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Faith, Suffering, and the Healing World of Vodou

Megan Joiner

To the first church family: I thank you (Gwen Heintzelman) for the graduation care package.   I thank you for the honor of being invited to speak in this sanctuary, I thank you for your love, not only for the past four years I've been away and you've been so eager to hear where I am and what I'm doing, but for the past ten, since you first opened your doors and your arms to my family.  I thank you for your loyalty, even when I stopped coming to church all together, "forsook" (if one can do such a thing)  UURE school and stayed home Sunday
mornings to stew in my own juices.  I thank you for your kindness and your support, even when you knew my name and I didn't know yours.  I thank you for your love, your care, your acceptance and for this invitation.  To my teachers: Seven Hills, Ursuline.  We've got fourth through twelfth grade here.  Thank you for the knowledge, the trust, the support and the faith you had in me.  Thank you for coming today.  My family:  my grandmother, uncle and cousin are here.  Thank you for the party last night, for the gifts.  For everything.  Evan, the little one who I
held in my five-year-old arms who today, is holding me.  You are the light of my life.  Thank you to my parents who, with grace, have given me both roots and wings.
To my friends, so many of whom are here today, I don't know what to do. 

Some of the people here I pulled away from along the way, others have been there even when I couldn't be.  Sarah.  Meghan.  Megan.  Jess. Kate.  You know.  I love
you. And finally thanks to Anthony, who took a 6am flight from LaGuardia to be here this morning, who waited for me for four years, all through our time at
Wesleyan, (okay, three and a half).  Waited to share with me a love I never thought possible and is, not only possible, but so very true.  He has taught me much about the world, about taking life by the face and kissing it on the lips with the innocence and joy of a child.  He's taught me about trusting in myself and in others.  And, thank you for sharing yourself with me and inviting me to do the same.

Now, I'd like to take the opportunity to invite you.  All of you.  Invite you into my life, my mind, my heart, my journey.  I invite you to share in the celebration that is my graduation from Wesleyan University.  I invite you to take part in the joy that is my reawakening to the beauty of this world and the life we share.

One of my very favorite professors in the Wesleyan Religion department is a short little man addicted to caffeine and baseball.  Ron Cameron drinks a full thermos of coffee in an hour and a half class and can spout stats on players that retired fifty years ago.  He splits his time between Middletown, Connecticut, home of Wesleyan and Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He doesn't teach at Harvard (any more) he simply (and admittedly) hates Middletown and loves the city.  He is the man who taught me more than anyone else what it means to be a scholar.  It means to love something enough to study it constantly, to eat, sleep and breathe your subject.  It also means developing enough distance from that subject to delve
deep into the contradictions, the hidden agendas buried between the lines.   "Dig we must, pardon our dust" Cameron says.  "Our job is to dig, to discover, to compare, to contrast, to THINK."  The tricky part comes when you ask what we are digging up.  Only the most sacred beliefs of 54 percent of the world's people. 

Cameron digs in the dusty and blood stained depths of Christianity's formations, studies the Bible like it is a bottomless thermos of Sumatran Roast.  It sustains
him.  It is eating him from the inside out.  On a visit to his office hours early this past Spring semester, Cameron and I chatted about the subject matter we've shared in studying over the past four years. 

"It fascinates me," I said to Cameron, "how truth is objective.  How belief is so true and so individual, so social and so isolating.  How people can hurt each other so much by saying 'God loves me and he sure as hell doesn't love you.'" 

Cameron nodded solemnly.  "I will quote J.Z. Smith," he said (Smith, of the University of Chicago, is the man known in the department as the only god Cameron believes in and known worldwide as the foremost scholar of religion of the 20th century) "Smith says in his essay on Jonestown," Cameron continues, "The Devil in Mr. Jones. Smith says, and I quote, 'Religion is not a nice thing.'  Religion is not a nice thing, Megan.  It is not about peace and love.  It is about insiders and outsiders, about difference and hatred.  No, religion is not a nice thing.  Don't forget that Megan."

