Making Sense of Haiti

Sightings 1/21/2010  
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School


Is the Devil a Black Man?
by Spencer Dew


In what has now become a much-circulated clip, Pat Robertson makes sense of the catastrophic Haitian earthquake as the latest in a string of curses delivered by God to Haiti’s people.  Robertson’s interpretation of this catastrophe, whether we find it repellent or compelling, offers an excellent example of one of the ways religion functions:  Robertson reiterates a reassuring framework of meaning in the face of experiences which call such frameworks into question.  The earthquake, rather than evidence of the random and senseless nature of human existence, provides for Robertson evidence of God’s existence and ongoing, partisan involvement in human history.  Robertson’s theology provides comfort, too, in its categorization of the victims of this tragedy as deserving of their fate, insulating Robertson from the agony of identifying too closely with these wounded, mourning, homeless, and hungry fellow humans.  Robertson may be moved by this suffering – his remarks were delivered as the Christian Broadcasting Network raised money for earthquake relief – but his religious anthropology renders this suffering, in his words, “unimaginable,” a stark contrast to anthropologies that urge empathetic relations.  


For Robertson, the Haitian people are markedly other, a tone that carries through his version of the nation’s history:  “They were under the heels of the French,” he says, “You know, Napoleon III, or whatever.  And they got together and swore a pact to the devil.  They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.  True story.  And so the devil said, OK, it’s a deal.  And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.  But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”  This story is, of course, far from true.  Robertson offers here a typical demonization of the Voodoo religion and a Christian distortion of the legend of the 1791 Bois Caiman ritual.  Yet Robertson, one imagines, finds animal sacrifice and blood vows repellent, and he has no reason to be accepting of any religion other than his own, ruling them all false and therefore damnable.  In the clearly defined narrative Robertson insists upon, the followers of God can expect rewards while to the followers of the devil come destruction, blood, and wailing.  The troubling aspect of Robertson’s remarks, however, is not the myths he offers to make sense of the world, but what he leaves out of his thumbnail history of Haiti:  Unmentioned in his summary is the word “slavery.”  The “true story” that Robertson occludes is that Haiti, the first country to be founded by former African slaves, owes its origin to armed uprising.  What began as raids on plantations became full scale revolutionary war, with people who had been regarded as chattel claiming their liberty via the blood of their former “masters.”  


From Nat Turner to Fred Hampton, the armed, independent black person has remained a nightmare image to those who benefit from white privilege in America, an image, indeed, not unlike Cotton Mather’s description of Satan incarnate in New England, that “Black Man” with the power to destroy the social order.  Haitian Independence was an event interpreted by much of the white, slave-owning world of the time as catastrophic.  That “they” would dare – and be able – to seize power called into question preexisting systems of meaning-making as surely as any earthquake.


The image of black slaves shedding their chains and taking up arms contributes far more than any hobgoblins of the evangelical imagination to the historical “curses” that have kept Haiti poor and troubled.  The history of American relations with Haiti has been indelibly tainted by America’s true devil – the lingering effects of our own schizophrenic founding as a nation insistent on liberty yet practicing slavery.  Just as racist terror helped shape the stereotype of Voodoo as devil worship, so too racist attitudes have dominated the history of American relations with Haiti, from the fearful to the patronizing, from clandestine political machinations to occupation by military force.  Hopefully, the current attention on Haiti (for those of us who reject dismissive metaphysical explanations such as Robertson’s) will prompt Americans to examine the racism embedded not just in foreign and domestic political history but, indeed, in our own minds.  Without honest confrontation of the legacies of our past as a slave society, some “they” will always be demonized and some “devil” will always be imagined as a mask for our earthly hatreds and fears.


References:


Pat Robertson’s clip:  http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001130024


Previous Sightings columns on the 1791 Bois Caiman ritual: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2008/0501.shtml and http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2009/0514.shtml


Spencer Dew is an instructor in the department of theology at Loyola University, Chicago.

