Friday 13

It’s Friday today. It’s also the 13^th day of the month. Traditionally speaking, in my culture, this is a day of potential bad luck! However, today, as it happens, is also the last day of the school year and, consequentially, the beginning of those glorious school holidays. Surely, a day of wonderful possibilities! An interesting conflict…

“Friday the 13^th – unlucky for some!” the saying goes. What a lot of superstitions we modern, 21^st century people still hang on to! A black cat crossing my path, a ‘money’ spider landing on my head, walking under a ladder left out on the pavement – these all have their place in the jumbled thoughts in our heads concerning the advent of good or bad ‘luck’. Our thoughts are still full of these apparently outdated cautions even today: “it must have been meant” we say, vaguely or “it seems that it wasn’t to be”. What do we mean by these vague assertions? Who meant it – or didn’t? Why wasn’t it ‘to be’? Why do some of us erect mini-shrines to Buddha and other deities in our living rooms and gardens, despite the lack of any formal affiliation to any religion at all?

Ex-Calvinists, ex-Catholics, ex-Muslims, liberated fundamentalists – many of us are desperate to be free of our outworn straight-jackets of thought and belief. But are we simply enmeshed in an alternative system of limitations and superstition? “Trust in the process” advises a friend. “Don’t fret” says another – “Something better is round the corner. You’ll see.” “God never closes a door, but he opens a window” jokes Terry Wogan, that veteran of broadcasting and humour. In Switzerland scientists are spending billions searching for that elusive ‘god particle’ that gives shape and form to living organisms. Now they think they have found it. How will that affect our lives? What will it do to life and faith?

These are interesting times. Caught between old and new, discarded religions and a burgeoning fascination in yoga, meditation and peace-enhancing forms of interior decoration, we stumble on through the maze, looking for something, but not sure what. So Friday, the 13^th – what will you bring? Are you part of the outworn tradition or do you still have power to intimidate? I’ll tell you tomorrow!