Reform Rabbis Attempt to Ride the Intermarriage Wave

Yesterday, the largest body of American rabbis inched closer to acknowledging that they cannot stop interfaith marriages from happening. The Associated Press headline reads: “U.S. Reform rabbis suggest welcoming interfaith couples.” It is astonishing, in a way, to think that such a timid suggestion could still be news in 2010. Instead of wailing and gnashing their teeth before the tidal wave of interfaith families, Reform rabbis now propose to make the best of the situation by putting their efforts into outreach to interfaith families.

I am all for anything that makes Jewish communities more welcoming. I want interfaith children to have the opportunity to experience authentic Judaism, and become knowledgeable and passionate about their Jewish roots. Rabbis engaging with interfaith families is good for the Jews, and good for interfaith children. Especially if the alternative is ignorant children, or negative and bitter feelings about Judaism.

Unfortunately, the task force from the Central Conference of American Rabbis (representing over 2000 Reform rabbis), releasing their report at an annual convention in San Francisco, did not suggest overturning the Reform movement’s formal opposition to rabbis performing interfaith marriages, according to the Associated Press (the report is not yet up online). Instead, they continued to maintain that it is up to each rabbi to decide whether or not to perform such ceremonies. Instead, they proposed creating special rituals to bless interfaith couples.

Okay, I’m sorry, but there is so much irony in welcoming an interfaith family by offering them a separate but unequal ceremony. I suspect my gay and lesbian friends can relate here. I try not to get exasperated about the fact that there are rabbis who will perform gay or lesbian marriages but not interfaith marriages. There’s enough pain to go around here.

And yes, I am someone who has never forgotten that our family rabbi refused to perform my marriage. I realize I was a generation ahead of the trend, since I’m only “half-Jewish by blood,” and my husband is Jewish only in spirit. Some will say we had chutzpah to even ask a rabbi to perform such a union. Others will wonder why we wanted to even be members of this club. If our rabbi had offered us a “special blessing” that was not a legal marriage, as the panel now suggests, would we have had any interest in such a thing? Or would we have gone ahead, as we did, and found a rabbi and minister willing to co-officiate? It is clear to me that we would have done the latter.

And, having experienced the beauty, the affirmation, the resonance of a completely balanced and inclusive ceremony, we went on to seek out this balance for our children, by joining an interfaith families community.

Purim: Celebrating Interfaith Marriage?

Yesterday, I donned some festive garb, and headed to our interfaith community’s Purim celebration. It has been said that most Jewish holidays fit one recurring theme: “They tried to wipe us out, we survived, let’s eat.” Purim fits that model (along with Passover and Hanukkah). Growing up in a Reform temple, the notion that Purim also celebrates an interfaith marriage somehow never came up. Now, celebrating the holiday with my interfaith community seems particularly appropriate.

In the Purim story, Persian King Ahasuerus (apparently a Zoroastrian) chooses Esther in a beauty contest, not realizing that she is Jewish. When the Jews of the land are threatened with genocide, Esther outs herself to the King as Jewish, and convinces him to save her people.

The Purim story intrigues for many reasons. The Book of Esther, while part of the Jewish Bible, is not in the Torah, (the most holy Jewish text comprising the first five books of the Bible), but is thought to date from a much later period, with the story taking place somewhere between 600 and 400 BCE. In fact, oddly enough, the Book of Esther does not mention God. Esther, the heroine, with the help of her Uncle Mordecai, uses politics, diplomacy and feminine wiles to save her people. God gets no credit whatsoever. This, along with the fact that the celebration includes drinking, dressing in costumes, loud noise, and games, makes it a popular holiday with the large secular, atheist and agnostic Jewish contingents, as well as with children. Purim shares a sense of rowdy release from social norms with Christian pre-Lenten Carnival festivities, and both holidays seem to trace their origins to “pagan”  spring fertility rites.

But peering through an interfaith lens, the most radical and transgressive aspect of Purim is the fact that the Jewish community in Persia would have been doomed if Esther had not intermarried. It was only because of her marriage to the Persian king that she was in a place to step up and save her people. What would have happened if she had refused to marry him because he wasn’t Jewish?

