21016: Mason: Haitian Spirituality: Griffiths Part I (Whole Gospel, American Occupation) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MariLinc@aol.com

Corbetters,

With the recent string of posts having to do with spirituality and Haiti, I
have dug into my electronic archives and come up with a document which I
believe could be most instructive to us; as well as encouraging to the Haitian
Spirit!

It is the transcript of a talk entitled "What We Can Learn From the Methodist
Church of Haiti", given by the Rev. Leslie Griffiths (former missionary to
the Methodist Church of Haiti; author of "History of Methodism in Haiti",
Imprimerie Méthodiste - D.E.L., Port-au-Prince, Haïti, 1991; and currently a
religion commentator for the BBC) at the Convocation on United Methodist Haitian
Ministries, held in Miami, FL, November 10-12, 1990.

Current contact info for Griffiths:

Rev. Dr. Leslie J. Griffiths, M.A.
Superintendent Minister
Wesley's Chapel and Leysian Centre
49 City Road
London, EC1Y 1AU
UK

Please bear with me as I post this most refreshing document, Part by Part
(total of 5 Parts, bearing in mind the space limitations for content of
individual text emails).

It's going to be well-worth-the-read as we struggle anew with an American
Occupation, anti-Vodou campaign, etc.

Marilyn

--------------

What We Can Learn From the Methodist Church of Haiti (Part I)

Rev. Leslie Griffiths

Well, I'm just delighted to be here as part of this.  I must say that having
heard so much about the nature of the phenomenon of an American response to a
new Haitian presence in Florida and in other parts of the United States, that
I'm very glad to have the opportunity to address the subject that's been given
to me, which might suggest to us that we ought also to be looking to Haitian
people as those from whom we can learn much about the human beings we are and
put ourselves back in touch with some human instincts that perhaps in our
western and civilized and sophisticated society we often lost.  So, I see the
subject I have been given as offering an opportunity to ask ourselves the
question, "What can we receive from Haitians?" instead of all the time, "What do we
need to do for these people who come problematically into our midst?"

And I want to begin by, and it's only proper for me to do so, paying my own
tribute to the Haitian people.  I never thought, being a Welshman, that any
other people on God's earth could get into my gut the way that the Haitian people
have, and yet that's precisely what has happened!

I was raised in Wales in a situation of abject poverty and, as often happens,
one's education alienates one from one's own background.  After ten years of
studying or teaching or researching in universities in Great Britain, I
discovered that when my curriculum vitae went to our Missionary Society, instead of
seeing the diplomas and certificates and accomplishments that I was very proud
of, they had seen that I had done French at some rather inferior level early
in my career.

So, instead of being the Director of a seminary and changing the world, I
became a pastor in Haiti, where I didn't speak the languages, where I didn't know
the culture, and where I was totally deskilled.  And there I was, again an
accident of circumstance, instead of being comfortably in a town alongside other
people of a similar educational background to myself, thrust into a country
circuit at that time of 48 churches -- Petit-Goâve.  The very first people who
came to see me were Fède Jean-Pierre [in the audience] and his then girlfriend
-- now his wife -- Violette.

I became a Bishop before I was ordained, and that is what has given me a
distaste for ever being a Bishop again!  I spent the first year travelling around
the 48 churches, finding them.  There I was in Haiti with 10 years of higher
education, with a sophisticated educational input into my being that had
alienated me from the dire poverty and the kind of background I had come from, now
with an illiterate Haitian peasant as my teacher and with Haitian people
teaching me about their culture.

I saw the world through the Haitian peasant's eyes and I swear to you that it
was Haiti that put me back in touch with my earliest self, made me a whole
person again, and gave me -- if I have anything to offer -- so much, that I now
feel I must share the nature of Christ and my conviction that it's in Christ
that somehow God has done something radically different, which can and which
indeed must change the world.

So, I offer my personal testimony as one who stands in deep debt to all that
Haiti has done for him.  And therefore I'm not going to play act at this
business of "Let's be open to receive from Haitians".  I mean it because I have
experienced it!

But I want to begin somewhere else in the presentation that I offer you.  I
want to say that the deepest thing that I have learned from the Haitian
Methodist Church is what it means to preach a Whole Gospel.  When I went, I was
highly educated and able to do nothing.  It's what they call in French, Tête bien
faite, which means your head's all dressed up and ready for Christmas, but your
hands and your body can't do very much at all.  And in the time that I was in
Haiti, I found myself doing -- and this is simply a selection from the list
-- the following things:  planting trees, dealing with taking the salt out of
seawater, teaching the skills of literacy, doing Bible study in sophisticated
church premises or under trees out in the countryside, training people for
citizenship, farming, animal rearing, preaching and witnessing to the good news of
Christ, drilling wells, running and administering day schools and summer
camps.  That is just to give you a flavor.  And it goes on all the time and it's
part of the ordinary everyday ministry of the Methodist Church in Haiti.

Now, what I want to do here is try and analyze the forces that have produced
a view of the Gospel in that whole way, and then I want to go on to draw some
conclusions from that analysis.

It was in the late 1920's up through to the early 1940's, I believe, that a
significant shift in the style and character of the Methodist Church in Haiti
took place.  The focus became no longer the town dweller who had dominated
nearly the whole of Haiti's life and Haitian Methodism's life.  It shifted to the
peasant.  The reasons for this are complex.  But certainly the presence of
United States Marines in Haiti at that time was a significant factor.

The Occupation, as I'm sure most of you know, took place over a period of
nearly 20 years, from the years 1915-1934.  During that time, Southern Marines
under poor leadership with racist world views came to administer a country that
was full of black people or mulatto people, although for the occupier there
was no difference, they were all gooks or niggers.

