Offerings and Other Transactions

Nothing leaves its fingerprints on our relationship to the spirit like our experience of love.

The point was made in a recent podcast that most of us don’t understand love, just transactions and obligation. We don’t even recognize love—it’s literally alien to us.

I asked papa once why the lwa ‘need’ offerings from us, since they are clearly cosmic powers. Why in the world does the spirit of love and self-sacrifice (Ezili Danto, as I experience her) need whiskey from me? What could I possibly give her that she needs?

Every penny I’ve ever earned wouldn’t be enough. Everything I’ve ever treasured wouldn’t be enough. Hell, my body wouldn’t be enough. My soul wouldn’t be enough.

The response was… I had to think about it for awhile, but in retrospect I am touched beyond words at its implications.

We can’t give the spirit anything. They don’t need anything from us. They can use the things we give them, but they don’t need what we do.

At first, I heard this as a door slammed on love. Love by way of giving gifts to make up for the burden of my presence was all I knew, and as much as I knew how sad that sounds, it was all I had to give.

The spirits know we can’t recognize love. They’re letting us work out the difference between love and obligation with offerings. They can tell the difference between transaction and affection, even if we can’t. So they let us do the offerings, feel the obligations, so that we will come back and build a relationship.

Don’t get me wrong, the offerings are tools and they will use ‘em.

But every glass of whiskey or red wine or plate of griot and red beans has merely been an overture to love. Since realizing this, everything I’ve offered since then has been confirmation. The offering does not stand between us as proof of anything.

It stands as a meal shared with a loved one—a piece of my life, in another way, for my beloveds.