Less seriously, as days of prayer go, there's also the vicar's MOT, when his 2006 Corsa (it has no name) gets an annual opportunity to stick its tongue out, say Aaaaaaah and have its reflexes tested. This is happening tomorrow.
Here it is (it has no gender either)
Will it pass? I'll pray, but in that sort of way that I pray for a parking space on the fell roads: in a deep awareness that God has other things to do, and that it won't be the end of the world (or even the end of the road) if the car doesn't quite make it.
Praying and cars are curious bedfellows. When my car (it has no name because it is not a sentient thing) is struggling up The Struggle near Ambleside or making some curious bonnet noises, I will do three things:
- Pray
- Stroke its steering wheel and speak to it coaxingly (don't do this in company as my last passenger asked if we wanted to be alone)
- Turn up the music (Suburbia is good) to drown the rattling
You can rank those in order of effectiveness if you like... which is to say that only prayer makes any difference in those circumstances. But since the engine of modern cars is a mystery to most modern people and I can't solve every problem with an egg and some pantyhose (they don't work for pastoral problems either any more) I am mostly powerless, and pretending that I have any measure of control over the performance of the engine beyond driving well is at most a faintly cheering charade. "You can do it," I tell my car (which has neither name nor ears). Perhaps God in his kindness accepts that as a prayer.
Stroking a steering wheel: I think that's the best picture of superstition that I have. I'm not otherwise superstitious: mirrors and magpies and black cats and rabbits' feet and lucky underpants and the number 13 don't have much purchase on my behaviour. I don't walk under ladders but that's because I've seen the overalls of painters. And yet I do sometimes catch myself worrying about tempting Fate (capital F, fate) - like when I say "nothing can go wrong." That's all about the mis-assignation of cause and effect, a confusion of correlation and coincidence and causation that every right-thinking person should eschew. But even now I'm wondering whether writing about my MOT is jinxing the whole business - and I don't believe in jinxes. You see how superstition lurks on the edge of our capacity to control things?
One of my favourite writers, Nick Hornby, addresses superstition brilliantly in his early book Fever Pitch about the adventures of supporting a slightly rubbish football team (all football teams are slightly rubbish even when they win because their supporters just know that they're going to lose the next game).
Excellent book.
He tells how once, supporting Cambridge United, "Chris Roberts bought a sugar mouse from Jack Reynolds, bit its head off, dropped it in the Newmarket Road before he could get started on the body, and it got run over by a car." That day, beleaguered Cambridge beat Orient 3-1.
A ritual, says Nick Hornby, was born. "Before each home game we all of us trooped into the sweet shop, purchased our mice, walked outside, bit the head off as though we were removing a pin from a grenade, and tossed the torsos under the wheels of oncoming cars." Jack Reynolds, sweet shop proprietor, watched them ruefully, shaking his head.
And Cambridge United (plucky, beleaguered and languishing, to use all the football terms) remained unbeaten at home for months.
Discuss.
That's right. It would be an odd universe and an odd theological structure that found any connection between mice and goals. Barking mad!
But I keep on talking to my car, even if it only reassures me and distracts me from worry.
Nick Hornby - acolyte and believer in the world of football and with absolutely no power over the performance of his team - provides a list of things he has latched onto at different points in his life: different rituals (his word) to help his team win, to skew the world in their favour, to influence the gods of football (there are none, don't worry). These include, brilliantly:
- Turning the radio off in the second half
- Playing a Buzzcocks album
- Eating cheese and onion crisps at a certain point in the first half
- Smoking
- Not videotaping the game
Hornby has tried lucky hats, lucky socks, lucky shirts, lucky friends (and also the corollary: friends he considered unlucky and tried to exclude from the games). Guess which worked.
Other brands are available.
That's right, nothing, because on any sensible view of causality, it would be a very curious set of events that allowed any of his actions to affect the performance of eleven men who don't know him. Their manager and trainer might affect their performance (skill and shouting and encouragement and hairdryer moments) and their breakfast might, but not Nick.
