21019: Mason: Haitian Spirituality: Griffiths Part IV (Lay Preachers, Social Conscience) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MariLinc@aol.com

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

Rev. Leslie Griffiths

Well, that's only one of the things I got.  I'm going on, I must catch up
with myself.

The other thing is, I won't have any triumphalistic talk about the Methodist
Church in Haiti -- it's been one struggle from the beginning to the end!  Now,
it's a struggle for Fède.  I mean, it's a struggle, isn't it?  It's a
struggle.  And it was always a struggle.  I've just listed here:

The missionaries came in 1817; a year later, they were kicked out.  From 1818
to 1824, they were persecuted, those early Methodists, with no minister at
all.  There was an earthquake in 1842 that affected the development of the work.
 The ministers started coming back in the early 1840's.  There was dissention
and defection, economic crisis, schools closed down, young men lost to the
ministry for a variety of reasons, resurgent Roman Catholicism with Vatican I
wanting triumphalist Roman Catholicism, there was destruction, buildings burned
down again and again and again, dissention and schism, occupation by the
American Marines, Duvalierism, the election disaster of 1987, hurricanes, droughts,
floods, and revolutions by the bucketful.

Has any group of people ever had to put up with more than that, I'd like to
know!?!  It's one catalogue -- I can only hint at it.  But what I can hint at
in the midst of it is the courage and the faith of those who have lived through
that kind of an agenda.  The Methodist Church in Haiti is not the largest
church by any means -- it's a tiny little church.  But, the integrity and the
courage of the people who have been Methodists through this 173 years is
phenomenal.  I can only hint at it.

Three young men -- Pressoir, Evariste, Bauduy -- who had been brought into
fellowship by the missionaries who came in 1817, finding them thrown out, having
to struggle to hold the thing together themselves, they never went to a
seminary or to a month-long course.  They never went to anything!  But it was them
now -- and I was just talking to somebody who had seen people with machineguns
at his garden wall, just a month ago, talking to him about what it felt like
to have machineguns pointed at you when you're at the front door of your house
-- well, read about these early young men and see the soldiers of the day who
wanted no Protestantism in their midst with their guns outside the door and
these three young men holding on.  I mean, one was a teenager!  And the others
were in their early 20's.

One of them wrote to the other:

Let us strive to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem at the hazard of our lives,
and if our blood is necessary to form the mortar, let us not refuse it, but
give it with all our heart, for God can raise up people more excellent and
valiant than us.

>From the outset, that's been the spirit of a very courageous bunch of people!
 I'd love to have time and leisure to write a biography of the first Haitian
Methodist minister, a forgotten hero, St. Denis Bauduy, who also became the
first Haitian priest of the Episcopal Church when pressures threw him out of the
Methodist Church in 1862.  He was a humble man.  He was a shy man.  He really
was.  He didn't want leadership.  But he opened up the work in Jérémie and
Aux Cayes.  He held up against the odds in Port-au-Prince and in Cap Haïtien.
You Americans would have loved him because, whilst he was collecting money to
buy some land to build the first Methodist Church in Port-au-Prince, he used
the money to make a little profit by doing some trading in coffee, and it
brought the day when that land was bought just that little bit nearer.  A great man!

You'll notice that so far I've not said much about missionaries!  All the
real things that happened in the Methodist Church in Haiti happened in the hands
of other people than missionaries.  But I must mention one, a young man named
Philip Baker -- the only missionary that's ever been produced by the tiny
island of Sark, between France and England.  His parents were very angry with him
when he became a Christian.  When he became a Methodist, they were furious!
When he became a missionary, they almost tore themselves to pieces!  He came to
Haiti in October 1882, and he only lasted 3 weeks.  In that time, yellow
fever took him and he was buried at Poste Marchand, and St. Denis Bauduy, who was
an Episcopal priest by now, celebrated the funeral.  Two of Haiti's leading
poets of the day wrote poems about this young man who'd come to die.  I've told
the story all over England.

A hundred years before that, there were attempts made by England (a very
rapacious country, you know) to take Haiti for itself.  The French were having
troubles back in Paris, so the English wanted it, and 20,000 young Englishmen in
their 20's died in Haiti, whilst England tried to get Haiti for itself --
20,000.  If you go to Haiti today, you don't find much evidence that they were
ever there!  There's a little place called Les Anglais, oh yes, that's one; and
there's a fort at St. Marc that the English built, but it's very hard to find.
Twenty thousand who died, and that's all you got for it!?!