Many have tried to explain away the fact of Esther’s intermarriage. Some speculate that she intermarried only because it enabled her to save her people:  exceptional circumstances. Others argue that her intermarriage was acceptable because she was a woman, and Jewish law respects matrilinial descent. More recently, the Purim story has been used as a cautionary tale–the problem is not the intermarriage, per se, but the secular lifestyle and “disengagement” that led to the intermarriage. One group of academics acknowledged that Esther’s marriage saved her people but were somehow able to conclude:  “But the lesson is not that intermarriage is good.”

Intermarriage occurs throughout the Bible: it drives the plot line in many a Biblical story, and not all those who intermarry are women. As a patrilinial interfaith person, I take issue with the idea that Esther’s intermarriage was acceptable only because she was a woman, or because of extenuating political circumstances. Or that she is somehow a heroine in spite of, and not because of, her immersion in Persian culture. It was, precisely, Esther’s cultural fluidity and willingness to intermarry that saved the Jews.

I cannot help hoping that when Jews across the world celebrate Purim, they may, perhaps in a moment of tipsy revelry, open their minds just a little bit more to all that is positive about interfaith marriages: not just ancient, allegorical interfaith marriages taking place in exotic far-off lands, but real, contemporary interfaith marriages.

Interfaith Family Shabbat: Essential Warmth

Recently, I hosted a potluck Shabbat, inviting three other interfaith families from our community. Gathered around the glow of the candles, I discovered once again the essential energy, warmth, illumination I gain from being with “my people”–the interfaith tribe. Collectively, that night, our ancestors included a rabbi from New Orleans, an Episcopal bishop, an Irish Jewish violinist from Dublin, Italian New York Catholics, and a Cuban Santeria priestess.

For our children, it was a chance to experience together the blessings over the wine, the challah and the candles without fear of looking foolish if they got something “wrong.” Our interfaith Sunday School teaches Hebrew literacy and essential Jewish prayers. But I also believe the intent of the Sabbath–the desire to break from the everyday and create a contemplative moment and sense of community–has much greater importance than the ritual details.

Earlier this year, an interfaith child I know felt humiliated when, after struggling with a book of flimsy matches, she lit one Shabbat candle with the flame from the other, and a rabbi who was present grimaced and stated that it isn’t done this way. I know, I know, a ritual isn’t a ritual unless it is performed the same way each time. But rituals evolve, and every Jew of every denomination must pick and choose the rituals to follow from the list of 613 commandments, many of which are so anachronistic as to appear surreal. In fact, lighting the Shabbat candles does not even rate a mention in the 613 commandments: it turns out to be a relatively recent ritual by Jewish standards (less than a thousand years), created by marvelous Jewish women. Furthermore,  lighting one Shabbat candle with the other is permitted according to some rabbis. We could probably stage a debate with a panel of rabbis to discuss the question.

I love the lively Talmudic tradition of questioning everything, but there is a time and place for this sort of semantic and intellectual wrestling, and a time and a place to be in the spiritual moment, focusing on the fire and not the matches. As an interfaith person who has often been excluded by Jewish clergy and institutions, I am highly attuned to the fact that such small incidents of being corrected or rebuffed can play a magnified role in the identity and affiliation choices made by interfaith people.

Some Jewish institutions have made impressive strides in welcoming and including interfaith families. Years ago, I wrote an essay explaining why I believe that, in spite of such progress, there is still a need for interfaith family communities, independent of Jewish institutions. More than ever, I stand by that position. I do not believe the complex identity of interfaith children will be “solved” when Jewish institutions evolve, or when Jewish outreach workers notice the needs of interfaith people. My own goal is to expand access to the unique benefits of celebrating Shabbat with a group composed entirely of interfaith families. In those moments, as we lift up the challah, no one is judging us. Everyone has the right to be there: no one is questioning whether our Judaism is matrilineal or patrilineal, whether our rituals adequately prove our Judaism, or whether we are sufficiently suppressing the Christianity in our families. Every interfaith family is welcome at this Shabbat table: the result feels unique, powerful, and necessary.

