Most traditional cultures, even those deeply informed by Christianity, have believed in the idea of luck and have attempted to improve that luck through rituals of various kinds. This seems unenlightened to us, but it's really the same impulse (desire to control our fate in a world that is often beyond our control) that has given us most forms of modern science and technology. Our methods have improved, but our aims are similar.
Now that they are disproven or supplanted, New Year rituals like eating a pig to ensure prosperity in the coming year, or beans to secure good harvest, are charming to us, and I do not see much harm in practicing them for nostalgia's sake. But I expect for some of the original practitioners (and some still today), these rituals carried with them the earnestness that many of us reserve for New Year's resolutions--one of the means by which we now attempt to make certain that the following year will be a good one. Having a good harvest has been replaced by resolving to change your habits to get a good job; hopes of marriage or childbirth in the coming year have been replaced by visits to the gym to ultimately win approval of someone else or health for yourself. These modern good luck rituals are less superstitious in that actually changing our habits is more likely to change our short-term destiny--but the desire to control is still there in all its humorless angst and deep drive to create a perfect world for ourselves.
So is the significance we attribute to a New Year. Why should the practical tools we have for marking time--themselves necessary but arbitrary--be imbued with some sort of mystical significance? Going to the gym or on a new diet the first week of the New Year (as opposed to any other time) is not so different, in this sense, from older, more inscrutable rituals. Both give us a kind of hope by consolidating past and present behaviors and events, separating them from an imagined future that is about to begin, and placing them mentally in the "past." We get to use the helpful labels "last year" and "this year," sending last year out of the camp as a kind of numerical scapegoat after pinning our personal and corporate evils to it. How many times have we groused about "the year" that has just "passed," contrasting it with what we hope the magical "New Year" will bring? This might be a helpful way to think, of course, but it is magical thinking all the same.
I was recently surprised to learn that hope itself was once considered akin to superstition. Most educated people in the Hellenic world, before the Advent of Christ, believed that hope was a delusion--one of the evils remaining in Pandora's box that made mortals feel the other evils all the more sharply. Harvest might be good this year, but the following year, starvation could be imminent. We won the war this time, but next time, our enemies will destroy us. Even if they didn't, of course, life would deteriorate into old age, disease, and death, as it still does. Hope was prelude to tragedy. The only sane response to such a mutable world was to take delight in those things that were already present and would not be so easily lost--ideas, virtues, traditions, the stars, the gods. But to hope for better fortune was bad philosophy.
The God of the Hebrews was different. He promised not only spiritual rewards to his followers but physical blessings to the nation of Israel. And when he became incarnate (so Christians believe) as Jesus, his message was not simply that people should stop hoping for good lives and focus on the eternal because they would die one day. He healed people's bodies, even if they would get sick again. He raised Lazarus, even though he knew he would die again. And he himself came back from death, claiming to have conquered it once and for all. This sounded crazy, like a superstition, to the educated people of Athens, who laughed at Paul when he tried to pass on the news of death's defeat. Paul had to insist that this hope "does not put us to shame." So important was hope that it became one of the three theological virtues besides faith and love, especially accessible to Christians.
So, how does hope in the Resurrection tie into our minor, personal hopes and superstitions? Can it redeem them? Can we twist the arm of God with our rituals? Does Almighty, transcendent immutable Omnipotence give a fig for our civic New Year, our categories, our resolutions about fertility or harvest, fitness or work? I think the Incarnation, and Jesus' ministry, leaves us little room to doubt that he does. Every aspect of life, in fact, can be embraced with hearts full of hope, with love of God and neighbor, and with prayers of faith. Rather than living, defensively, as if these mutable and seemingly limited aspects of our lives have nothing to do with God's Important Business, we can live in the sure knowledge that these things actually matter more to God than they do to us. Attempts to control our lives utterly are sinful not because our lives do not matter, but because we refuse to believe that a God who died for us does not care about our day-to-day existence. Instead, he makes our lives manifestations of the eternal within time. Each desire, each prayer, points us not merely to the impassive, eternal unchanging reality, but to ultimate, embodied joy, in which all our earthly longings are fulfilled in the Resurrection.
This is why prayer and thanksgiving are such gifts to us. They acknowledge that the God of the Universe is not limited by his large size to care only about his own Important Business of running the cosmos (or even saving eternal souls). He is infinite, and he cares infinitely about the details of our lives. He commands us to pray for our daily bread and the coming of his kingdom, and to thank him for the spiritual and material blessings of the day (or of the past year). We thus acknowledge that the universe is governed by someone who, while more than a person, is certainly not less than one. Each answered prayer becomes an icon of our own future Resurrection--some small manifestation of the restoration of all things. Each unanswered prayer, likewise, drives us to pray all the more for this same restoration, so that we are groaning along with creation for the true New Year that will come at the end of time. Thanksgiving allows us to acknowledge that God, not luck or fate, has given us what good we have out of his goodness, not because we have deserved it by being holy enough, or praying enough, or dieting, or eating enough pork and beans on New Year's.