Philip Baker was only there for 3 weeks.  During that time, he went out to
Duplan.  He preached at Duplan -- in the hills above Port-au-Prince -- and many
people gave their lives to the Lord.  I am sure that their descendents, their
grandchildren and their great grandchildren, are still there and you can shake
their hands.  The Gospel is much more powerful than arms and armaments, and
this young man in his 20's, compared with 20,000 young men in their 20's, seems
to me to have achieved a great deal!

Othello Bayard in Cap Haïtien, who was drummed out of the ministry for being
a tentmaker minister (that we heard about earlier), because the Methodist
rules don't allow that, held on to the cause for year after year after year, even
though the Methodist Church didn't recognize him as a minister!  The rules are
sometimes foolish and sometimes we have to be brave about them.  That's what
I learned from the Methodist Church in Haiti, too.

Or Auguste Albert.  Ah, what a man!  A Methodist minister in the 1890's.
Incorruptible!  Oh, what a man!  Incomparable!  Refused a post in Cabinet and led
the campaign for moral purity in the land with great conviction and power.
He was majestic and he was thunderous!  He spoke out against fellow Haitians
who prostituted themselves in the quest for power, for example.  One of his best
friends was a man called Rosalvo Bobo, who himself had Methodist connections.
 "There he is," he said in an editorial in his newspaper, "with the gang
begging for power."  (He might be writing this for the election campaign down in
Haiti today, you know!)  "With the gang begging for power, the man once so
proud, kneeling now before the Baal of politics. He is thrusting out his hand,
seeking the presidency with those who have put on the beggar's tattered garments.
 When principles weaken," he wrote, "nothing can hope to remain upright.
What a disaster!  We have reached our darkest moment."

Well, he also wrote against President Harding about the Occupation because he
couldn't stand the Occupation, not Auguste Albert!  I must read you one
paragraph from that; he even wrote a text at the top of the letter to President
Harding that was this from Micah 6:8:

What does the Lord require of you but that you do what is just, that you love
mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

Then, he wrote the following words:

The domestic affairs of your country are of no particular interest to us.
But during the presidential campaign, when you were the leader with the highest
profile, you spoke out ... There is little point in stirring up the ashes of
the past in order to exhume those horrible events which mark the invasion of
Haiti by America.  They are well enough known.  They have been confirmed by the
various inquiries which have been set up to investigate the facts surrounding
them.  Haiti has been plundered, gagged, and in chains for the last six years.
 Our deep misery has been at the hands of those who are still supervising us.
 We didn't ask for your soldiers, we had no need of them, we have no desire
to keep them here, yet your country continues to deploy them on our territory.
Worse still, we have been feeding them from our poverty these last six years.
 Yet your country is so rich.  You should have respected our poverty and at
least paid for this country holiday you have thought it fit to give to your
brave young men.  [audience response]

That's something, isn't it!?  That's absolutely right!  But, I've got to sort
of leave the last word to another Methodist about Albert.  Just listen to how
he was summed up by Bertholimieu Danache, who was the private secretary to
President Dartiguenave (President of Haiti during the Occupation), in his
memoirs:

He revealed publicly and outspokenly the things which people saw but were
afraid to repeat even to themselves.  He laid open our social and political
wounds, he whipped the spendthrifts, those selling in the Temple, those digging a
grave for their country.  He pilloried them, citing them at the bar of Public
Conscience.  Every one of his speeches was like a cannonball landing among
frogs in marshy ground.  His style was simple but vigorous, familiar yet correct;
his words flowed from his lips with ease and abundance, they found their way
unhindered to the hearts of his listeners.  Many people wondered anxiously
whether the government was going to leave unpunished this audacious use of
language and these appeals to public opinion.  But the Pastor was feared and
respected at the same time; the authorities preferred to turn a deaf ear and leave
things alone in case they were themselves to be a target for the orator.

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


Recorded and transcribed by Marilyn Mason, 1990

© Copyright Marilyn P. Mason, 1990-2004

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