: the small spiritual deaths of healing and elevation, the small death of birth, as well as to attend the deaths of our children and hold their death rites. Interspersed with the deaths of our children are our own deaths, a devastation that ceases to need a funeral.

Death and death, as we walk amid the pyres.

What endures is something that does not seem quite human to people who have not gone through those processes. We let go of humanity, a consensus that someone ought to help us, ought to pay attention, ought to save us. It is the need for someone to reassure us, to comfort us, to make us happy, looking to the people around us and a shared bond to soothe us. We let go of the idea that things must be fair, that everything should turn out well, and that anything should do anything. We let go of reputation, of anything which fosters delusion, of fear, and of life and living. We let go of ourselves, coming into death and leaving nothing behind.

This is not endless misery. Letting go of that humanity dissolves the capacity for misery, even the capacity to be haunted by our emotions. Everything passes through, leaving only us.

It is strength, but we reach it in our destruction. On the other side of destruction, we find what cannot be destroyed.

What we give our children is bought just this way. We give them the endurance we have earned, from which they learn strength. We treat them as if they have strength, we train their strength, we lend them strength and endurance magically, and we stand guard on them when we cannot give them what they need, yet.

If you have the eyes to see it, you will see what the spiritual parents of the children have given them.