I must say I have nothing to gain from making this analysis.  It pains me
enormously especially since at the same time I could offer a similar analysis of
what British soldiers were doing in Egypt in order to safeguard the Suez
Canal, as the occupation in Haiti was to safeguard the approaches to the Panama
Canal!  So I take no pride or pleasure from offering the analysis -- but during
the period of occupation, there was an intellectual resistance at first,
particularly on the part of those who had held power and resented losing it, and
that was significant and impressive in its way.

But that faded out and with the arrival in power of a president named Louis
Borno, who really was the nadir, I believe, of Haitian governments, although
there was little violence under his presidency.  I think that the shift in the
struggle against imperialism moved to Haitian country people under the
leadership of Charlemagne Péralte and caco groups, groups of country people who
gathered around for guerilla warfare and to struggle against the occupier with
whatever means they could find at their disposal.  And it was the arrival at the
focal point of the nation's attention of country people leading the resistance
that enabled the intellectual people of Haiti, as well as the country people,
to begin to give value to the Haitian peasant in a new way.

Indeed, to give value is one way of putting it.  To mythicize the Haitian
peasant, I believe, also.  To romanticize Africa, even.  But, whichever way you
look at it, the unification of all Haitians in this struggle against the
external forces of the American occupation produced possibly the richest vein of
Haitian culture in the history of free and independent Haiti.  Novels, poetry.

The most famous novel, La Gouverneur de la Rosée, idealizes a peasant named
Manuel, who makes a Christlike act of self-sacrifice in order to heal the
communities where there's been a vendetta and a feud and it is his self-offering
that brings healing.  And so that is part of the mythicization process.
Then think of this poem by Carl Brouard, a strange man, surrealistic in many
ways.  But the poem is about the Haitian peasant.  It's called You.  I read it
for your benefit in a translation in English, you will be glad to know.

You,
the rabble,
the filthy,
the stinking,
peasant women coming down from our hills,
baby in belly,
horny old men, toiling on the land,
feet drilled by vermin;
whores,
and you,
the decrepit, dragging yourselves along
in the stench of your wounds, thick with flies.
You,
all of you common people,
stand up!
Now for the clean sweep.
You are the pillars of society --
You get out
and it all collapses, like a house of cards.
Then, then,
you will know you are a tidal wave
whose power remains hidden.
O wave!
gather yourself,
boil up,
roar,
till under your shroud of foam,
nothing remains, nothing
but what is clean through and through,
scoured, well washed,
bleached right down to the bone.

The great irony of people whose physical exterior has been presented to us as
dirty, being the means through which the cleansing of the nation will happen!

Now that was how the poets and the writers were seeing things.  Not only
that, it brought in a whole strain of ethnography and anthropology that began to
give some statistical backing to those imaginative insights.  Melville
Herskovitz -- his Life in a Haitian Valley, for example, done under the auspices of
the United Nations, came out in 1937.  C. L. R. James -- The Black Jacobins --
1938, again an analysis of the common people of Haiti and their struggle for
independence, this time from the French.  James Leyburn -- The Haitian People,
the classic that's been reprinted many times, was published in 1945.

But, having said all that, the great work, the seminal work by the greatest
of Haiti's intellectual masters, was a book called Ainsi Parla l'Oncle (Thus
Spoke our Uncle, although uncle is not really the way to translate l'Oncle) by
Jean Price-Mars, which came out in 1928.  One of his pupils, of course, and
greatest admirers was Papa Doc François Duvalier himself.

Through all this intellectual ferment at a time of military occupation, the
Africanness as opposed to the Europeanness of the Haitian psyche came to be
given pride of place.  This was where you found your commonality in the struggle
against outside forces.  The peasant was idealized and came center stage.

This also brought of course the Voodoo religion as an integral aspect of the
peasant's life into the open.  And I am aware that I am just giving broad
brush strokes on the canvas to create some elements for a picture.  The peasant
and his world view and his religion came into the center of the stage.  At the
same time, significant numbers of peasant people started turning towards
Protestant churches.  This was unusual because the syncretism between the Voodoo
religion and Roman Catholicism is well enough attested.  They started turning
towards the Protestant churches which had for over a century been stuck in towns
and cities.  This movement was centered in the plains beyond Petit-Goâve, but
there was also evidence of the same in Aux Cayes and around Jérémie, out on
the southwestern peninsula.  Interestingly, the figures for the Methodist Church
at that time -- just listen to them! -- reflect this coming towards the
Church of people from a Voodoo and a peasant background.  In 1931, there were 516
communicant members of the Methodist Church; there were 527 people on trial for
membership -- more than there were members!  That's not the way the figures
normally look at all!  But it was reflecting this arrival of these new forces
from unexpected backgrounds into the bosom of the Church.

Add to that, Petit-Goâve and Jérémie were run at that time by non-ordained
but set-aside church ministers -- Alain Clérié and Pierre Nicholas.  The Church
was in total disarray!  Its ordained ministers incapable of providing
leadership of any real quality.  Deep quarrels had caused a schism in the Church and,
if it had not been for these so-called non-ordained but set-aside ministers at
Jérémie and Petit-Goâve, there would have been no capacity to respond to this
new demand.  I've always said and my teachers in seminary taught me the
principle -- and I've never found it disproved -- It's lay people who are the
missionaries of the church; they discover the new territory; ordained people make
the maps afterwards.  That's pretty much the way I see it.

It was, then, despite the unhappiness at the very heart of the Methodist
Church at that time, a happy conjuncture in view of the missionary opportunity
that this new conscientization on the part of the Haitian peasant was presenting
to Methodism in those days.

-----to be continued--------


Recorded and transcribed by Marilyn Mason, 1990

© Copyright Marilyn P. Mason, 1990-2004

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