Concerning Superstitions

Chinese people are plagued with all kinds of superstitions. Don't sweep the floor during Chinese New Year; don't wear black; don't wear white; don't give clocks; don't look at funeral processions on the street; don't visit the hospital during Hungry Ghost; take a red string, eat a sweet, bring home a towel, and wash your hands in the water full of flower petals...

When I was younger, I used to think that superstitions were a bunch of hog-wash used by uneducated people to explain the world. With the enlightenment and the hailing of scientific method, everything can be explained - the human body, the way the planets move, bad weather, sickness and death. These previously inscrutable subjects have been snatched from the realm of the gods and placed under the microscope.

But science cannot explain everything. It was only this year that I finally began to understand how superstitions are formed. It has to do with finding patterns and believing in these patterns when there are no other explanations offered. When crippling sickness strikes, and the doctors say it is idiopathic (arising from some obscure or unknown cause), what do you do? The human mind grapples for a reason to anchor his sanity.

I saw a woman offer joss sticks to a black-faced god erected at the market yesterday. She held the joss sticks in her hand, looked in the face of the god, shook the joss sticks a few times, and then placed them in the urn. What did she pray for? A son? Protection from evil? Good results for her children? Her pining was palpable.

What is the answer to all of this? Are the ways of God inscrutable, the path of a man's life unknown to himself? Yet the God of the Christians says that for those who seek, they will find.