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The Pleromatics Project
Spirit & Shadow
The way to the divine numinosum leads through the shadow. That has been especially evident to me during regular medical visits to Haiti since 1981, a period during which I also began the serious study of Jung's work. Others willing to take the emotional risk may find as I did, that Haiti offers an extraordinary opportunity to explore both personal and social dimensions of that vital mystical axis of spirit and shadow.
Haiti is a country which still lives in the shadow of the Duvalier legacy, which itself lay in the longer shadow of colonial repression, the violent reaction to it, a series of brutal prior Haitian regimes, and between the world wars, occupation by the U. S. Marines.
But Haiti has also been severely victimized by the projections of the collective shadow of North Americans. One evidence is the harshness of that first U. S. occupation. Had we understood ourselves, the second occupation to restore Aristide might have been unnecessary.
Our culture has devalued mysticism (even in our churches!) and especially has stereotyped, caricatured, and stigmatized African and Haitian mysticism. President Bush's famous "voodoo economics" remark is a prime example of our ingrained attitudes and associations. These have strongly influenced our immigration, embargo, and health policies toward Haiti, which have been inconsistent with those toward other countries, for example, Cuba. Confronting Haiti, and traditional Haitian religion, requires confronting our own shadows.
But we must also confront our own shadows if we are to recapture the spiritual power of the Christian tradition. Perhaps especially in North America, the deep mystical significance of Christian symbols is often lost in the shadows created by excessive emphasis on belief and by our merchantilistic and technological orientation toward life. Breaking through that often requires looking through the eyes of Christians in other cultures, who have other orientations toward life.
Spirituality permeates Haiti. That is evident in its many churches and vaudou temples, and in the curious mix of influences of each religion on the other. It is evident in its arts (especially painting, music, and poetry), and in the naming of its vehicles and places of business. It is evident in the compelling images of the countryside, and in the fact that Haitians themselves have survived under conditions which defy survival.
A Haiti experience brings one face to face with shadow, and may confront visitors with sometimes overwhelming feelings as they first encounter extreme poverty and an exotic archetypal folk religion, in addition to the expected differences of race (perhaps), language, and society. But there one may also see Christianity as a living tradition among people with a very different culture. Such confrontations may also lead one gradually to see that reality itself is quite different from what it had been imagined to be. Haiti forces the visitor to come to grips with levels of being which are difficult to reach in our overfed neon-plastic "developed" world.
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