21018: Mason: Haitian Spirituality: Griffiths Part III (Mystical vs Cartesian, Whole Gospel) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MariLinc@aol.com

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

Rev. Leslie Griffiths

In the mind of the Haitian peasant then, indeed in the minds of all Haitians,
it could all very properly be held that the non-spiritual reasons for
conversion are perfectly legitimate.

Price-Mars, who wrote in 1928 that seminal book that I told you about
earlier, offers this analysis:

The primitive African [Haitian] mind confused an object with its image.
There is no notion of causality in one direction or responsibility in the other.
The primitive mind refers everything to an occult power present in everything.

Price-Mars calls this a mystical mentality, which gives birth to the external
world.  There's nothing out there which has an objective, independent
character.  Physical happenings or phenomena, biological chains of events, all find
their meaning in the realm of the mystical coalescence in the mind.  The
reasons why people convert -- economic, medical, security, peer pressure -- that
Métraux and Hodgson identified are not at all evidence of a lack of sincerity on
the part of the people who convert.  They are rather a demonstration of the
unfolding associations in the primitive mind (liaisons déroulantes), where
physical betterment and spiritual allegiance all flow together from the same
mystical source.  So it's wrong to take a Western analytical view and say, "They're
only in it for ..."  There is no difference in the world view that sees the
wellbeing of the body in exactly the same way as the wellbeing of the spirit --
it's all flowing from the same source which is where the wholeness of our
being resides!

Now, the negative aspects of this are only too clear.  It can lead to
fatalism and there is indeed throughout Haitian Voodoo the philosophy of Bondye bon,
you know, you can do nothing -- God tells you what to do -- He directs you --
that's it -- finished -- there's no notion of causality or responsibility,
very often.  And that negative aspect is a mighty factor to encounter.

But the positive side of this analysis is very clear.  It offers very
creative possibilities and it imposes, in my view, a clear imperative:  No
presentation of spiritual values can be undertaken in a vacuum, amongst people who
cannot or do not separate the spiritual from the physical.

The Haitians may be holding for us in Western society a truth that we have
lost since the philosophy of René Descartes and the Enlightenment -- the
separation of the physical from the spiritual.  They may be holding onto something in
trust for those of us who have diminished the spiritual to some kind of
private inner world, when it belongs to the physical outer, which is shot through
with the glory of God and the sense of the grandeur of God!

Indeed, I believe -- and I've learned it in Haiti, having come from Cartesian
approaches to philosophy and the history of ideas -- I have rediscovered in
Haiti this richer understanding, this far deeper world view that sees no
separation between the physical and the spiritual.

And so, a primitive mind it might be.  But primitive doesn't mean backward or
underdeveloped.  It means first or original!  In the Methodist Church the
positive aspects of this analysis were worked out in an approach to evangelism
that yoked the spiritual and the physical aspects of reality inelactably
together.  You couldn't separate them!

Marco Dépestre, one of our great ministers of this century, wrote a wee
little booklet in 1957 called Experimental Rural Evangelism in Haiti.  In that,
it's just incredible what he holds together as he talks about evangelism!  And
all that I've said up until now must be held together.  Having been a government
agronomist, he said:

... My former concern as a Government Agronomist for land and people in
relation to productivity was transferred to a higher plane where land and people
are considered not merely as agents of production but where the land and work
can minister also to the spiritual needs of the people.

That's it!  He's not changed from being an agronomist because he has become a
Methodist minister!  He now sees all his skills applied to affirming people's
humanity in a world that God gave us and within which we are to find our
identity and our dignity and our value as the Children of God.

Well, the things he put on for those he wanted to teach, he didn't dismiss
bush medicine or herbal remedies, but he recognized their limitations.  He
turned his attention to the main source of livelihood for Haitians, the land.  Most
of it in the mountains, etc., etc., etc.  Pigs, all kinds of things.  Yes, I
had to deal with pigs, too!  There's a marvelous breed of pigs in the slums of
Port-au-Prince at the moment -- I've never seen anything quite like that --
down at La Saline.  Magnificent pigs there!  They love it!

"We worked by way of preaching and giving talks," he said.  "We used
audio-visual aids; we made and put on simple plays; we availed ourselves of the
willingness of some State institutions to cooperate with us (Adult Education Office,
the National Service of Agriculture, the Public Health Service, and the
UNESCO Training Center in Jacmel, a competent medical service available to the
peasants in the rural community, and so on and so forth)."

In the context of a course that had Bible training, the inculcation of
spiritual values, the development of a spirituality, the learning about the context
within which God did his significant thing in Jesus Christ, all on the same
syllabus!

And, I think that if you asked Marco Dépestre how he could do that, he would
be surprised at the question, as I think most Haitian people would!

Why shouldn't you have it all together!?!  It's up to us who got into this
bifurcation between reason and faith to give the explanations, not those who
have held together what was meant to be held together from the very beginning!

So, I offer my view that the Methodist Church of Haiti has offered a Whole
Gospel which affirms the inseparability of body, mind, and spirit and spells out
that message in a program which, if applied, could turn this earthly republic
into the Kingdom of Heaven.

And I think we would do ill to underestimate that.  And here in Florida, as
we think about Haitian people, I think we would do well to seek from them that
rediscovery of a view of the world that doesn't see it compartmentalized
artificially by the human reason in the way we have been doing for the last 200
years.

And indeed they're in touch with primitive Methodism, if I may use the word
primitive again.  I mean, I've always got to quote Charles Wesley.  From the
house in which I live in London, I look out a window and I see his tomb, where
he was buried.  He is my hero and every day I turn over a page of the 1780
hymnbook and read another of his hymns!  And Methodism stood, perhaps not against
the tides necessarily of the French Revolution or the revolutionary forces in
England (we'd had our revolution a hundred years earlier -- pity John Wesley
wasn't around then), but certainly stood against this incursion of reason,
desiccated reason, which everybody else was into at that time!  I mean, Charles
Wesley wrote:  "My God, I know, I feel Thee mine", with feeling and knowledge
held together creatively!

Charles Wesley wrote these wonderful words that really were corking a snook,
as we say in England, but you wouldn't understand that at all in the United
States of America:  "Where reason fails with all her powers, there faith
prevails and love adores."  Reminding me of the words of Blaise Pascal from the 17th
century, who stood against Descartes also:  "The heart has its reasons that
reason cannot understand."

Holding it all together!  A Whole Gospel!  For the whole person.  In a world
that was given us by God in which we are called to be whole.  Faith plus
reason.  Religion plus politics.  The spiritual plus the physical.  All held
together.  No dualism.  And THAT, I believe, is one of the things you United
Methodists should go looking for, cap in hand, from Haitian people who've still got
it together BEFORE the culture that reigns here will drive a wedge in them too,
between their faith and their reason!

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



Recorded and transcribed by Marilyn Mason, 1990

© Copyright Marilyn P. Mason, 1990-2004

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