God Is Not One by Prothero Stephen

Author:Prothero, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Six

Yoruba Religion

The Way of Connection

In my introduction to religion courses I ask my students to invent their own religions. They form groups and dream up new religions. They then pitch their religious creations online and in class. After every group has had a chance to evangelize, everyone votes (with fake money in makeshift collection plates) for the new religion they like the best. Over the years my students have attacked this assignment with intelligence, humor, and creativity. One group invented Sism, a religion inspired by the grooves of rapper Tupac Shakur and the inscrutability of the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, which promised a posthumous “After-Party” for those who followed its injunction to “respect the rhythm.” Another tried to convert us to The Congregation of Wisdom, which honors Jeopardy! phenom Ken Jennings as its patron saint. Meanwhile, Sertaism and ZZZ aimed not at salvation but at a good night’s sleep.1

Many of my students’ religious inventions were quite profound, however, and the one that moved me the most was Consectationism (from the Latin for “pursuit”). The goal of this religion is to find and follow your own purpose, or “Lex.” And its ethic is simplicity personified: pursue your own Lex, and don’t hinder anyone else from pursuing theirs. In their class presentation, modeled after evangelical Bible-camp skits, Consectationists offered revival-style testimonies about “The Sign of the Covenant,” the sky-opening moment when each found his or her own Lex. Much of our sadness and suffering, the students observed, comes from trying to live a life other than our own. So each of us should seek to discover our purpose and pursue it with passion and resolve.

Consectationism is, of course, make-believe, while Yoruba religion of West Africa and its diasporas is a venerable global tradition. But the heart of Consectationism lies surprisingly close to the heart of the religion of the Yoruba people. Here, too, each of us has a destiny we have somehow forgotten. Before we are reborn (the Yoruba affirm reincarnation), one of our souls (we have two or more, depending on who is doing the counting) appears before the High God Olodumare to receive new breath. Olodumare then allows us to choose our own destiny, which includes the day we will return to heaven, our personality, our occupation, and our own unique measure of good and bad luck. With birth comes forgetting, however. So we wander through life veiled from our true purposes, sidetracked by pursuits, in love and work, foisted on us by parents, friends, coworkers, and spouses. The antidote to this forgetfulness is to remember—to recover our destiny so we can do what we were created to do for ourselves, our families, and the world.

Happily, we are not alone in this task. There is a vast pantheon of superhuman beings, known as orishas (orixas in Brazil, orichas in Cuba), able and willing to help us live in harmony with our destiny.2 There are a variety of techniques of divination that can bring the wisdom of these orishas to our ears.

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