Monday, May 30, 2016

Prayers and Hardship (Trinitarian article)


S.E. Daagbo Hounon Houna 
 S.E. Sossa Guedehoungue

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
June 2016
Prayers and Hardship


When I lived in West Africa (1993-96), I had the unusual experience of hosting lunch in my home for the traditional religious figure known popularly as the Pope of Voodoo.  Not only that, but two weeks later, we hosted the Antipope!  Daagbo Hounon Houna, whose calling card described him as the “Supreme Chief of the Grand Council of the Vodoun Religion of Benin” was a specialist in ritual and divination who had inherited his position as high priest of Ouidah and Supreme Chief.  After Marxist-Leninism fell in Benin in 1990, the newly elected democratic government established a government office to coordinate the very diverse and independent traditional religious communities in the country.  An herbalist and faith-healer, Sossa Guedehoungue, was elected as president of the official “National Community of Voodoo.”  Hounon was pope; Guedehoungue, anti-pope.  As director of the American Cultural Center, I was charged by the U.S. Ambassador, Ruth Davis, to establish friendly links to the leaders of these communities, who exerted a great deal of cultural and political influence in the country.  But these two guys were known to hate each other, and the word on the street was that it was dangerous to let one of them know that you were even talking to the other.  So to avoid the risk of bones being pointed across the table with attendant curses and poisons, we invited each one, with their immediate entourage, to separate lunches about two weeks apart. 

Hounon came first.  At one point in the conversation, he asked about my parents.  I told him sadly about my father’s Alzheimer’s Disease and how we had had to institutionalize him over the summer.  He replied, with appropriate concern and sagacity, “When you visit him next time, get something of him—his nail clippings, or hair trimming—and bring it back to me.  I will make the proper sacrifices and prayers and prepare for you an amulet.  Place it around his neck.  It will bring his memory back and cure him.”  “I’ll see what I can do,” I demurely replied. 

When Sossa came, we had an eerily similar conversation, right down to the request for nail clippings and hair.  But Sossa ended his request with, “I will prepare the right herbs and potions, and say the prayers.  I will make an amulet.  Place it around your neck, and you will always know what to do for your father’s well being.  It will help you deal gracefully with such a hard illness in someone you love.”

These two faith leaders had two very different approaches to the pain of human life. 

I have thought from time to time about my voodoo friends and their different ways of trying to help me and my father.   We often have an approach to prayer and faith like that of Daagbo:  say the right prayers, do the right things, and God will turn back the clock and heal what appears to be without remedy.  Occasionally we experience or hear of stories where it looks very much like God has heard our prayer and miraculously intervened.  And we are very thankful, rightly so. 

But much more often we find that our prayers seem to go unheeded, unanswered.  And we blame God for it, and find ourselves alienated from God, or denying God’s existence, whether we let ourselves admit this to others or even to ourselves. 

And so some of us have come to an approach closer to that of Sossa: pray for strength to keep on giving the right care, saying the right words of comfort and support, and to have the tranquility and peace to accept things we cannot change.

God is the one “in whom we live and move, and have our being” (Acts  17:28).  Rather than being “out there” somewhere, God is beneath and behind all things.  His ultimate purpose is love and health and joy for all his creatures.  And he is constantly working beneath and behind all things to bring this to pass.  That’s why Jesus used healing as his main sign showing the coming of the Kingdom of God, and why he taught us to pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”

To summarize Rowan Williams on this:  God the All-encompassing is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God the All-loving is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of God’s final purpose and sometimes they resist.   But things can come together in the world at this or that moment, and the ‘flow’ of this created world can be eased and more directly linked with God’s final purposes.  On occasion, perhaps a really fervent prayer or a particularly holy life can help the world can open up a bit more to God’s final good purpose so that unexpected things happen, making his good purposes absolutely clear here and now.  That’s what we call a miracle.  We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works.   We don’t see things as God sees them.  But we owe it to God, to God’s creation, and to each other, to think, say and do those things that might give God, as it were, additional room to maneuver. 

This isn’t something we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic.  The Lord’s Book of Blessings is not a mere Book of Spells. 

Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis

Colleagues of C.S. Lewis asked him after his wife Joy Davidman died of cancer what good any of his prayers had done.  Had they changed anything?  Lewis’ reply is famous, if only for its heart-felt nature, “They changed me.” 

To hope for such a thing is enough.  For it is very good. 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

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