Remarkable...

My idea of Divinity might be described best as the capacity within each of us for kindness and love… I am a daughter of Isis.  (It ain’t just the name of the bidnezz)  Today I heard a story, one that captured  me:

A UPS driver who came to us from Haiti and now has an American wife, confided his Spiritual dilemma…how he has converted, for his wife, to Christianity.  But, he is hurt (not mad, but hurt) to think that Americans, his wife included, would think of the Haitian People as devil worshiper’s, God-less and damned.  He is very dejected, isolated in his tragedy, worried that his family on the island are dead and now he feels he has to endure his native Spirit is being exiled from his new home by ignorant judgment. 

It breaks my heart. 

I understand Voodoun.  I understand it as a Yoruban spiritual expression, an ancient African heartbeat that resonates with the forces of the cosmos, reaching into the stars, where the masks of humanity have been placed onto the essence of life giving qualities that reside there as cosmic forces.  These forces are invited into an intimacy among those who attend the Bembe (voodoun ceremony), to express themselves through the ceremonialists who call on them for healing… Healing of many different kinds.  Heal the heart of failed love?  Perhaps Mamon Brigette will come to you, counsel your heart and leave you with renewed vitality to open it again.  Lonesome and ignored by the world?  Erzulie, with one of her many faces, can delight you with a courage to ask for vibrant life, to celebrate it and to love.  Are you looking to help heal someone of a terrible illness?  Papa Legba might be there to guide you towards the best remedies with the help of Loko, a Spirit of medicine in the plants and vegetation surrounding us.  Do you hunger for comfort and sustenance?   The Mother Osun will wrap her arms around you and still the terrors of want and death.  These are cosmic principles that invest all of life… and the African dimensions of awareness for them give shape and form to them using the template of our humanity.  Yoruban spirituality is not based in negative or evil expressions… but then again, neither do the Judeo/Christian/Islamic expressions of faith…in principle… yet must I describe the plenty of examples there to illuminate the evil that those faiths have dispensed (and still do?).   Those who practice the Petro side of voodoun are not common nor do they represent the majority of the voodoun faith.  Shame on anyone who condemns another for their faith or beliefs.  Especially at a time of such tragedy and devastation.  

Like attracts like, and perhaps the young man got me as a pick up today by some stoke of goodness so that he might be able to experience that not everyone thinks his spirituality is something wicked.  He said there was a silver lining to it all; that now Haiti will have to rebuild and if the US and UN are there to oversee, then perhaps it will be done properly and good folks will get good jobs to rebuild their lives.  I think it remarkable that a young man who fled Haiti because of the poverty and hardship, who is feeling so alone and alienated from his new family right now, has grasped that his homeland might experience a new dawn from all of this devastation and judgment.   People are remarkable.  

They are Hopeful. And within all this chos afar, it's something to be able to understand how resilient our spirits' are.  Hopeful.  

In all of this.