Superstition

Offerings set out at the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts. Note the idols, food and joss sticks.
(photo from here)

Superstition: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.

Superstition lurked everywhere when I was a child. There were trees in which spirits were believed to live; you would see a red or yellow ribbon tied around the trunk and a little shrine placed at the base of the tree. The shrine displayed a few pieces of fruit, along with joss sticks stuck in a sand-filled container, aromatic smoke curling up from them.

If you lived where I grew up and shared the beliefs of most of the population, you wanted to keep the spirits happy with you--outwit them if you were clever, or at very least appease them. There were also fortune tellers and diviners to help you with this. The diviner could pick an auspicious day for your wedding, or a lucky day to open your new shophouse. Or he could write special words on a piece of paper that you could keep nearby to ward off evil. A priest or monk would sing and clash small cymbals together over the casket of your loved one before closing the casket, to be sure the evil spirits were warned away and didn’t follow your dead family member into the afterlife. In Thailand, pall-bearers would dodge down a narrow street and then race around another corner while carrying a coffin, trying to confuse any evil spirits who might be trying to hitch a ride and torment the loved one in the afterlife.

In Malaysia, where I lived during my elementary and high school years, the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts came around once a year. During this time the spirits of the dead were believed to emerge from the lower realms. People tended the graves of their ancestors during this time, tidying up weeds and debris, and placing offerings on the graves. Relatives performed rituals to appease the hungry ghosts and to ensure peace for their deceased ancestors in the afterlife. If you were more affluent, you’d purchase small paper representations of material goods from the real world—golden Mercedes cars, elaborate Chinese-style houses, fine clothes, ...and servants to go with them all—and then burn the paper models so that they could travel via the rising smoke into the spirit world. Thus your ancestors would be well-supplied and comfortable for their activities and leisure in the afterlife.

Although some practitioners will shudder at this, my dad employed the local superstitions at times in his medical practice. I remember him telling the story of his psychoneurotic patient who came to see him frequently in Malaysia. Medical examination didn't uncover any reason for her complaints. One day he told her, "Auntie, today is TUESDAY! You are wearing GREEN! You should NEVER wear green on a Tuesday. Please change that practice immediately, and you will feel better." When Auntie came back for her next visit, she reported that she was feeling much better now that she was avoiding wearing green clothing on Tuesdays.

Another time, my dad told us, a man came to see him and said that the diviner had told him that he would die on such-and-such a date. He was worrying about it. My dad examined the man, and there was nothing wrong with him.  But on the appointed date the man went home, had a last meal with his family, and then laid down and died. "You hear about living by faith," my dad remarked. "This man died by faith." Or superstition. There are some similarities between the two, if you think about it.

Superstition.

We weren’t into it, because after all we were Christian missionaries. So our mission hospital compound was free of any superstition. Except, it wasn’t. In our Saturday afternoon wanderings on weekends, we missionary kids found charms and amulets hidden in the open-air hospital laundry, brought in by workers who either were not Christians, or in typical southeast Asian eclecticism were hanging onto their indigenous beliefs along with their newly-acquired Christianity. They had all their bases covered, right? Guardian angels watching them, amulets and charms to protect their work area. Unfortunately we kids helped ourselves to the items, throwing out the amulets and ripping up the charm papers and scattering the pieces around. I'm embarrassed to remember that I saw our actions as a missionary activity, and giggled at the idea that people would be frightened that the evil spirits had ripped up the charm papers. Yep, we were little missionaries. No idol worship allowed on our compound. But we never told our parents.

While growing up, I also heard of superstitious beliefs from the western world and thought they were just as strange: don’t open an umbrella in a house, don’t go out on Friday the 13^th lest harm befall you; watch out if a black cat crosses your path, cross your fingers for good luck, and don’t break any mirrors. These were silly. People who believed them were silly. People who took action just to be on the safe side of them were to be pitied.

Superstition. 

To be clear, there were some things that were not superstition. We saw these things with our own eyes. I really did see people go into trances and not feel pain as they walked on red-hot coals. Our gardener put skewers through his cheeks at a Hindu festival to fulfill a vow to the god, and did not develop scars due to the protections of the devil. Evil spirits really did possess people and do them harm. These things were around us, and I still do not take them lightly. After attending just one firewalking festival as a young teenager and literally feeling the evil in the air around me, I promised myself to never go again. And I didn’t. And I won't. Evil is real. There are supernatural phenomena.

Superstition.

There were some other ideas that did fit into my belief community, ideas that arise because people are susceptible to superstition when they don’t think carefully and deeply. I remember going with a schoolmate named Bradley to the Christmas banquet my freshman year in high school and being quite relieved when we found something to talk about: whether or not the food tasted better if you said the blessing before eating. (Yep, I argued that it did. I was 14 years old and, well… there you go.) Then there was the time that my friend Betsy dropped her needle while doing embroidery on a Sabbath afternoon, couldn’t find it, and busted out with a lament that God was punishing her for not keeping the Sabbath. I was taken aback, never having heard that God had set a prohibition on embroidery on Sabbath. And then there was the superstition held by some in my community that when you enter a movie theater your guardian angels must wait at the door because they won’t go in to such a place where evil abounds. To be fair, after visiting an old theater in Tombstone, Arizona and hearing what went on in wild west theaters of the 1800s, I can see how that idea came to be, in the early days of my church. Were I a guardian angel, I would've waited outside, too.

As I think about it, I do believe that we humans attribute far more to supernatural causes, than actually are caused by the supernatural. Coming from a Christian belief system, I also believe what the apostle Paul said: “In all things God works for good.” (Rom. 8:28)  Much of what happens, I think, can be attributed to natural causes of some sort or another. However, I believe good outcomes can emerge from just about any occurrence, and that is caused by God’s good work in our lives. I believe in miracles, but I don’t think they are in any way ensured by anything we do. (Faith healers, in my opinion, should receive our focused suspicion.) We can't make miracles happen; they seem to occur with no consistent rationale. But we are capable of finding good in circumstances,. We are also capable of manipulating circumstances for evil. We have some agency in life, perhaps more than is assumed by those who are superstitious. That's where I have gotten to thus far in working out my own perspective.

Superstition.

It's pretty much not for me, I tell myself. I travel the California freeways with defiance on Friday the 13^th. I step on cracks in sidewalks. I open my umbrella in the house to let it dry out after I’ve been in the rain. I don’t cross my fingers to increase the chances of good luck. I don’t read horoscopes, nor do I have any idea what my zodiac sign says about me. If a movie review is good and it looks like I will benefit from the story, I’ll go see it in a theater. I bow my head before I eat ... but it’s an act of gratitude to God, not an incantation of any sort. I’ve had a couple of black cats and they were (described in alphabetical order of their names) personality disordered, and sweet and funny. I don't believe in praying before sports games, unless it's just for the grace to play with good sportsmanship. I don't believe that dead people return as ghosts.

And I can’t remember breaking any mirrors. If I did, I'd make a point to throw the shards in the garbage can and get on with my day, because superstition can really slow a girl down.