Haiti: Interfaith Syncretism, Symbiosis

Today, in the “On Religion” column in the New York Times,  Samuel G. Freedman finally points out that Haitian Vodou is a legitimate, important and much-misunderstood religion. And yet, Freedman’s copy editors persist in using the spelling ”voodoo,” not only refusing to recognize it with the capitalization they give to any other world religion (Buddhism, Hinduism), but maintaining the Americanized spelling associated with Hollywood horror movies, rather than one of the more phonetically-accurate spellings (Vodou, or Vodun)  more true to the French-inflected pronunciation in Haitian Creole.

But returning, as I always do, to the subject of celebrating two religions: Freedman explains that “between 50 and 95 percent of Haitians practice at least elements of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism.” He does not clarify that this wide range reflects a  shift in recent decades. Haiti was once nearly 100 percent Catholic, with the majority also practicing Vodou. But Protestant churches have made inroads in Haiti (and throughout the Catholic world), and Protestant clergy are less willing to tolerate the involvement of their adherents with Vodou. When I lived in northeastern Brazil in the 1990s, I saw the same shift occurring: “believers” (fundamentalist Protestants) did not participate in the Catholic and African celebration of  Carnaval (and did not drink, dance, or wear pants if they were women). This fact had a felicitous personal consequence for me when we lived in northeastern Brazil: our Protestant babysitter was available and willing to work for us while my husband and I went out and “played” throughout Carnaval.

American news reports on Haiti have almost always focused on misery, and Americans may not realize that in Haiti, Catholics celebrate  Carnival in the days before Lent,  just as Catholics in Brazil, New Orleans and Europe do. In Europe, Carnival evolved when the Catholic church absorbed Ancient Roman festivals, and those European pre-Christian elements followed colonists to the Americas, mixing with African and indigenous American rituals to create New World Carnivals.

In my recent essay on celebrating both Catholicism and Vodou, I referred to the intertwining of the African and Catholic pantheon of saints and spirits as “syncretism.” Freedman avoids using this word, perhaps because the Catholic church discourages syncretism, with its implication of  two religions in dynamic equilibrium. On the other hand, the Catholic church has envisioned and encouraged a dance between Catholicism and local cultures, a process referred to as ”inculturation,” in order to deliver Catholic teachings in diverse settings. Inculturation signals respect for cultural differences but also for the boundaries between them. Syncretism threatens those boundaries.

Freedman evades the dangerous implications of the word “syncretism” by referring instead to a “Catholicism in symbiosis with voodoo, a Catholicism in which saints are conflated with African deities.” The word “conflates” implies that the superimposition, the equation of saints and African spirits is mistaken, or negative. Symbiosis, again, implies that two entities remain separate. But I suspect that for many Haitians, Catholicism and Vodou coexist in a marriage so intimate that they are “as one.” Freedman interviewed Vodou priest and religion professor Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, who compared Haitians to those Japanese who perform both Shinto and Buddhist rituals and “see no contradiction or mutual exclusivity.”

Meanwhile, those of us practicing both Christian and Jewish rituals await recognition of our much-misunderstood pathway. Judaism and Christianity have different cultures and rituals, worth highlighting, specifying, preserving. But at the same time, I do not fear allowing the two religions to coexist in my community, my family, my brain and body: personally, after a lifetime of contemplating this conundrum, I see no contradiction or mutual exclusivity.

Interfaith Child at Thirteen: Coming of Age? Bar Mitzvah?

Yesterday, my son turned thirteen. We are still working on a format for his Coming of Age ritual: interfaith children may take longer to reach a point where they want to stand up in front of a community and talk about their religious identity and commitments. Anyway, I do not believe, and Judaism does not dictate, that such a ritual has to occur precisely at the stroke of thirteen. But I admit that a little alarm went off somewhere deep in my Jewish consciousness: Thirteen! Bar Mitzvah! Thirteen! Bar Mitzvah!

