Vodun practitioners from all over the African Diaspora traveled to Benin (formerly Dahomey), the birthplace of the religion, this week to participate in what is known as International Voodoo Day. This January 10 festival of prayers, libations, sacrifices and other rituals is the most important Vodun gathering in the world.

As a Haitian-American, I can’t help reflect on this most African part of our heritage in the New World especially as it is continually maligned by those whose knowledge is restricted to popular images that favor the macabre. Those of us who recognize and respect Vodou’s complexity know we must defend it because the religion remains trapped in stereotypes making it extremely difficult to dispel geopolitically driven myths too entrenched in the spectacular.

Growing up as a child in Haiti, I had no concept of what is referred to as “Voodoo” in the U.S. In fact, the more appropriate word, Vodou, was not part of my vocabulary. The tradition that some members of my family followed was known as “serving the spirits.” Even that phrase was not something we actively used, since our actual engagement was rooted more in daily practice than naming. Serving meant living in a world where the sacred and secular were blurred. So it was commonplace to see adults pour libations of water and coffee three times onto the ground upon awakening in the morning before even speaking to one another. Or sometimes they rushed to the outhouse, I would learn later, to expunge bad dreams that should not be spoken in order to deflect their mal-intention and prevent entry into the home. These and other very conscious acts of psychic repulsion taught me that serving the spirits was foremost about communion and protection.

Tikkun Daily reader Jan Garrett wrote to us with a link to a piece of upbeat news.

It’s not often that so-called ordinary “first-world” folk (of progressive inclination) are able to strike an effective blow for justice in the relationships between major international financial institutions and the people of the third world. So this article by Johann Hari about the IMF’s backing off its plans to impose “shock doctrine” on Haiti is worth taking note of.

The article is called “There’s Real Hope From Haiti and It’s Not What You Expect.” Thank you, Jan!

This is great and hugely promising. There’s a whole generation of young evangelicals out there who are different in certain ways from their parents. Gary Dorrien was talking about this on Monday night on the Tikkun Phone Forum (and I hope we can get the recording up soon). Young evangelicals are more accepting of gay relationships for example. They are also more focused on world poverty. This new initiative is exactly the kind of leadership they need. This is the whole of a press release from a new organization called the New Evangelical Partnership, with a cover note from Kristin Williams at Faith in Public Life, from whom I received it:

A potentially very influential new evangelical organization, with a bold vision, has just launched with a call for total cancellation of Haiti’s debt. The organization is significant in that it brings Rich Cizik (former VP at the National Association of Evangelicals) back fully into public life and into partnership with David Gushee, who led the evangelical witness against torture. Expect this organization to address a broad agenda and have influence in churches, academia and Washington. – Kristin

Richard Cizik was one of the main promoters of environmental consciousness, or Creation Care, at the National Association of Evangelicals and was forced to resign in late 2008 after he supported same-sex civil unions on NPR’s Fresh Air program.

Influential Evangelicals Call for Cancellation of Haiti’s Debt

New Evangelical Group Launches to Mobilize Christian Support for Loan Forgiveness

As the death toll of last week’s earthquake in Haiti climbs into the hundreds of thousands and the country’s infrastructure lies in ruins, prominent US Christians are calling on governments and international lending bodies to cancel the Haitian government’s foreign debt. A statement released today, organized by the recently-formed New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good and signed by more than 60 prominent Christian leaders, states in part:

MLK Day is drawing to a close. Have all the tributes and videos shaken us up, radicalized us, and renewed our resistance to the systems of imperialism and racism that Dr. King fought in his day?

At its best, MLK Day leads us to hear King’s powerful call for justice resounding in the present moment, to hear him urging us to dismantle our racist judicial/prison system and end the mass incarceration of black men, to oppose U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to take seriously his idea that militarism leads to the “spiritual death” of a nation. At its very worst, the memorialization process reduces King’s legacy by offering a saccharine history lesson that leaves people thinking that King did all the necessary work and racism is over.

