Listeners' Reflections

This is your place to publicly comment on the topics and issues addressed in Speaking of Faith programs. React in a personal way, and put into words what this program meant to you.

Submit Your Reflection about "Living Vodou."

Fantastic (August 21, 2008)
I work at the Milwaukee Art Museum and after hearing this program, the Hatian section of our galleries has become an even more profound place to look and reflect.

I picked up Maya Deren's book Divine Horseman and that has also touched me deeply, in a way I believe will stick.

I have always found myself drawn to different spiritual traditions, and Vodou has become another island I find myself revisiting. I was raised in a Cuban-American household, and I found many similarities in the mixture of Catholic and African traditions, similar to the way Hatians have mixed the traditions and cultures.

Thank you so much for this program, and others like it, which expose more and more connections between spiritual, mystical, and religious traditions across national boundaries.

Violeta Gutierrez
Milwaukee, WI (WUWM, 89.7 FM)

Thank You (August 12, 2008)
I just listened to the show on voudun. It was, unfortunately, almost hard to believe that I was hearing such respect and attention to this subject.

No one, really, should be thanked for simply showing respect to another's beliefs or another's culture. We white North Americans should get no praise for setting aside our vast ignorance and peculiar to us taboos, and facing reality.

But I will praise you all, Krista and staff and all your mentors and accomplices, for doing the work to get this show past all the censors, guardians and bewildered authorities, without giving up its integrity or its meaning.


Lamar Yates
Maurertown, VA (WVTU, 91.5 FM)

Amazing (August 12, 2008)
It seems to be really difficult to convey to those who belong to mainstream religions just how complex and fulfilling religions such as Vodu or the Lukumi/ifa traditions are. When one realizes that these religions were continued under the harshest and most inhumane circumstances, AND have flourished and evolved with to meet their followers needs in the New World, it's amazing. There will always be those who react with fear or disdain to spiritual paths different from their own, who will show disrespect to the deities of another by calling them 'demons' or 'devils', but hopefully, due to wonderful programs like SOF, they will learn that all faiths have value, all religions have darkness and light in their teachings, and in the end most of us follow the religion that we hope to evolve to our highest and best through.

R. Dooley
Detroit, MI (WUOM, 91.7 FM)

Mythology, the Collective Unconscious, and the Archetype (August 7, 2008)
WOW! What a wonderful program! Congratulations to you and your staff. I could write pages on reflections I experienced during that wonderful show. In deference to brevity I shall just say that, Joseph Campbell, Heinrich Zimmer, and Carl Jung, would have loved your program! It was a beautiful testament to mythology, the collective unconscious, and the archetype!

David Richardson
Fort Worth, TX (Listens to SOF OnDemand)

Thank You from One Who Serves the Spirits (August 22, 2007)
Though raised in rural Georgia as a Southern Baptist, I have been practicing Vodou ("serving the spirits") for a number of years. I find Vodou to be a religion of healing, service, responsibility, and personal empowerment—one that, like so many other religions, connects its practitioners to a greater sense of spiritual connectedness to God.

So I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with the program on Haitian Vodou. The choice of guests, music, and suggested readings (like Karen McCarthy Brown's "Mama Lola") offer a wonderful window into this very misunderstood religion and will no doubt point in the right direction those curious about learning more. I also appreciated the way your thoughtful approach did not try to make Vodou defend itself, to prove that it is somehow a religion on par with other faiths (as if that sort of apologetics is even objectively possible).

When so many "religious programs" on TV and radio focus largely on the most dominant and mainstream while ignoring the more marginal or eclectic, "Speaking of Faith" provides a wonderful space for the serious and sincere exploration of all faiths and religions without viewing those world views through an ethnocentric lens that divides spirituality into easy categories of "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong." I have been a fan of "Speaking of Faith" for some time now, and I look forward to your future programs.

T. K. Fountain
Saint Paul, MN (KNOW, 91.1 FM)

The Course I Always Wanted to Take (August 6, 2007)
I wrote you sometime ago and asked you to include more on African Americans and how they practice their faith and I even asked you do a program on Vodou. I was so pleased to hear your program on Living Vodou, even if it wasn't my suggestion you were following. It was educational and I loved it. It removed a lot of the negative stereotypes I have heard associated with Vodou. Your show is the course in world religions that I never had time to take or could not find in the areas I lived. Keep up the good work. I love what you are doing.

Cheryl Johnson
Asheville, NC (Listens to SoF on Demand)

Aibobo! (July 19, 2007)
I lived in a small village in rural Haiti for over two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer and always stood in wonder of my experiences with Vodou. Its complexity and power have so often gone misunderstood; it was so refreshing to see such a thoughtful and in-depth exploration of this fascinating spiritual system. Aibobo!

Meghan Armistead
Nairobi, Kenya (Listens to SOF Podcast)

Breathing Room (July 1, 2007)
I was raised in the Church of God in Christ. I grew away from this church and its dogma in my adulthood, partly because I am homosexualist and partly because there were too many areas of restriction and contradiction and limitation embedded within the religion that curtailed my access to the Divine in my own life. It was only through finding a church that affirmed my sexual orientation and that urged me to pursue the question — How is my sexual orientation a gift from God and how is it to be used? — that I began to reclaim aspects of the religion that I found liberating from me. Among those aspects was possession and ecstatic expression of the presence of the divine. For me that has taken the form of healing through the singing of African-American spirituals to evoke personal stories and the reenacting and subsequent reframing of those stories (I use playback theater for this). In my singing of the spirituals I find myself inevitably going into trance. So, it is the identifying of personal life stories as a form of sacred scripture to be used in the reclaiming and redirection of one's life.

