Magic 601: Errors
Vodou’s cosmology embraces the idea that you have eternity to master the lessons which you need to master. It takes as long as it takes, and there is no particular hurry. All lessons will be repeated until mastered. If you do not master a lesson, if you make some sort of error, if you don’t get it: your understanding and whatever effects it might have caused will eventually be fixed. Bondye is patient with everything that exists.
To be a priest or a spiritual worker is to accept that you will make errors. It is also to accept that your errors will propagate. Because we care for people, providing care, advice, spiritual work, or various forms of support for people, we cannot help but to influence them. Where we are unbalanced, or misunderstand, or otherwise provide something in error, it will cause side effects in the people we care for.
This is completely understood by the spirits, who will come and correct the misunderstanding (and occasionally help fix the side effects.) They are not patient, and bondye is not patient in the way people are patient. It would be more accurate to say that no matter how it seems, their efforts and their silences are aimed at the correction of misunderstanding and the solution of error. They have a perspective that sees into the particular eternity of the priest, spiritual worker, or person being treated in spiritual work. For this reason, consequences up to and including death can occur because of errors, but none of this is permanently held against the person. It’s just that the error needed correcting in order to help the person advance along to the next set of lessons. It is patience in the sense of having another try, not patient in the sense of persisting the current problem.
Ego and negative spirits view error as an opportunity and a lasting statement on the person. After all, according to ego and negative spirits, you are either a winner or a loser. Any losing is a statement about the self and an opportunity to attack. One does not really recover from being a loser.
For priests or spiritual workers, this can mean not just creating problems for the people we serve, but also learning to understand error as a correctable and temporary state, while under attack from both the patterns we have learned (e.g. our guilt and memory of punishment) and from the various negative and lesser spirits which might already be trying to deceive, delude, and/or attach themselves to the priest or spiritual worker. At least some of the strength that makes an elder comes from the ability to be corrected and to continue, from mastering that lesson instead of being distracted by the various things that can distract a priest or spiritual worker when they have made an error.
As is a common trend in these entries, humility helps, as does the presence of others to help remind the priest or spiritual worker that this, too, can be mastered and all errors will be resolved, one way or the other.
