What do you think of when you hear Jambalaya? Yes! food, glorious food! A divine mixture so flavorful that when you pay attention, you can feel your taste buds and your spirit being charged with an energy that can be sublime. Cooking isn’t just for survival, it can become a ritual, a sacred ritual that connects you to your senses, your ancestors, your seat of power, the ashe which is the spark of life. And when you’re cooking for the ancestors and the goddesses, it is transformational.
As the granddaughter of an altar maker, a healer who cultivated an herbal garden with specific ailments in mind and heart, a widow with four children, a teacher, and a devotee of Mary, my childhood was filled with experiences that mixed up traditions rooted in nature with the most beautiful prayers, songs, and rituals of the Catholic church. I didn’t know then that gardening, cooking, and feeding others was prayer, was religion, was faith, was a healing miracle.
And I also didn’t know that the woman doing all this, my grandmother, was not a “traditional” woman meaning submissive, resigned to her assigned social role, keeping her in her place, but was strong, courageous, faithful not to the male dominated church institution, but faithful to her values grounded in love and her sense of justice and eye for beauty and creativity to produce meals and healing balms and teas for her children and the neighborhood children, the students in her classroom, and their mothers, this subverting all the power structures that would have her be submissive, feel less for being poor and without a man in the home. I didn’t know then that when she was cooking, she was the prayer, she was the miracle, she was the spark of life.
All those ingredients mixing together that produced powerful aromas that rose to the heavens reaching her mother and sisters long gone, also seeped through every pore of herself and her children as a recurring baptismal blessing. I didn’t know then that she was resignifying communion, making it a communal ritual meal, not an individual sacrifice for a distant faceless god, but bringing all that were fed, close, grounded in the strength of a love that connected all to the ancestors, to the people around us, and to ourselves. I didn’t know then the words feminist, womanist, ancestor worship, theology, or hermeneutics of suspicion, the practice of interpreting and challenging the surface meaning of a text, especially when women are erased from history or diminished in importance. And I didn’t know then that she, my grandmother, would remain present in my everyday life, would come to me when I cook and stir the pot, and close my eyes as I allow the steam, the aromas, the powerful mixtures, infuse my senses with a sense of well being and protection, especially when I feel vulnerable and afraid, praying and hoping that it brings that same sense of well being to the people with whom I will share that meal or herbal tea. When courage and hope are scarce, I pray and cook and tend the garden and the altars for my ancestors.
Long ago, when I was feeling lost and in need of spiritual guidance, a young mother, living in New York City during the AIDS pandemic, protesting the government’s inaction and the church’s evil homophobia and rejection of its most vulnerable children, wrestling with my own sexual orientation while wearing my shirt with the pink triangle that said “Silence Equals Death” a book came into my life: Jambalaya by Luisah Teish.
This was not just a book to be read and put away. This was a sacred text, a living, breathing collection of memories, prayers, incantations, spells, and rituals, writings born of a lived experienced made in New Orleans, flavored with a bit of Mexico and San Francisco, a book that begins with “Reclaiming Our Magic” talking about the women’s movement, the woman spirit movement, the redefinition of words like witch to mean a strong, proud, self confident freedom fighter, wise in the ways of natural medicine. There, alongside the Virgin Mary, Saint Barbara, Yemaya, Bridget, and all the women saints, including Marie LaVeau, was my own grandmother.
At the heart of the book is an invitation to responsible cultivate and utilize spiritual power. It counters colonial perspectives of African religions rooted in racism, offering an empowering path towards cleansing ourselves from what she calls the garbage of racism that we all have inherited. Racism would have us divided, believing that anything related to African Religions is superstition.
She begins by healing and reclaiming the word Voodou, a word that has been maligned, misunderstood, reviled, made fun of, commercialized and tokenized, just like Marie LaVeau, especially by Hollywood, shaping people’s imaginations with images that have nothing to do with the true nature of the meaning of Voodou: Life Principle, Spirit, Genius, in the Fon and Ewe languages of West Africa.
In this book there is healing of our words, our imaginations, our beliefs, and our memories: “This book concentrates on the Voodou of New Orleans, which is like Jambalaya, a spicy dish, with many fine ingredients cooked together. Blending the practices of African ancestor reverence, Native American Earth worship, and European Christian occultism. Voodou is an open ended system that easily incorporates new cultural and scientific information. This branch does not require initiation and it’s not subject to rigid hierarchy.
The Voodou of New Orleans respects and encourages the divine inspiration of the individual. Its charms and rituals require the use of natural objects and employ the artistic talents of the practitioner. The Voodou is powerful and can be practiced alongside other traditions.”
She cautions the reader that if they expect “Vaudeville” magic they will be disappointed. But “those who are willing to work for self transformation will be rewarded.” The magic of New Orleans Voodou is that it’s a spirituality that is embodied, practiced on an every day basis, expressed through common household acts: cooking, cleaning, gardening.
Fast forward to 2005: I was in my second year of seminary and my first month in an internship as a youth minister, when hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. We started seeing images on TV of the floods after the levees broke, the politicians and government agencies not doing enough to save and help the most vulnerable. Who could forget the images of the superdome and the 9th Ward?
We also started getting reports and images from our UU church in New Orleans, from the newly called Minister Rev. Marta Valentin, who lost her home, and whose church had flooded. I will never forget the image of the UU hymnal floating in the mud.