I'm not mocking Nick Hornby - he whistles in the dark, on the side of the angels, it says in some of his reviews - but I'm so with him when he skewers what superstitions and rituals are all about:
"Nothing has ever been any good. But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; is it any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?"
His diagnosis of the human condition is spot on: we are so weak and there are so many things over which we have no control. And since I don't cope well with not being in control, I will invent things to give myself the illusion that I'm a real stakeholder in football or motor mechanics.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy all the psychological props I can that affect my mood and performance so that I do things better - I have a very comforting jacket, I don't work as well if my socks are inside out (odd is okay), and I once borrowed a friend's jumper to give me the moral confidence to confront a bully. They make a difference not to the universe directly, but to me. I have quite stompy black shoes for when I'm taking a difficult funeral because they lend me standing. Colin Baker has lucky knickers which he claims offer him at least two kinds of support.
Colin Baker: badly-treated excellent actor
What I need to do is stop talking to the car and start talking to God. If superstition is a product of weakness and uncertainty and needing to affect the running of the cosmos, then the best antidote to it, the best prevention to the waste of energy and sugar mice and cheese and onion crisps, is knowing that I have a strong strong God who does affect things, who is working his purpose out and whose eye is on the sparrow, although his criteria for intervening in football matches, 1990 Argentinian handballs aside, is hazy.
Superstitions are unreliable crutches for weak humans. Illusory, but possibly comforting as long as you don't ruminate too hard on them.
God is an entirely reliable crutch - also for weak humans (that's all of us). Not illusory, and twice as comforting because his comfort arises from a historically plausible incarnation, attested words of encouragement and promises from someone whose credit-rating is impressive.
If you must have a crutch (and we all must) make it a good one.
So - as so often in my sermons - it's worth remembering that God is good. "I know who holds the future, and he holds me in his hands," says a rather sweet little hymn I know. That he works in all things for the good of those who love him. That nothing can separate us.
Hornby uses some fun words as well in his football-superstition spiel. He calls things "liturgies" and "rituals," which is a good reminder that all of our "religion" (also a terrible word) and our attitudes are one of two things. They are either gathering round a good God who means us well, or else they are attempts - subtle and unconscious attempts, I give you that - to manipulate the universe and its God to make things work in our favour. There's a thin line between what God's grace has done (forgiven us) and the things we do to remind us of that (ten Hail Marys, which don't effect forgiveness but illustrate it, remind us to do better next time). You can't make a deal with God where if I do x or y, God will do a or b. Why not? Because he's already beaten us to it by launching a covenant in which he looks out for us regardless of our actions.
It doesn't invite complacency - that would be an equal and opposite error. But it does liberate us from the old religions where sacrifices and the right words conjure the pleasure of God out of nothing. It's the difference between being in a bad relationship with someone capricious that you want to please but haven't the foggiest where to begin, and being in a good relationship where every graceful overture, every thankful prayer is accepted with aplomb regardless of the form of words, manner of dress or church tradition.
So if you have traditions (and we all do), make sure they're not instead of this brilliant relationship with a loving and lovely God. Make sure they're like Colin Baker's lucky knickers which put him in a place where he is on top form to live well. Incense and genuflection and the sign of the cross are only useful inasmuch as they help us prepare for an encounter with a kind God. (Lower church equivalents are available, ion harder to pin down.). Use them but don't be so reliant on them that if they were suddenly swept away by - I don't know, a pandemic? - you'd be stuffed without them.
Jesus (no lucky pants as far as we know, just a good sense of identity) died so we could be free, and that includes freedom from having our lives restricted by superstitions, freedom from fear that I might jinx my MOT, freedom to eat a whole sugar mice and not litter the Newmarket Road. Put yourself in the shoes of Jack Reynolds, sweet shop proprietor, shaking his head at the wasted efforts and calories, and if you'd be baffled by someone else doing what you do, give it a good long look and then wave it goodbye. Take a deep breath and say to God, "Yes, I'm so weak... what can I do? It's a very good job I have a very strong friend."
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