I could have told him that.   I remember 6 years old. EPIC school.  Birmingham, Alabama.  The playground.  "Unitarian," the other kids said, sneering, "What kind of religion is that?"  "It's Christian," I protested, "I don't know what it means, but it is Christian.  I think."  Years later I would be at Ursuline Academy here in Blue Ash watching (with glee) as the jaws of my classmates dropped one by one.  "The immaculate conception?  No, I don't believe it.  Come on," I'd push, "We all know Mary got knocked up.  I mean, more power to her.  It was a great story."  Oh, I was mean.  And I hated them for having something I didn't.  Something that made the
world less gaping, less terrifying, less gray.  Something that shone.  Shone its light on them , one and all, providing they knew what to say, what to do and when
and how.  And provided they didn't ask questions.  Not the wrong questions anyway.  Provided they didn't raise their hand in scripture class and say "Listen, I just don't think it was fair—this business of Cain being marked by
God.  It wasn't his fault he was a farmer.  He killed Abel out of jealousy from God's favoritism. What's up with that?"  Provided they didn't ask that.  They would do just fine in life.  And me?  What about me?  With my existential teenage angst, with my dark clouds, with my lack of hope, of faith.....What would I do?  Would I make it?  I honestly couldn't have told you yes or no. 

I have just recently begun to be treated for a depression that has sat heavy on my shoulders for the past 7, 8, 9, 10? years.  The woman I see in Boston: (at first my friends, when I put it this way, thought I was finally coming round, dating women, way to go Megan!  Wesleyan did give me a nose ring, but the love I got out of the deal happens to be of the male persuasion.  Sorry girls.)  Jeanne asked me in our second session if didn't I have any faith?  FAITH?  Did the woman know what she was asking?  Who she was asking.  I was ready to jump up and walk out, preferring panic to proselytizing, depression to disciples. She meant in myself.  She meant faith in myself.  Faith that I could learn to love myself, learn not to fear other people, learn to feel without shutting
down.  She meant faith in my work, my strength, my worth and my ability and to believe in the loyalty of those who love me.  Faith that we would together be able to help me live in color again. The color analogy is being used now for depression all over the place, on prime time even.  Could there be something going on, that we are all living in gray, desperate, thirsty for color?  Something missing, maybe, in the way we've constructed our collective world? Faith.  I'm learning.

I arrived at Wesleyan swearing I would never take another religion class ever again.  No offense to the lovely UA religion teachers in the congregation today, but I had had enough.  Oh, but I hadn't.  I could stay away.  First
semester of my sophomore year I took a course called "Religions in America" and I was hooked.  I declared the major before I left for a semester off and came back the next spring to "Ethics and Communities," and "The History of Modern Christian Thought."  Moved on to the Colloquium in Religious Studies and this year hit
Cameron's "Introduction to New Testament," Crites' "The Aesthetic Formation of Experience," Zwelling's "Judaism and Story," (look for the names, they've done great work.) This Spring brought a final round of "Religion and the Social Construction of Race" and "Judaism in the time of Jesus."  Okay, so I took a few more.  Only the method of studying religion at Wesleyan has been like night and
day to Ursuline.  And I've loved it.  And I honestly don't think I'd have gotten as much out of it as I did or done as well as I did if it hadn't been for those Christian Awareness, Christian Scriptures, Catholic Christian Morality, Prayer and Spirituality courses.  They didn't quite make a Catholic out of me, but they did make something...

There is a reason for my continued interest in religion, a desire to understand it, and deeper down, an almost perverse desire to prove that organized religion does not and cannot provide the truth we seek.  I wanted to show that that color we are all looking for so desperately can't live in a Church, a synagogue; can't be found in worship, in prayer, in a far away white male god in the sky. 

Ron Cameron and the religion department have given me the tools to study religious formation, the social and literary constructions of religious world views.  They have opened up the world of religious ritual to the teeth of post-modernism and relativism.  But they didn't give me anything to believe.  That wasn't their job.  They've done their job as far as I'm concerned.  My last college class ended with Cameron shouting: "And that's what it means to think!" (If you want to know what it means, see me after the service.  'Cause now I know.)  They've done their job.  And now it's time for mine to begin.  Time to continue to sort out my own truth, find what it is I believe.  And yet, I want to keep digging.  I want to understand more about our culture and others, to study how we collectively work to make our world make sense.  How can we do such intensive anthropological and intellectual study of the search for social sanity through religion and still discover and retain some sense of personal, individual understanding of our place in the world and the sanctity of life?  I think the answer lies in human knowing and living fully the joys and sorrows of our experience.  And I think for me, the answer lies in the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition.