The Sacrament of Monastic Profession

Photo:  Before the Profession of Vows Liturgy, 
Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, TN.  2010

So you say that there are only seven sacraments?  Really?  No way!  What about the burial office?  And what about monastic profession?  I believe that there are more than seven sacraments--external, visible signs of an inward spiritual grace.  For me, I cannot imagine grace being contained and complete in mere seven.  More of that later...

On the Feast of the Confession of St. Peter (Jan. 18th), I professed simple vows in the Order of St. Anthony the Great.  The "OPC" Brothers and Sisters are a mixed contemplative community in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, GA.  Founded in 2006 by Abbot Kenneth Hosley, OPC, the young order is in process to seek full recognition by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church.  To date, we have 8 members under vows and several postulants.  We seek to embrace a rule of the contemplative life that helps teach others the richness of the Christian spiritual tradition and cause renewal in our Church.

My heart was full that night;  God has called me down a new road in my life and one that gives voice (or silence!) to a very important part of me.  More over, I had a lot of dear friends present with me--and many who were unable to be there praying for me--which impressed upon me the love that so many have for me and our Church.  I was, and still am, in awe.

As part of my discipline, I decided to write an icon of our Order's name-saint, Anthony the Great and present it to the Order upon my profession.  Admittedly, I got the idea from seeing the Icon of the Brotherhood of Gregory the Great.

It is the largest icon to date that I have completed.  It was exciting to see the image come alive and then to customize it with important emblems from the Order.  I painted a frame to surround the saint and placed the Order's initials in each corner, OPC, which is Ordo Precis Contemplativae or "Order of Contemplative Prayer."

The flash does do justice to the brilliant color.  Anthony's hands are holding a scroll with the Order's motto, Silentio Coram Deo, or "Silence before God." I began this icon at the beginning of January, and it helped me get through the GOE exams!  I can see an improvement in my hand each time I write an icon, plus a willingness to embrace imperfection (which is something that I've been working on for years).  The icon was blessed during a Eucharist in the Seminary's Chapel by our Associate Dean of Community Life.  It was graciously received by my abbot and will travel to Atlanta to live with our Order.

~Silentio Coram Deo

New Year's Blessings To You

World Without End

The 30,000 foot view of creation (taken from an airplane). By the author.

John Donne, in his Christmas sermon delivered at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1626, opens with a rather pointed message:

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at the first as his cross at last.  His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day.[1]

I have always appreciated the reminder that Donne points towards—the connection of Bethlehem and Golgotha, that Christmas cannot be separated out from Good Friday.  In fact it is an even more appropriate statement of the whole of salvation history, that God as author purposes creation to move towards its ultimate fulfillment in the Kingdom.  This imagery is even reflected in the collect from the Vigil of the Nativity of the Lord:

O God, who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption: vouchsafe; that as we joyfully receive thine Only-begotten Son for our Redeemer, so we may with sure confidence behold him when shall come to our Judge, even Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord: Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.  Amen.[2]

So we come to the title, “World Without End,” a traditional ending for prayers in the catholic tradition.  Christmas, the birth of God’s Eternal Word born into our very midst, is the ultimate beginning of our salvation.  It is God’s most sacred action in loving God’s creation.  The powers and principalities of this world, even from the tender birth of a babe in the manger, see this Jesus as a threat to their world.  Recall Herod’s quest to quash this new king and resulting slaughtering of the innocents throughout the land.  This is also a sign of the threat to the Kingdom that has also endured throughout time.  And yet, the Kingdom, and the visible Body of Christ on earth the Church, stands as the judgment upon it.  Christians in every time and place work assiduously for justice, peace, and love to bring to fulfillment God’s eternal purpose.

The whole of creation sings out, “Glory to God in the Highest Heaven.”  We join with the angels’ song to add our hearts and voices in proclaiming God’s redeeming love to the world.  While so much of this has been lost in the commercialization of our culture today, remember that there is no Christmas without a Good Friday.  Easter is around the corner and it is more glorious than any Wal-Mart super sale.  Thanks be to God! 

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[1] The Showing of Christ, Sermons of John Donne.  Edmund Fuller, ed.  (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 76.

[2] Missale Anglicanum, The English Missal, 3^rd altar ed. (London: W. Knott & Son, 1934), 12.