Halloween Series -- Superstition and Religion -- Part Three

So again, I believe that the driving force behind religious practice and superstitious behavior or belief is our insatiable need for meaning. In the book group I lead, we have been reading "On the Mystery" by Catherine Keller. It's a book about process theology, and it's been a rich and interesting challenge for us that has provided much fruitful and thick conversation.

One of the things that she repeats over and over again is the idea of life as "open-ended interactivity." Early on in the book, she critiques the idea of God as omnipotent. She talks about all the things that are wrong with many historical interpretations of the idea of "God's will."

And it's true that people have some really bizarre, inconsistent yet fervently held beliefs about God's will.

I think part of that fervor comes from a deep fear of meaninglessness. We are terrified by the idea that life is random and largely a matter of chance.

One fascinating way this plays out in some churches is in how we deal with the idea of "luck."

Where I'm from, when people bring food to church for a shared meal, we called it a "potluck." Here in the Heart of Dixie, it's usually called a "covered dish meal". This struck me as odd (and inconvenient, since potluck is so much shorter).

It didn't seem to be a huge deal at my church, more just what they were used to. But I asked around a little and discovered fascinating things. One woman told me that someone else had told her that you shouldn't use the word "potluck" because it starts with the same letters as Lucifer!

I have a woman in my church who will correct herself if she starts to say that a certain happening was "lucky". What is amusing is that the word she inserts instead is "fortunate" which doesn't seem any better to me at all, if you think about it.

This issue has also arisen in my life recently in the debate about whether it is okay to have a raffle at a church-sponsored fund-raiser or not. I was all set to have this happen, at a fund-raiser for an organization whose board I'm on. But the agency director ixnayed it. He offered me all these ridiculous excuses about how the volunteers would be mad about the extra work and confusion, none of which I was buying since I'd already checked it out with those folks. His real reason was that he considers a raffle (the kind where you buy a ticket for, say, a buck and then one person wins half the take and the other half goes to the organization) gambling, a game of chance, and thus, clearly an immoral activity that should not be done in a church setting.

Let me say right here that I have very strong feelings about gambling. But they have nothing to do with a situation like this. I am opposed to gambling (real gambling) because it involves playing with money, when there are so many people in the world who don't have enough money. To me, entertaining yourself by playing with money, acting as though it doesn't matter if you win or lose it, trivializes the dire need of so many people around the world.

A raffle, on the other hand, held to support the work of a non-profit agency dedicated to helping people in need, is practically the opposite. The chance involved is merely an incentive to get people to give more money to the cause.

We clearly have different reasons for opposing gambling, reasons that cause us to define gambling or gambling's immorality to be precise, differently.

What is strange to me is the idea that anything that focuses on the reality of chance is considered immoral. It's like it's considered rude to point out, in God's house, that things are random.

I think this is related to some people's need to believe that nothing is chance because God is in complete control. To indulge in games of chance is considered offensive, partially because it's seen as testing God's will, but also, I suspect, because it forces people to question their comfortable presumption that God is controlling every last detail.

The truth is that lots of things are going to happen that we cannot adequately explain. Some will turn to the mystery of God's will. Many will describe it as "luck" without quite knowing what we mean by that. We crave meaning and cannot get enough of it, so we make it up where we wish it was.

Personally, I'm fine with continuing on as Lucky Fresh. The random chance of the world may seem to open a terrifying abyss, but I prefer to see it as beautiful and tasty.