Vodou Culture 101: Joy and Despair
As you might think if you read this blog regularly, I talk about religion with my godfather a lot. He has some fascinating hot takes on the difference between Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) and vodou. I share his views, especially on Christianity, because of my experience with it.
A common topic in our discussions of Christianity is that it is a very despair focused religion: a grim god inclined to smite humanity for its imperfections is held off by the memory of the son he sent to be tortured to death. Life is misery and testing and we are powerless to prevent ourselves from being overcome by evil on a regular basis, only held off barely by specific ritual words and actions. All that you see, all of the world around you is evil and/or perverted, and leads you to evil or reminds you of your own inadequacy. You, the body you live in, your instincts: all of it leads you to evil. The focus of that theology is overwhelmingly negative, and while it promises some salvation, it makes no excuses for the fact that it considers the world broadly negative.
He points out that vodou is a religion of balance. Comparative to Christianity, we’re practically a religion of joy. And in fact, when he records shorts for social media or gives talks, he often focuses on joy and the idea that it’s possible to live your life in joy and fulfillment.
What he does not say on those shorts and I will is that there is more than one way to learn. The Christianity of my childhood focused on the misery of living, promising conditional joy in heaven after a lifetime of pain. Learning happens through repeated pain, though years of slogging through suffering with the only real relief being death. You are taught to rejoice in your suffering, because it means that you might be in the midst of learning.
Vodou tends to agree that you should learn to enjoy your lessons, even when they’re negative, but in vodou you can learn through joy, too. This is because you learn through experience, not just negative experiences. Everything that happens to you is useful for lessons, is a part of learning.
One of the goals of a priest or spiritual worker, working with someone, is to help them learn to learn lessons in joy, too. We strive to teach people that you absolutely can live a worthwhile, fulfilled, and joyful life, and still be working on your elevation and/or maturity. It takes a bit of work to recognize lessons in happiness after being taught your whole life to only recognize lessons when you’re experiencing despair, but it can be done.
It is, in some ways, a kinder way to teach.
A marker of personal elevation is recognizing that there is joy in despair or in the misery of lessons, and despair or misery in joyful lessons. It is a marker that someone is experiencing wholeness, which involves the ability to recognize things as being made of many factors.
