Vodou 501: All The God I Have
We tell people looking for a vodou house to observe the character of the house and priests of the house. Over time, the nature of the house and priest are exposed and if you are paying attention, you will see the god of the house in those natures.
A priest is, among other things, a reflection of god. Conversely, the god a priest serves is a reflection of the priest—the priest and god mirror each other. Because the all (god) cannot be fully known in the consciousness, whatever part of god a priest can connect to is the god which the priest reflects. The actions a priest can take, the healing they can offer, the magic they do, all are reflections of whatever part of god a priest can hold.
The goal of vodou is healing, growth, but also elevation and eventual oneness with god. For priests, because of the nature of service, there must come a time where the mirror they can hold to god becomes visible not just in its limits—that is, we need to have some sense of where the god we can hold is smaller than the whole and differs from others—but in its completion.
One of the lwa I work with says, simply, that whatever is left after the burning is god. Whatever is left after lessons, whatever cannot be extinguished or destroyed, is god. What remains, what persists, of the priest in lesson after lesson, in trial after trial, is the reflection of god they can hold. It is, in the moment, the whole of god for them and the whole of the god they can reflect. Change is inevitable, and indeed every “now” is the only “now” which can exist for the priest. Every god in that now is in fact god.
Beyond that, the god reflected at the priest contains the priest. Not the priest as they think of themselves, nor the priest as the people they serve think of them, but instead the priest as they are now, the priest’s consciousness and the rest of the priest’s soul. This does not deify the priest, it simply removes the illusion of separation, the reflection sharpening as the image, the priest, continues to burn.
When people approach deity, they often isolate the idea. God as a distant figure, god as unrecognizable. God as something so far removed from them or anything they might recognize that there is no way to see god. God as something unapproachable, unknowable, and fundamentally alien. The idea of god including them, as the all includes all, is incomprehensible.
The all includes the ego, but cannot be recognized from the ego. The all includes the consciousness, but cannot be recognized from the consciousness. The all can recognize the all, and where the all is what speaks, the all is what hears. Where the priest has burned enough to reflect the all clearly, they know themselves to be part of the all. The reflection and the image are one as they move, as complete as they can be.
All a priest has to give you is all the god they have.
