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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