All religious movements share in what can and has been called world building, myth making, social formation.  It is the creation of a world view that explains and softens the cold truth of human suffering.  Karen McArthy Brown has used just such a definition of religion in her ethnographic study of the ritual world of Vodou.  (Now, I've gotten wind that everyone was really excited to hear me speak today.  I just wonder how many thought I was going to let you in on my Voodoo magic ritual cult affiliation.  Sorry, no such luck.)  Voodoo is a mispronunciation of American proportions of a religion known in Haitian Creole language as Vodou.  I'd advise you to read Elizabeth McAlister and Karen Brown's work on Haitian Vodou.  You'll see that the religion has nothing to do with devil worship and all to do with faith, family, life, loss and love.  Vodou provides a perfect example for the purpose religion holds in our lives.  Brown states: "It is no exaggeration to say that Haitians believe that living and suffering are inseparable.  Vodou is the system they have devised to deal with the suffering that is life, a system whose purpose is to minimize pain, avoid disaster, cushion loss and strengthen survivors and survival instincts.  The drama of Vodou occurs not so much within the rituals themselves as in the junction between the rituals and the troubled lives of the devotees.  People bring the burdens and pains of their lives to this religious system in the hope of being healed."

What else are we doing when we come to church?  Even we, the Unitarians, come to church for the healing that happens in this community, in the quiet space of this sanctuary, in the quiet grace and wisdom of our minister.  We are seeking to make sense out of this nonsensical world, but even more than that, we are looking to create purpose and meaning in our lives. And what are we doing when we study religion using anthropological methods
that distance us from our subjects?  I'm not sure. 

Anthropologists are looking for something.  Ron Cameron is looking for something in the work he does.    In the book Mama Lola, Brown is open about her purpose in studying Vodou.  She talks about her entry into the world of a Vodou priestess living in Brooklyn, Alourdes, also known as Mama Lola, who became Brown's Vodou mother as the ethnographer was initiated into Alourdes' Vodou family. I realized, Brown says, that if I brought less to this Vodou world, I would come away with less. If I persisted in studying Vodou objectively, the heart of the system, its ability to heal, would remain closed to me.  The only way I could hope to understand the psychodrama of Vodou was to open my own life to the
ministrations of Alourdes." 

With her work, her research, her participation, her involvement with her subjects, not as anthropologist and natives in the dominant Durkheimian tradition, but as mother and daughter, as family, Brown has changed the face of anthropological research.  She calls her method "interpretive anthropology."  And bases it on the importance of human connection.  She acknowledges that "ethnographic research, whatever else it is, is a form of human relationship.  When the lines long drawn in anthropology between participant-observer and informant break down, then anthropology becomes something closer to a social art form, open to both aesthetic and moral judgment.  This situation is riskier, but it does bring intellectual labor and life into closer relation."  I'll tell you, that leaves a much better taste in my life than Durkheim's "The natives always lie."

What makes such an approach riskier?  It can practically go without saying that Cameron does not approve of this method.  He makes the distinction between anthropology near and anthropology far, and chooses the later, arguing that, for academic study, distance is more valuable than connection.  On one level I agree, but there is something missing. What Cameron leaves behind is that sense of human knowing, that there is such a thing as spirit and life and we aren't only socially constructed, because we contain something on the inside that is at once individual and connected to the whole - a whole that is comprised of, not only the human family, but the entire planet. There is a vast difference between studying the ancient world and the beginnings of Christianity vs. today's religious landscape. The people Brown writes about are living, breathing, loving people who at this very moment are holding feasts for the spirits in Brooklyn.  I, for one, think giving up objectivity is worth healing.  Worth meaning.  Worth respect between author and subject.  Worth connection.  Worth understanding.  This is why I chose to continue my study of religion through the Unitarian community, the Unitarian philosophy. 