In our interfaith families community,  seventh and eighth graders spend two years going through our Coming of Age curriculum. Each student chooses a mentor and a project that involves a community service component. The program culminates in a group Coming of Age ceremony, where each student talks about their project and the community recognizes that they have reached physical maturity, passed through our interfaith education program, and reached an age when they must draw on the ethical principals they have learned to take responsibility for their own actions.

For many families, the group ceremony meets their needs.  But for some families, this community process, more akin to Christian (or Jewish) confirmation than it is to a Bar Mitzvah, is not enough. Some families want an individual ceremony. We want to be able to host extended family and friends from outside our interfaith community: to create a family event on a par with a wedding, to give elderly relatives something to look forward to, especially grandparents who might not be around for the weddings of their grandchildren. We want our children to have the experience of crafting and leading an entire ceremony, to meet a rigorous challenge that both draws on and instills confidence.

In our community, an individual Coming of Age ceremony may or may not involve a Torah reading, and the young person leading the ceremony may or may not read in Hebrew from the Torah. The family may or may not choose to label the ceremony as a Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

Historically, the Bar Mitzvah ceremony evolved in recent centuries:  it is not required by Jewish law. In fact, traditionally, all Jews automatically become a Bar or Bat Mitzvah (daughter or son of the commandments) at the age of 13 (twelve for girls), whether or not they perform any specific ritual. Reaching this age entitles them to lead services, obligates them to follow the Jewish commandments, and officially relieves their parents of responsibility for the child!

In its most essential form, the Bar Mitzvah ritual involves being invited to make an aliyah for the first time—which means going up to the bimah (pulpit) and saying the blessings before and after the Torah reading. Over time, and in different denominations, the tradition has expanded to involve reading the Torah portion itself, reading the haftarah, giving a speech (a D’var Torah) about the Torah portion, and leading many of the Shabbat prayers. But the requirements vary from congregation to congregation, and our family has been to secular humanist Bar Mitzvahs where the Torah was not even present.

When my daughter was thirteen, she chose to have a Coming of Age ceremony in which she chanted the blessings over the Torah in Hebrew—and then read the Torah portion in English. I thought this was a wise decision because she will hear Hebrew blessings throughout her lifetime in every Shabbat service she attends. A Torah portion memorized in Hebrew, while it is a formidable feat, is rarely used again later in life. And for my daughter’s extended family, three-quarters of whom are Christian, the reading of the Torah portion in English had far greater meaning.

So was this a Bat Mitzvah? My daughter and I do not presume to refer to it as such, though my feisty (Jewish?) side tells me she could. My own Bat Mitzvah was entirely “by the book”—Torah portion chanted in Hebrew, haftarah, D’var Torah, all the Shabbat prayers. Often, when people challenge my right to a Jewish identity, I use the fact that I learned to read Hebrew and had a Bat Mitzvah ceremony as Jewish credentials. The Reform movement has encouraged, and even required, that interfaith children accomplish such rituals in order to call ourselves Jews.

In the end, there are an awful lot of loopholes. What constitutes a Bar Mitzvah? And then, inevitably, who is a Jew?

And yet, despite the ambiguities, the essence of the Bar Mitzvah tradition has power, and I claim that power for my children. I stand up and speak to them about who they are, our pride in them, their role in the world. They stand up and learn that they can be poised and articulate in front of our community. They see that their family, their Jewish family and their Christian family, will go to great lengths to be with them at important moments in their lives. They connect to the ancient traditions of Judaism (and by definition, Christianity) and feel the continuity of the generations flow through them.  And they learn, they know, that they can claim all this, and experience the beauty of such a ceremony, no matter what we label it, and no matter what others might say or think about it all.

Deep Pause: Interfaith Sabbath

We are blanketed now in three feet of snow, the outside world has become muffled and distant, and we are forced into a pause one could describe as an extended Shabbat. On the first night of the storm, which happened to be Friday, we had a spontaneous music jam with close friends who walked and skied to our house to play saxophone, ukulele, guitar and viola. On the second night, still without power,  our family huddled by the fireplace, in a pile of pillows and blankets, with the dog, the cat and the guinea pig all snuggled with us for warmth. With no internet or television, my daughter read out loud from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, not exactly the “good book,” but indeed a very good and thought-provoking book that she happens to be reading for 10th grade English. The entire experience was restorative (until it got too darned cold, at which point we moved to a friend’s house).