All these images inspired me, the senior minister, and one of my seminary colleagues, to plan a service trip to New Orleans. To raise funds, we made Jambalaya and invited the community to a benefit dinner.
We arrived in New Orleans without really knowing what to expect. We were greeted by an organization called Common Ground, and the first lessons for us, especially for the young people who came from privilege, was to listen to the leaders, young African American grass roots community organizers, to follow their instructions, to be aware that we were there not as an act of charity, or altruism, but solidarity and we were expected to practice cultural humility every step of the way.
We were expected to clean up after ourselves, do our own laundry by hand, contribute to cooking, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, and above all, be respectful to everyone we met. We slept on the floor of St. Mary’s Catholic school and woke up not expecting to be served but to serve.
After breakfast, we checked in and received our hazmat suits, respirators, gloves, and bottles of water. We were deployed to different parts of the city. From the window of the van, I now saw house after house with spray painted symbols and numbers on the door. I later learned that the numbers meant “Dead in the Attic.” The spray-painted markings were used by search-and-rescue teams to indicate that a body had been found inside.
During the first week, we helped to clear debris from churches, cleaned and painted, but the most moving and transformational experience for me and the youth to this day, was going inside homes where the water, now caked mud, would have covered us. We searched for anything that could be salvaged and brought it to the home owners, who received the frame, plate, spoon, chair, with gratitude and tears.
Another memory that I will never forget is that everywhere we went, we never left empty handed. We went to volunteer at a church that was in ruins and we found people, families, children, laughing, singing, playing, sharing joys and sorrows, the statue of Mary welcoming us with open arms, the image of a Black Christ, flanked by Black angels, sounding trumpets of victory over death, the people holding on to more than the material remnants but to each other, the image of St. Joseph, holding baby Jesus, surrounded by Mardi Gras beads, the quilt made by hundreds of hands that told the story of generations, the roof that was missing tiles showing the strength of that wind, the collage they had made that said “the devastation is real but so is hope” the hugs that we received from people that we had never met before who treated us like newfound family members and called us “sweetheart” “cher” and “baby,” and the beautiful lilies that they gifted us, with a perfume that was balm for the soul.
In New Orleans we learned that there’s a Louisiana Creole tradition of abundance, that little extra helping you get from merchants as a thank you, the baker’s dozen, called Lan-yap (lagniappe), a tradition which I grew up with in Chile and we call it “la yapa” Every single experience in New Orleans was a profound lesson in cultural humility, a lesson that changed the shape of our spiritual landscapes, and our understanding of community.
We also met with community leaders, business owners, musicians, artists, and learned about New Orleans history, the meaning of Mardi Gras, the Second Line, and we visited the cemetery where the tomb of Voodou Priestess Marie LaVeau is located. I still remember getting chills, feeling a current through my whole body as I paid my respects and whispered a prayer of gratitude for Louisah Teish, who had taught me about the real magic, had given me the decolonized version of Voodou, and had taught me that Marie LaVeau was a real woman, not some Hollywood stereotype, a real woman who in the face of racism and against all odds, conjured up the Life Principle, the Spirit, and the Genius of her ancestors to become a powerful healer.
Needless to say, our New Orleans service trip was unforgettable, and from time to time, I get a note from some of the youth who went on that trip, who are now parents themselves and work as community organizers, nurses, lawyers, and social workers, who continue to remember and apply those important lessons about cultural humility, decolonizing history, appreciating diverse religious and spiritual traditions, and being a helper willing to be led by seasoned and wise African American community leaders who embody a lived experience that can help us dismantle our own internalized racism, if we are willing to let that magic work on us.
We, as Unitarian Universalists, are also a kind of Jambalaya: our faith is rooted and guided by many religious and spiritual traditions. Among us there are humanists, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Pagan, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and some of us are a mix of two or more traditions including earth centered traditions; we are diverse in almost every way and we are united by principles centered in love that call us to be disrupters of evil systems, healers, helpers, caregivers, weavers, story tellers, visionaries, builders, responding to the call of love, the call to bring our own flavor to the movement, our own magic, and our willingness to be transformed in the process.
Jambalaya is not merely a metaphor, it is a recipe that is both ancient and relevant today: when the proverbial levees break, and they have, when the government is not showing up to help the most vulnerable but to inflict more pain and suffering, as it is, when the people are asking what can we do? How do we keep afloat? How do we not drown in fear?
Mutual aid: cooking, cleaning, gardening, delivering groceries and breastmilk, blowing the whistle on evil and injustice, conjuring up spells for strength, for endurance, for hope. Taking all the broken pieces, all the scattered beauty, all the dreams, prayers, and songs, and stirring that pot of spiritual Jambalaya to sustain us for the long haul.
Beloveds, whether you light a candle, pour libation for your ancestors, sing a song of freedom, make soup, pray with your feet as you dance, know that the Saints are with us, guiding us, blessing us, bearing witness with us, today and every day, they march alongside us, illuminating our path, this road that is now flooding with tears, soaking up the blood of the earthly saints, is also filled with little altars everywhere, signs of hope that say “Joy is an essential part of the Resistance” and “The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love.”
As we continue to organize to respond, let us remember that in the recipe for Jambalaya no one ingredient is more important than another, that the important thing is how we come together, how we blend to bring the flavors out, and the most important thing: sharing and nourishing community because together we can reclaim our magic. Amen! Ashe! and Blessed Be!
by Rev. Dr. María Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa