The Freedom To
When I wake up, I tend to scan the forums and social media accounts I have to see if anyone has pinged me along with my coffee. This morning, someone posted a story about a London area houngan being tried for sexual assault. It was a short enough read.
This is the second story this year about sexual assault in vodou which I’ve read. While this is definitely a lower sexual assault rate than most of the churches I attended growing up, it’s still worth talking about.
Vodou is a religion of balance and a religion of nature, in which the priests are often drawn from the people in any room who’ve had the hardest lives. One of the side effects of this is that a priest in vodou is rarely shocked by human behavior. We done seen it all at least once even before we took up vodou. After we reached priest, our job involves seeing a lot of people who are out of balance in their behavior, thinking, emotional, or spiritual lives. Vodou priests who have done enough personal elevation are simply not going to have moral outrage very often, because we reject little.
We know what people are capable of.
However, the position comes with duties, responsibilities, and an ethic. It’s not what the broader culture would think of as ethical, but there is a code of conduct. A priest is a guardian of a community, whether that’s guarding them from themselves by giving advice or guarding them by removing spiritual parasites of various kinds. The initiates we serve are the children of the lwa and we function as co-parents with the lwa. Even our clients, who are not our children in the spirit or the lwa’s children, are people we are functioning temporarily as a kind of help for.
This is not to say that sometimes we don’t end up in relationships with people who we’ve helped. Sometimes shit happens and the spirits care nothing for what most people think of as morality, only the healing and elevation of souls, which is definitely not a process that follows Biblical (Torah, Quran) rules nor the laws of any country.
What it means is that we don’t withhold healing, treatment, or help from them on the condition of sex, nor do we make their well being conditional on sex. We might charge you a fee and you might have to do something weird, like take a spiritual bath or dispose of something in a crossroads, but we don’t withhold healing on whether or not we get off. Introducing the dynamics of sex into a situation where someone is working on a form of healing (and is therefore vulnerable) is reckless and gets in the way of that healing. Getting in the way of the healing we’ve been asked to do has consequences.
Being a priest is the freedom to _____. We have enormous flexibility because we have to be flexible to do the work we need to do with people, to meet them wherever they are.
It’s also the freedom to experience the consequences of whatever we’ve done. If what we’ve done gets in the way of healing for someone the lwa are trying to heal, we can expect that the lwa will let us enjoy the side effects of getting in the way, which may include jail time.
You should just be aware that in vodou, we are usually not functioning from a Abrahamic or legal point of view on the topic of morality. We don’t think sex is bad. We just don’t think it’s for every circumstance. Because so much of our work is healing, it’s considered poor ethics to do things that interfere with that healing.