Now that they are disproven or supplanted, New Year rituals like eating a pig to ensure prosperity in the coming year, or beans to secure good harvest, are charming to us, and I do not see much harm in practicing them for nostalgia's sake. But I expect for some of the original practitioners (and some still today), these rituals carried with them the earnestness that many of us reserve for New Year's resolutions--one of the means by which we now attempt to make certain that the following year will be a good one. Having a good harvest has been replaced by resolving to change your habits to get a good job; hopes of marriage or childbirth in the coming year have been replaced by visits to the gym to ultimately win approval of someone else or health for yourself. These modern good luck rituals are less superstitious in that actually changing our habits is more likely to change our short-term destiny--but the desire to control is still there in all its humorless angst and deep drive to create a perfect world for ourselves.
So is the significance we attribute to a New Year. Why should the practical tools we have for marking time--themselves necessary but arbitrary--be imbued with some sort of mystical significance? Going to the gym or on a new diet the first week of the New Year (as opposed to any other time) is not so different, in this sense, from older, more inscrutable rituals. Both give us a kind of hope by consolidating past and present behaviors and events, separating them from an imagined future that is about to begin, and placing them mentally in the "past." We get to use the helpful labels "last year" and "this year," sending last year out of the camp as a kind of numerical scapegoat after pinning our personal and corporate evils to it. How many times have we groused about "the year" that has just "passed," contrasting it with what we hope the magical "New Year" will bring? This might be a helpful way to think, of course, but it is magical thinking all the same.
I was recently surprised to learn that hope itself was once considered akin to superstition. Most educated people in the Hellenic world, before the Advent of Christ, believed that hope was a delusion--one of the evils remaining in Pandora's box that made mortals feel the other evils all the more sharply. Harvest might be good this year, but the following year, starvation could be imminent. We won the war this time, but next time, our enemies will destroy us. Even if they didn't, of course, life would deteriorate into old age, disease, and death, as it still does. Hope was prelude to tragedy. The only sane response to such a mutable world was to take delight in those things that were already present and would not be so easily lost--ideas, virtues, traditions, the stars, the gods. But to hope for better fortune was bad philosophy.
The God of the Hebrews was different. He promised not only spiritual rewards to his followers but physical blessings to the nation of Israel. And when he became incarnate (so Christians believe) as Jesus, his message was not simply that people should stop hoping for good lives and focus on the eternal because they would die one day. He healed people's bodies, even if they would get sick again. He raised Lazarus, even though he knew he would die again. And he himself came back from death, claiming to have conquered it once and for all. This sounded crazy, like a superstition, to the educated people of Athens, who laughed at Paul when he tried to pass on the news of death's defeat. Paul had to insist that this hope "does not put us to shame." So important was hope that it became one of the three theological virtues besides faith and love, especially accessible to Christians.
So, how does hope in the Resurrection tie into our minor, personal hopes and superstitions? Can it redeem them? Can we twist the arm of God with our rituals? Does Almighty, transcendent immutable Omnipotence give a fig for our civic New Year, our categories, our resolutions about fertility or harvest, fitness or work? I think the Incarnation, and Jesus' ministry, leaves us little room to doubt that he does. Every aspect of life, in fact, can be embraced with hearts full of hope, with love of God and neighbor, and with prayers of faith. Rather than living, defensively, as if these mutable and seemingly limited aspects of our lives have nothing to do with God's Important Business, we can live in the sure knowledge that these things actually matter more to God than they do to us. Attempts to control our lives utterly are sinful not because our lives do not matter, but because we refuse to believe that a God who died for us does not care about our day-to-day existence. Instead, he makes our lives manifestations of the eternal within time. Each desire, each prayer, points us not merely to the impassive, eternal unchanging reality, but to ultimate, embodied joy, in which all our earthly longings are fulfilled in the Resurrection.
This is why prayer and thanksgiving are such gifts to us. They acknowledge that the God of the Universe is not limited by his large size to care only about his own Important Business of running the cosmos (or even saving eternal souls). He is infinite, and he cares infinitely about the details of our lives. He commands us to pray for our daily bread and the coming of his kingdom, and to thank him for the spiritual and material blessings of the day (or of the past year). We thus acknowledge that the universe is governed by someone who, while more than a person, is certainly not less than one. Each answered prayer becomes an icon of our own future Resurrection--some small manifestation of the restoration of all things. Each unanswered prayer, likewise, drives us to pray all the more for this same restoration, so that we are groaning along with creation for the true New Year that will come at the end of time. Thanksgiving allows us to acknowledge that God, not luck or fate, has given us what good we have out of his goodness, not because we have deserved it by being holy enough, or praying enough, or dieting, or eating enough pork and beans on New Year's.