Is this a religion???  (It's not Christian, I know that.) But that's a whole other sermon.   A place in the UU tradition provides not only the opportunity to learn about and study religious systems created and followed by other's, but an opportunity to participate in ritual time and space, in the liminal, in communities of love and life.  And I know that this is a place I want to be.

There is such a thing as human knowing. We know things.  Animals know things.  I would argue that plants know everything, but don't get me started.  Love. Connection. Does it come from above?  I don't believe so, but you know, I don't know.  I do know the truth of love.  How?  The friends and family who have stuck through the suffering and the isolation that comes with living with
depression are the faces of love in my life.  How do I love?  In strength. In thanksgiving.  Open to joy.  Open to loss and pain. I told Anthony a few weeks ago that I was confused by not feeling sad all the time anymore.  I didn't (and still don't) know quite what do to with myself.  "More than that," I whispered, "now I love life.  And I'm afraid to die."  I'm afraid to lose my loved ones, just discovered again after all this time. Anthony couldn't quite understand that fear.  For him, The pain of death allows us to see the truth of connection. His love of living doesn't cause him to fear death, but gives him a desire to live every minute of life.  The death of a loved one is a
way to feel as deeply as we can, the connection, the love we had with them and to know it was real.

My roommate and best friend at school lost her father thirteen months ago to pancreatic cancer.  I asked her if I could share with you some of her words, they come to you straight from our kitchen table, wet with tears from both our eyes. I learned in my father's death, Rebecca said to me that day, that Love is real.  Some people find God in suffering. They know Jesus is real.  I sat there
in that hospital room and I knew that love was true.  That connection between people is the most beautiful and meaningful possibility for our life here. For the year he was dying there on the couch in the living room, I wanted
to get in the car and drive away as fast as possible.  I wanted to leave the raw pain of loving and losing.  To have to spend every waking moment loving openly, rawly, because you know you are going to have to say good-bye is more painful that anything.  And when he died, I was sure I would never, could never ever love another person again.  I didn't want the pain that came with it.  But I will.  I know the truth of love.  And I will live it. 

I invite you now to welcome into your heart that part of yourselves that knows the truth of love and human connection.  It is our relation, not only to those at our sides this morning, but to those we cannot see, cannot hear and will never meet.  It is our connection to the physical world around us.  And to that love we know is somewhere inside of us.  That love is life.

PAUSE

We are just trying so hard to understand why we are here.  After this blip of human time, we still don't know.  And we won't.   The author of 2 Esdras knew this.  He was desperately trying to make sense of a Roman ruled world in which everything held sacred by his Jewish people was being destroyed.  So he wrote into existence an angel who spoke to Ezra saying, "Count up for me those who have
not yet come, and gather for me the scattered raindrops, and make the withered flowers bloom again for me; open for me the closed chambers, and bring out for me the winds shut up in them, or show me the picture of a voice; and then I will explain to you the travail that you ask to understand."  

We will not understand.  But we can take the edge off the suffering.  We can heal some of the pain of life by living it together.  To do so, we must open our own lives to the heart, to healing.  We can, together, heal the pain of
suffering, of loss, of the drama of living everyday on this beautiful and terrible planet.

How?  I choose a few paths.  I will work to protect the environment where we make our home.  My sacred spaces are the woods, the waters, the mountains.  And
they are dying.  I will make my place in the humanist religion that has been a home for our family for generations.  And I will love.  I will love hard and with rage, working as we all are, especially in these important and racially charged times here in Cincinnati, working for justice.  Sharon Welch tells us that "Justice, compassion, decency, all well up from deep reservoirs of respect: respect for the rhythms of life, the realization that there is nothing profane, nothing contemptible in our bodiliness; thus respect even of death and decay; respect even of pain."  May we offer her words as inspiration, acknowledging that: "The ground of challenging injustice is gratitude, the heartfelt desire to honor the wonder of that which is; to cherish, to celebrate, to delight in the many gifts and joys of life." 

PAUSE

may all beings be well and happy.
may all be peaceful and harmonious.
may all have the light, the way out of suffering.
and the way home.
may we each share our bright and wondrous natures
for the benefit of all.
ohm
peace
peace
peace

Thank you for coming this morning.

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