I was lucky to have many moments like this one in my childhood, growing up in a happy interfaith family. But we  rarely performed the specific rituals of the formal Jewish Sabbath. We went faithfully to religious school every week at our Reform Temple, and we celebrated Passover and the High Holy Days, but Friday nights were pretty secular–devoted to school or social events. My mother, raised Episcopalian, did everything she could to raise us as Jews. But the 1960s and 70s were an assimilated period in Reform Judaism–rather dry, without the joy and juice of the Renewal or Chasidic movements. None of our Jewish friends seemed to celebrate the Sabbath very often, either. It probably didn’t help that we lived in a very Protestant little New England town, filled with white steeples and dominated by a Puritan anathema for displays of emotion or exoticism.

My children, though we are raising them in an interfaith community and not exclusively as Jews, have grown up celebrating Shabbat rituals more frequently than I did. And as often as not, it is my husband who reminds us to light the candles and say blessings on Friday. My husband, who grew up as an acolyte in the Episcopalian church. My husband, who offered to agree to raise our children as Jews.

Instead, I found and embraced the  interfaith spiritual home I had sought all of my life. And my husband followed where I went, helping to pioneer this new pathway, even stepping onto the Board of the Interfaith Families Project after I stepped down as a Board Chair. We are deeply committed, together, and our children see this and it helps to water their deep roots in this radical interfaith soil. And it also helps that our interfaith community, along with many Jewish and Christian communities these days, infuses song, spirituality and even mysticism into old rituals.

So on Friday nights, my daughter is happy to put to use the silver Kiddush cup and candlesticks that she received for her interfaith Coming of Age ceremony when she turned thirteen. My 12-year-old son shows off his mastery of the prayer over the fruit of the vine. Together, we sing the English/Hebrew “camp” version of the blessing over the challah: “Hamotzi Lechem Min Ha’aretz, We give thanks to God for bread. Our voices raise in song together, as our joyful prayer is said: Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam. Hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Amen.”

While  this version of the blessing seemed hokey at first, I like the fact that it incorporates the English, so that if we have non-Jewish visitors, they understand the meaning of the prayer without having to wait for the translation. In our interfaith community, this version feels more inclusive of the Christian spouses, and of the children who are just beginning to learn Jewish rituals, because of the way it weaves in the context.

Even when it’s not Friday night, we try to pause before a meal with friends or family to acknowledge the communion of breaking bread together. Feeling thankful in this sense does not require a creed or dogma; it does not require a belief in God at all. Sometimes, a few words of thanks to our guests for being there is all that is needed. Or sometimes, we use a “grace” we learned at Appalachian folk dance camp. It sounds Buddhist to me: if anyone knows its origins, let me know. It is sung to a jaunty little tune, which can be sung in a round, and the words are: “Thank you for this food, this glorious, glorious food–and the animals, and the vegetables, and the minerals, that make it possible.”

As the snow continues to fall here, we pause to appreciate warmth, electricity, food and friends. Nature is reminding us to stop, unplug, experience the power of the blizzard, and take a deep breath of the frosted air.

Interfaith Community: Why it Matters

 

For the second week in a row, it looks like our interfaith community is going to be snowed out on Sunday. While getting up on Sunday mornings sometimes feels like a sacrifice, now I find myself pining to return, and frustrated about the cancellations. I often describe myself as an interfaith zealot. Why? I grew up on the margins of Jewish life: always a little different, a little suspect, because of my Christian mother. But in our interfaith community, all families are on equal footing, all parents have equal standing, all children are equally welcome. Everyone takes part in our rituals. This radical inclusivity is powerfully seductive for me, after a lifetime of feeling like a religious outsider.