Anyway, I was pleased to hear your speaker address the vestiges of African religion present in the African-American Pentecostal churches. That is something that I think many practitioners in the African-American churches would themselves deny. But it was a relief for me to hear that recognition coming from someone other than myself. I missed in your broadcast any reference to Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse and Voodoo Gods and Men. This is a podcast I will replay for some time to come.

Gregory Ford
Washington, DC (Listens to SOF Podcast)

But Is Any of It True? (July 1, 2007)
Krista rightly raised the question of whether Voodoo is just a bunch of myth and delusion. But she cut the legs out from under her own question by phrasing it as whether voodoo is "rational by Western scientific standards." The question isn't whether it's rational but whether it is true. And simple truth is not a Western or scientific concept.

The impressive knowledge gathered by Pacific natives on how to navigate tiny boats across huge oceans, or by jungle dwellers on the habits and uses of the animals and plants that surround them: these were not obtained by visions from ancestors or praying to gods, but by straightforward observation and experimentation. When empirical methods are available, everyone knows that they are the right way to obtain reliable knowledge. Only when empirical methods are not available do people fall back on visions and prayers.

I wish Krista had asked "How can we test whether any of what you are saying is true?" I wish she would ask this of all her guests. And I wish she would subject their answers to the same sort of searching skeptical analysis that would be used when the truth really matters: when someone is trying to persuade us what medical treatment to choose for our ailing child, for example. Unless the truth doesn't really matter, of course…

Mark Alford
St. Louis, MO (KWMU, 91.7 FM)

Voodoo Is Pagan (July 1, 2007)
Concerning Voodoo and animistic spiritism: After 19 years in Africa as a child and as a Christian missionary, and as a life-long Christian and student of religion, I call attention to Saint Paul's arresting words: "The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord's table and the table of demons. Are we trying to arouse the Lord's jealousy?" "I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, 'Jesus be cursed,' and no one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the Holy Spirit. (I Corinthians 10:20-21; 12:3)

Peter Muir
Toccoa, GA (WPPR, 88.3 FM)

More Music (June 30, 2007)
This was a lovely program — informative and thought-provoking. Your guest is an engaging man of faith. Keep up the good work. (Wonderful music. Where do I get more of that?)

Ab Logan
Cockeysville, MD (WYPR, 88.1 FM)

Gods and Spirits (June 30, 2007)
I listened to the interview on Voodoo. Many see this as the ultimate African religion. Yet Akhenaton was an African and moved people away from worshipping various spirits to one spirit who he symbolized as the sun. Voodoo is very powerful. There is a class of beings that is accessed who must be placated with sacrifice. Many times this involves blood sacrifice. It might be from a goat or something living. Priests generally deal with these beings and sacrifice to them and there are thousands of them. They are not perfect.

Yet where does this all fit in the realm of spirits and gods. I was raised in Islam in the United States but not in the Arabic mold. I was taught that a follower of Islam in the true sense of the word is one whose hands, tongue, and thoughts do not hurt others. Most people in all organized religions are too much into ritual. Rituals define religion. You perform the rituals sanctioned and something or someone will be pleased.

I remember reading about Ramalinga Swami. He was omniscient by the time he was 8, and over time his form became finer and finer until the point people could barely see him. Then one day he locked himself in a room with his followers outside and disappeared in a flash of blue light. He is definitely one of my mentors. He was perfect. People have talked about the original sin and how we fell. The idea is that we were once deities and now in flesh we have become frail and weak humanity. So the Siddhas, and I have a degree in Siddha medicine, believed the purpose of life was to live divinity. So did the immortal sisters of ancient China. There is this tradition that the idea is to live the divinity that we are and return to deific life. Here or there we are perfect, omnipotent, omniscient immortal, and infinitely more. No finite mind can comprehend things infinite. It is the issue.

So people have developed relationships with spirits just as the ancient Greeks would sacrifice on their idols. They would listen to their gods speak through the mouth of a virgin. People have altars and such to maintain a relationship with these spirits. People give alms or make sacrifices or offer food and such. It is what people have also done around beings like Babaji who we all know about. Voodoo is more in the ancient Greek traditions. It was Immanuel (who Christians call Jesus (Latin term) who told them the Greeks that gods and demigods spoke to them through images made by man and now it was time for them to hear from perfect man. I don't know who they are portraying in the Bible. It is pure make believe.

There is so much to talk about in this area. There has grown up the idea that we have a higher self and a lower self. The higher self is the divinity that we are, and the lower self is our descent into the mortal. The idea is to reconnect and live our higher selves. That is what real yoga was supposed to do. It was what the ancient Egyptians did. The Arabs there now who came in the 7th century have no idea what the history of land Kush is all about. So people used powders and drinks to try to raise themselves to be the deity they are. There was never a tradition to hand your body over to anyone or anything. The idea was to live the perfect divinity that we are. I live with that.

So I was taught to meet my Creator in my heart and it is He/She who made me. So why would I need to interact with deities when I have a direct connection? Well there is the world we live in and until we can get back home we have to get along. So there are spirits and angels and such. There is a whole order of angels and so there are Archangels and Angels that control the days and months for instance. The Hindus have Shiva or Ganesha who are spirits they deal with. They interact with them for sure, but these spirits are perfect. Angels are perfect.

Raymond Bey
Williamstown, NJ (WHYY, 91.0 FM)