The Grace of Neutrality

One of the largest differences between Christianity and vodou is the fact that we don’t really have or need a concept of good and evil. Everything you do is, in one way or the other, progression toward divinity. As a metaphor, some lives you move a millimeter. Some lives you travel thousands of miles. You don’t have to believe, you simply have to exist.

You are free to do as it occurs to you to do, and you are free to experience the consequences of your actions. If you have, for instance, the power to influence others and you choose to use it to get money and sex partners, you are free to do that. You’ll just have to live with the consequences of it.

The witch, in vodou, is governed by their character and their consequences.

I believe that to be one of the virtues of vodou. Sometimes (and in fact often) people learn better from their actions than they do from anyone else telling them that an action is going to have a consequence. You can lecture someone as much as you like, but until they’ve managed to incur consequences they don’t want to repeat, they’re probably going to keep doing it.

Because we have lives (and each life is a soft ‘reset’ of the situation you live in—new body, new gender, new family of origin, new country, new time, etc) to grasp the consequences, we can incur a LOT of consequences, learn a lesson, and move on to the next.

One of the reasons ‘fairness’ is an illusion is because fairness is, quite often, an observation that we’re disturbed by what’s happening. And to be clear, the consequences here may be dying, for instance, because your husband can’t stand to not have control of you. The consequences may be living five minutes in hideous pain, due to a genetic defect and your mother living somewhere where she can’t get an abortion.

Each of those are lessons, which may be the consequences of someone else’s actions, but they’re still lessons. In your next life, you may be the husband. You may be the mother or the legislator who signs a full abortion ban into law. There is no kind of thing that has happened or will happen that you will not need to experience in order to finish your process of rejoining the divine, which is in everyone and is everywhere.

This is also why judgement is a waste of time. You are capable of anything. Every lesson you experience is important for you to experience, and the fact that vodou is neutral to ideas of good and evil (and fairness) allows you to have those vital lessons which get you closer to joining the divine.

That neutrality is grace, the room to experience. The divine is not in the slightest interested in your comfort, just in the slow progression of your soul.