The interfaith families in our community range across a spectrum in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual-orientation, ideology. We are atheists and God-lovers, liberals and conservatives. But our common bond–the shared condition of having created an interfaith family, the desire to build something joyous out of our differences, the determination to see dual religious heritage as something positive and enriching rather than simply as a problem–this bond thrills me.

When we do not meet, I think of all we are missing. Last week, my seventh-grader was supposed to lead our Tu Bishvat gathering with his “Coming of Age prep” class. This week, we were supposed to hear from our Rabbi and Minister about the trip they just took to Israel with their friend, Imam Yaya Hendi, and students from Georgetown. My husband, who once lived in a seminary in Haiti, was supposed to say the Lord’s Prayer in Haitian Creole for us. And the children were supposed to file up to drop smooth stones into the bowl of concerns as we think of the people of Haiti. My teenage daughter was supposed to work, as she does each week, reading stories and helping with crafts in the kindergarten classroom. And we were supposed to schmooze and eat bagels together, and sing together to our rocking house band.

So I’m hoping the deep snow melts soon, and I can return quickly to my community, to my beloved motley crew of non-joiners, reluctant religionists, visionaries, brilliantly cynical secularists, and passionate mystics. We call ourselves the Interfaith Families Project because we are building the community as we go along, never sure exactly where we are going to all end up. All I can tell you is that wherever we are going, that is where I want to go.

Salinger, and Zinn: Interfaith Connections

 

Two American cultural icons died this week–author J.D. Salinger and historian and social activist Howard Zinn–and both of them had interfaith connections. Salinger perches near the top of any list of prominent “half-Jewish” writers–along with Marcel Proust, Gabriela Mistral, Dorothy Parker, Adrienne Rich and Mary Gordon. The fictional Glass family depicted in many of Salinger’s works, including Franny and Zooey, mirrored his own family: a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. Salinger created what may have been the first important fictional treatment of an interfaith family: the theme of half-Jewishness was clearly resonant for him, if also troubling.

Zinn, on the other hand, was culturally Jewish, though his work for peace and justice put him in the vanguard of those working across religious boundaries, starting in the Civil Rights era. “I find inspiration in Jewish stories of hope, also in the Christian pacifism of the Berrigans, also in Taoism and Buddhism,” Zinn told Tikkun magazine.

Zinn had an important connection to two prominent black/Jewish interfaith families. Author of the essential People’s History of the United States, Zinn spent most of his career as a history professor at Boston University. But from 1956 to 1963, he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he mentored both Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman, both of whom went on to marry Jewish men.

Alice Walker called Zinn “the best teacher I ever had.” Her later marriage to a Jewish lawyer was brief, but her daughter Rebecca Walker has written an important memoir on being a biracial, interfaith child. Marian Wright Edelman has had a long and happy marriage to law professor Peter Edelman. In her book Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, Edelman wrote about the profound effect Zinn had on her, an impression that I cannot help but think opened her mind to the eventual possibility of interfaith marriage. “Howie not only lived what he taught in history class by breaching Atlanta’s segregated boundaries, but stretched my religious tolerance beyond childhood limits,”  wrote Edelman, a minister’s daughter. “I felt shock and confusion when he announced in class that he did not believe in Jesus Christ. There were few Jewish citizens in my small South Carolina hometown. Through him I began to discern that goodness comes in many faiths and forms which must be respected and honored.”

The admiration was mutual. In 2006, when asked to assess the possible candidates for President, Zinn described Barack Obama as “cautious.” His suggested candidate, he said, would be Marian Wright Edelman.

Fela: On Being Yoruba, Christian, Muslim

Our family saw “Fela” on Broadway last weekend: a remarkable musical that depicts the life of Nigerian political dissident and Afro-Beat musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. With ears acutely tuned to interfaith themes by now, my 15 and 12-year-old children remarked on a climactic scene in which Fela evokes many gods, or God by many names, including Allah, and the Yoruba spirits such as Shango. “It was interesting, Mom, because he wasn’t just being politically correct by naming them all, he lived with them all,” one of the kids remarked.

