Faith?
2004 02 19
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Sometimes I wonder why it is that some of us human types are so superstitious; how is it we come to innately cringe at the thought of broken mirrors, at spilled salt, at crossing fingers for luck? The Buddhists rub Buddha's tummy for luck. In the west we knock on wood to prevent jinxing ourselves, and affix horshoes above doorways for luck; with the open end up, no less, so that the luck doesn't run out. We consider it bad luck to wear black at a wedding; to whistle inside a theatre; even failure to respond to chain letters brings the loom of ill luck to some. Your mother may even have told you that virgins weren't supposed to wear tampons. What misfortune is it we expect? And why?
Some superstitions, I"m certain, have a religious base, the origins of which have long since drifted so far back in man's memory it is unlikely we'll ever dig them out. Others are more modern, but still their origins are dimly lit; don't open an umbrella inside your home; don't give a purse or wallet as a gift without putting money in it; don't step on cracks between paving stones or your mother will suffer a fate worse than sciatica. Many have forgotten, for example, that carrying a bride over a threshhold is not a romantic symbol; it is a symbol of thievery and ownership which some say is reminiscent of the story of the theft of the Sabine women by the Romans. We have even forgotten that white was a royal colour of mourning, not a colour of purity, and that the tradition of a bride wearing white to her wedding apparently goes back to a time when a bride of high birth was forced to marry against her will and wore white to her wedding as a sign of protest.
It's funny, in a way, ironic even, how people so lacking in belief in the spiritual, will put so much automatic faith in astrology, in throwing pennies in wishing wells, in the performance of rituals meant to bring good fortune. If you call it religion to some, their hackles go up, but when you call it by another name they'll embrace it without flinching. I find astrological horoscopes an amusing expenditure of time, a subtle oxymoron even (logic of the stars?), but I don't believe in it. Those predictions which so often seem so intimate and personal, so particular to you, also apply to a twelth of the human population if one goes by the Western Zodiac, without even considering what the Chinese Zodiac has to say, or Native signs and symbols, or Celtic ones, or a whole host of others.
We accept superstitions so readily, believing almost automatically without a hint of a need to investigate for ourselves the origins of myth or urban legend, that it tells me one thing: Despite all our paranoia and lack of trust, despite a trend towards atheism and the meeting of physical needs as more preferrable than spiritual ones, we still have faith, or at least a desire for faith, despite how much we balk at the idea. We have faith, despite how suspicious we say we are of others, that what they tell us is true. We will believe outrageous lies, accepting them without a backward glance, but still shy away from the personal. We still have faith, we're just so hesitant to call it that anymore.