My religion.

My religion is ancestry, as I like to call it. I used to think its Buddhist because I couldn’t find the right word to describe it. We don’t have a church or a place where people go and worship but simply we have a shrine within our own house. We do this rejuvenation of our shrine every New Year in calling our ancestors to come and share a feast with us. Usually it’s my dad sitting at a table with four empty seats with food and a table setting to feed four. He’ll be talking in this weird “Hmong” language that I can’t understand. I think it is old folk language. It is said that he’ll call upon our ancestor to come down from the heavens and share the feast. No one is to sit in those empty seats as the spirits are sitting in them enjoying their feast with my father. After that is done, we sacrifice a chicken, boil it and set it up on our shrine. This chicken is to bring us luck and fortune for the upcoming year. After three days, we take the chicken from the shrine and boil it some more then everyone in the family eats a piece of it for luck. In our culture, we have a witch doctor or also known as a shaman.  People are chose to be shaman by the forces of their family spirits. They just can’t decide they want to be a shaman but be chosen. Shamans perform vigorous task in chanting when they are needed by their community to appease their ancestors. When they chant, their spirits has left their bodies and gone to find whatever it is that their looking for. When a person is randomly sick for a long period of time or a sickness is reoccurring, they have lost their spirit. The shaman then goes into a chant and look for the sick person’s spirit. Once they find the lost spirit, they take it back. The elders say that when we pass, there are three spirits from our body, one stays behind and guard the body, one goes on to get reincarnated, and one stays to look after their family. There are many superstitions too when it comes to my religion; for instance, we can’t whistle or cut our hair at night, we can’t have tarty fruits on the table while we eat. I know it’s different but I believe in it and feel a sense of comfort about my religion. Thanks for reading!