Jack & Jill Politics has done a particularly smart job of projecting Dr. King into the present rather than freezing him into the past. In response to the Washington Post‘s call for YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, Jr., blogger Baratunde Thurston (aka Jack Turner) created this video to draw attention to Dr. King’s radical critique of militarism and imperialism, which has such clear relevance to U.S. foreign policy today:

In response to one of the comments on my humorous post “Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti,” I found this article on the Voodoo view of the quake. Vodou is the earth-based religion of Haiti, so it makes sense that a Vodou priest would view his country as a manifestation of Mother Earth.

From the Washington Post:

Voodoo’s view of the quake in Haiti

By Elizabeth McAlister
Associate Professor of Religion, Wesleyan University

Vodouists in the Haitian diaspora are praying on their knees today, just as Catholics and Protestants are. Why did this devastating earthquake have to happen in Haiti, a country already so vulnerable that people live on a dollar a day, where on a good day, the government cannot employ or educate or provide health care for the majority? In Port-au-Prince, they are coping by searching and rescuing, sharing resources, crying, and praying. In Vodou most ritual is about finding balance, putting yourself into equilibrium with the spirits, with your family, and with yourself. In Haiti things are way out of balance. We might say that spirits of death have launched a coup d’état.

My friend and colleague, the artist, educator, and priest of the spirits, Erol Josué, has been praying and crying in Brooklyn. Through Twitter, Facebook, and his cell phone he has learned of at least twenty dead friends in several Port-au-Prince congregations. He told me today that for him, as a spirit-worker, this event is both scientific and symbolic. This is indeed a natural disaster for Josué. But the land in Haiti is a person, he said. We consider it a woman, our mother. “Haïti Chérie,” as the well-known ballad goes. She wants to know, ‘who will make me beautiful, put clothes on me, and take care of my children?’ When you mistreat her, and uproot her trees, when you give her too much responsibility, she is like a woman with cancer. The tumor metastasizes, and explodes.

For Erol Josué, the earthquake was mother nature, the land of Haiti, rising up to defend herself against the erosion, deforestation, and environmental devastation that have been ongoing for the last few decades. “Everybody was smashed to the ground,” said Erol. “Rich and poor. But look how symbolic this is. The Palace is smashed, the legislative building, the tax office, and the Cathedral. The country is crushed. We are all on our knees.” This Vodou priest is not speaking about divine retribution, as has Pat Robertson. God is not punishing us for disobedience. Erol is speaking about a giant natural rebalancing act, a reaction against human dealings with the ecosystem.

I don’t use my cell phone very much. Whenever I visit my father, though, and he is in a pretty good mental space, I love to grab it and call someone back east to whom he hasn’t spoken for a while so that they can chat. Despite Dad’s progressive dementia, he pulls it together for those calls and truly lights up when he hears the voices of people he loves so much. This afternoon, as the phone vibrated to life, I noticed that I had a voicemail….. strange……. when I listened, and heard that it was from the Department of Homeland Security, I realized this was change I could really believe in.

Yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Satan resonded to Pat Robertson’s recent attack. See for yourself why he thought Robertson was making him look bad:

Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll. You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

Another letter writer believed it might be another God who was offended by the Haitians:

We live in a time of agony. The faces of the devastated people in Haiti come to shock us today. But we learn from UNICEF that

… more than 24,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable causes like pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition. Nearly 200 million youngsters are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence.

This is not the pain of simply being human, of the uncurable disease, natural disasters and death that have always been with us. It is the pain of neglect; of avoidable and curable disease, of killing poverty across the tracks from unimaginable wealth. You know this, we all know this. We seem to be trapped.

But still we dream of a world where our security comes from generosity to each other. And many many people are striving to make it happen, and the news is not all bad any means. We need to believe in the possibility of it more.

So I was very happy to see that people coming to this blog in the last 14 hours–after I sent out an email to our large list with the headings of the week’s posts (a list you can join here, which gets a wider range of emails than you can get from the “Join Tikkun Daily” button above)–clicked on the post “The opposite of consumption isn’t thrift. It’s generosity” far more than on any other (over twice as much as the next favorite post). We know the pain of the world, but we come to places like Tikkun to find encouragement for the countercultural belief, that often feels naive to us even though we know better, that we can create a caring world. It can happen. And not only in our immediate circles. We can think big. We can look after each other and all the life on our planet. Breathe in that idea, open to what it will take, not knowing how it will happen. Share the belief, connect, give. We don’t know how but we do know how.

My atheist anti-religious friends will tell me all about Pat Robertson’s vicious words on Haiti. They may not send me all the many words from religious leaders giving a call that is more true to the founding spirits of the great religions. Thanks to Aminah Carroll for sending this piece from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that says all that really needs to be said.

Message from ISNA president Dr. Ingrid Mattson on the Haitian Earthquake

It has been reported that a prominent Christian leader, Pat Robertson, has said that Haiti has been “cursed” by a “pact with the devil.” Fortunately, this is not the mainstream Christian position and my friend, the Reverend Paul Raushenbush, has rejected Robertson’s “blaming the victims” theology. Religious leaders must take a stance against extremist voices in their community, and I am glad to see Rev. Raushenbush respond to Robertson’s ridiculous and offensive suggestions.

As Muslims, we believe that human suffering is not always explainable or understandable. We do know that innocent people suffer all the time, from sickness and natural disaster, and that in such cases, we are required to do two things: First, pray and remember, as the Qur’an says that “to God we belong and to Him we return.” Second, we must help those who are suffering. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, reported in a Sacred Hadith that if we want to be close to God, we should visit the sick and feed the needy. On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will say, “O son of Adam, I fell ill and you did not visit me.” The person will say, “O Lord, how could I visit you when You are the Lord of the worlds?” He will say, “Did you not know that So-and-so fell ill and you did not visit him? If you had visited him, you would have found Me with him [the hadith continues].”

The rest is here.

It’s not an act of God. It’s a natural disaster that we know how to mitigate: in a rich country with good building codes few die. But this is a rich world, so why are there poor countries where tens or hundreds of thousands die?

Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. But how much will we be family again once the crisis is off our front pages?

Once again we fortunate citizens of rich countries write checks to disaster agencies. Once again the people who go from our country to the disaster do all they can in the moment, and we thank them for doing it. Then they, more than the rest of us who find other matters occupying our minds, are faced with the question of what kind of aid helps most in the long term.

“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, give him a fishing rod and he and his family eat forever” goes the saying (and it works even better, all the reports show, if the “he” is a “she”). But in fact the local bully boy takes away her rod, or – mafia-like – makes her pay protection money to keep it, or in capitalist style makes her rent it back, and meanwhile the fish have all been taken by the big boys, whatever their designation: criminal, capitalist, or politician. So the aid agency professionals come to see that only systemic political solutions work in the long run, and they frequently become socialists or some other brand of visionary. But to espouse socialism and get into conflict with the local and global (often US-based) criminal capitalist powers ruins their agencies’ chances of raising large sums during disasters, because the large American public has not faced the same questions about long term solutions and have not been there watching when the donated fishing rods were taken away, and so have not cared enough to agonize about the solutions. So most of the aid workers back off their radicalism, because their salaries and chance to return to help the poor depend on fundraising from the widest-possible public during disasters. They settle for what can realistically be done, and often good things can be done, and often not. The world development profession includes many decent people, but like President Obama, they are hampered by the lack of radical energy in the great American, European and Japanese publics.

So after we write our checks to our preferred agencies, let’s this time put more energy into long term solutions. Tikkun has for the last few years promoted the idea of a US foreign policy based on generosity not domination, symbolized by the idea of a Global Marshall Plan to end world poverty. You may prefer another route. But the idea is to think big, really big. Thinking small is attractive, more personal and manageable. But we can’t afford to only think small, because too many rebuilt villages and businesses have been devastated by the big boys’ trade policies that deny poor farmers’ a fair price for their produce, and by all the many predatory practices of the international money and power system. Port-au-Prince was not unbuilt in a day.