Vodou Culture 101: Faith
My godfather makes podcasts and recorded lessons on a variety of topics in vodou. He recorded one on the topic of faith and I happened to be on that particular recording. I remarked (at the time) that I didn’t think it was very fair, faith. I know and have always been aware that something was there. Even when I was trying to be an atheist, I had the nagging sense that someone or something was waiting for me to stop being an idiot and get my ass in gear.
I don’t need to believe, to extend my imagination and behavior to something nebulous. I know. But knowing is not always comforting or satisfying. I have things which are witnessed by multiple others, events recorded and written down, and having those things does not make me feel comforted or satisfied. I can consult my notebook, the recording, the podcast and get reminded of what I was told, but that does not make me feel better about what I need to do.
His response was that the fact I know makes it faith. I thought it wasn’t fair to say I had faith because I know. His point was that faith is not an act of the imagination, nor is it an act of trust. If something is in front of you, you don’t need to engage your imagination to invoke it. You don’t need to trust that it’s there, because it’s in front of you producing effects in the physical world.
Vodou produces a lot of effects in the physical world. It takes real effort to be an atheist looking into the eyeballs of a spirit in someone’s body, when the little hairs all over your body are standing up and the spirit is casually bending physics—drinking lethal amounts of alcohol, standing or sitting unburned in a fire, breaking a machete in their bare hands without cutting themselves—or demonstrating knowledge of you and your history that you have told no one and no one knows you well enough to know. It takes even more effort to be an atheist as you feel your consciousness be displaced and your body starts doing stuff without you. That’s way too much effort for me.
Fairness had nothing to do with faith. Some people have faith. Some people have imagination. Some people have trust.
There is a layer of noise in the mind, a layer of doubt and questions which so often distracts people from things they know and things they need to do. It is a layer of turbulence which can easily trap people. Even in the face of something which demands an explanation which does not start with delusion or some sort of anomalous physical phenomena, people will still be caught up in that turbulence.
Vodou is not about belief.
If you are in that turbulence, remember that it is turbulence. You do not need to trust if you know.
