Magic 601: Love and Cost
Everything has a cost. Some things are cheap for a cheap result. Some things are expensive for a cheap result. There’s a hell of a lot of cheap things out there with a thin veneer of gold on them to make them look expensive, and not just in terms of dating. Your job is, often as not, trying to convince you their profit margin is worth your health and a negligible salary.
Sometimes you get lucky and find something that is expensive for an invaluable result. The kind of love the divine demonstrates to us via the lwa is expensive for an invaluable result.
We take for granted, in vodou, that this path isn’t for everyone. The divine allows as many paths as are necessary to reach the divine, and vodou is just one of those paths. One must be chosen for this path, and that invitation must be echoed in everything a vodouizan does—we are where we are invited to be, or we will be removed, naturally. The love of the divine is in that multitude of invitations, and in the multitude of arrivals to new growth, new elevation, new healing which are a part of those invitations.
A direct, embodied experience of divine love is one of the invaluable things we get for the cost. No matter the cost, we are lucky to get to pay it.
Love always has a cost, and that cost is change. We change our habits for the person we love. We change what we wear, our haircuts, our diet if we think the love is real. Paying that cost is, itself, of benefit to us. We learn things about ourselves in the way we respond to the person we love. We can learn to honor ourselves, to respect ourselves in how we pay that cost. And the things we get from the person we love are also of benefit to us. The process of growing a relationship can be inherently of benefit, and the source of a million lessons about ourselves, others, and what it is to love.
Paying the cost—making the sacrifices of time, attention, love, obedience, and devotion—to the members of our court and through them to the divine itself, inherently benefits us. It slowly teaches us something of divine love, of what it means to be devoted, of true intimacy, of growth and healing, and why sometimes, the cost is worth it no matter how steep. We learn, over the course of lives and sometimes in a life, something of what the divine has for us.
Consider your relationships with your court, with the lwa who are with you in this life. Consider the love that sent them there, to you, and the love they demonstrate in their guidance.
Consider how lucky you have been, to get to pay the cost of loving them and being loved by them.