The idea of “being both” has a long tradition in Africa, where Christianity and Islam joined but never completely supplanted original African religions. Fela, the son and grandson of Protestant ministers, wrote blistering critiques of the imported religions of the colonial oppressors.  As South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”  Fela grew up in a Nigeria wracked by war between Christians and Muslims in the state of Biafra; violence between Christians and Muslims continues in Nigeria today. Fela would sneak out of his parents’ middle-class Christian home to attend traditional Yoruba ceremonies, and he reclaimed and reformulated this African religion for himself, filtering it through his experiences with the American black pride movement, and then transmitting it to the world in his music.

Listening to the powerful evocations of Shango, Egungun and Yemeja in the Broadway show, it was hard to keep my mind off of Haiti, since these Yoruba spirits also live on, fused with Catholic saints, in Haitian Vodou. At the end of the play, Fela delivers his mother’s coffin to the Nigerian military to protest their attack on his compound, and the cast members file on stage carrying small coffins. It was my children who noticed that one coffin, presumably in the last two weeks since the earthquake, had been marked “Haiti.”

Haitian Spirits

 My mother-in-law has a sequined Vodou flag hanging above her fireplace in Connecticut. When people inquire, she explains that it depicts the ship Imamou transporting the Haitian dead to the land of the spirits. Visitors tend to go quiet as she delves into the belief system of Vodou, the national religion of Haiti.

This week, Imamou groans through the waves, tragically overloaded with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of passengers–Haitian earthquake victims. As the horrific news and images swirl around us, I wait to hear whether my husband’s skills as a Creole-speaker and relief worker will mean he gets on a plane. I know he wants to go: of all the countries he has worked in around the world, Haiti is his first love, never forgotten.

In 1983, I went to visit him while he was working in a home for street boys in Petionville. In preparation, I read Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, a seminal work on Vodou written by a filmmaker in the 1950s. Then I read Robert Farris Thompson’s influential Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, a book describing how West and Central Africans brought their religions to the New World and preserved them by interweaving them with Catholicism in places including Haiti, New Orleans, and Brazil.
I arrived in Haiti during the week when the Christian holidays of All Souls, All Saints and the Day of the Dead converge with the most important Vodou celebrations. In the night, we heard drumming, and got out of bed to walk until we saw a circle of dancing Haitians dressed in white. An eager journalist, I wanted to approach the circle. My husband, with healthy respect for the culture in which he was living, convinced me that we should return to bed, and not intrude.

Somehow, our lives have continued to circle the Atlantic in a mysterious pattern echoing the slave trade. We lived for three years in West Africa, including trips to Benin, Togo and the Yoruba centers that so informed the religion of Africans in the Americas. Later, we found ourselves living in northeastern Brazil, where African religions absorbed Catholic saints and symbols to become Candomble.

So why write about all this on my interfaith blog? A lot of folks (Pat Robertson, David Brooks) are making ignorant comments this week about ”voodoo” (a Hollywood construct) and Haiti. For those who want a deeper understanding, I recommend the two books above–both are authoritative, deep yet lively. Joseph Campbell wrote the introduction to Deren’s book.

In my own interfaith journey, Haiti provided the first thrilling encounter with complex, compelling and obviously syncretic religious practice. Later, I came to see all religions as syncretic: evolving together, influencing each other, intertwining and swapping information like strands of DNA. In Haiti and Brazil and Africa, adhering to more than one religious worldview simultaneously is often central, not marginal. In my quest for interfaith acceptance, I take inspiration from my time in these rich and deeply spiritual cultures.

Sorting through our photos from Haiti, trying to choose one for this post, I found many images of the street boys who taught my husband Creole. They should be men now in their prime, and it is very hard to think about their fates this week. As others have pointed out, death is always close in Haiti, and the dead remain an intimate part of the family. After the spirit Agwe ferries Imamou through the waters, their souls are home again in Ginen (Guinea), the land of the ancestors. The idea provides comfort, much like the consoling Judeo-Christian idea of heaven as green pasture. So I chose a photo of a bit of green in Haiti’s mountains, remnants of farmland and trees, in an attempt to envision a peaceful place for all of these souls, and a remnant of hope for a future of ecological and agricultural renewal in Haiti.