I don’t think it was a coincidence that when I selected Carlos Santana’s music on my iPod before writing my first column for 2008, the first song was Black Magic Woman.
During this time of the year almost all TV programs and talk shows are falling all over themselves to talk about ways to have good luck in the New Year. Just as the year started, people suddenly threw out their rational minds, their college education or their spiritual training and reverted to simple minded superstitious practices. Hence the theme “Black Magic Woman” is so appropriate!
At a minimum, this traditional topic and treatment from media reveals a fixed frame of mind that lends more worth to superstition, a prevailing lack of imagination and unwillingness to think that there are more positive, more educational approaches in preparing for the New Year. To begin with, we should simply stop wishing or making good luck greetings in the New Year, or any other time for that matter.
The chances that you would achieve prosperity in 2008 because of good luck are as remote as winning the lottery. Even then there are lottery winners who eventually realized that all that money also brought a lot of misery from the taxman, criminals and rela-thieves. To greet or wish someone the best of luck is like an instantaneous delete of all their abilities, their intellect as well as their effort. If we want to wish people well why can’t we simply say “God be with you” or Via con Dios. But “Good Luck” or “Break a leg” is just bizarre. We all mean well and can’t be bothered to rationalize things but many times what we do is quite irrational.
The problem is we have allowed popular media to give credence to the irrational by allowing them to dictate and propagandize a largely pagan lifestyle.
Anyone who disagrees simply has to listen to all the pro-Feng Shui segments, specials as well as articles that talk about good luck and how to get more of it. If you can manipulate luck in order to have more of it, then it’s not really luck, is it? Luck is supposed to be something that comes to you or happens to you, not something you affect or make happen. All the talk about positioning and placement is about architectural and design logic that has been given a mystical twist to make it more thought provoking. Obviously it works because the mirror-making industry is now thriving.
I have often heard people say that religion is the peoples’ opium, that religion is the first cousin of poverty. Well think again. Who is it that celebrates the coming of the New Year by burning millions and millions of pesos to chase away the spirits that bring bad luck? Jesus chased out legions of evil spirits with the word of God and with God’s authority, not with a whistle bomb or 100 5-stars now heretically called Judas’ belt. Commercial, professional, or Biblical prosperity has always been the result of a systematic, logical process that requires knowledge, work, investment, sacrifice and faith. Real success or prosperity is not about chance or luck. Whatever good that comes in the New Year is also not always about money or fortune.
Time was when prosperity meant having children, now people treat them as burdens to feed, to clothe, to educate and to raise up. Prosperity meant being a lender not a borrower, but now people have no second thoughts about “being in debt” or being a borrower in their hope of becoming an entrepreneur or simply to own the latest status symbol. Yet most of the entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed started out with very little and simply enlarged their territories by faith, hard work, and daring.
To prosper meant the “work of your hands” bore much fruit and the money you lent was not in usury but in partnership with a fellow believer. Now many people live in abject poverty because their fellow believers who call themselves Catholics and Christians don’t really believe in the goodness of man and don’t practice what is preached. So the poor “palengkera” has to borrow under usurious rates not from a fellow believer and often not from a “Filipino”!
If there is poverty in the Philippines, don’t blame GOD. Let us collectively blame ourselves for being religious and pious in title but not in works or in acts.
So how do we turn the tide? For starters how about “BE-LIVING” as in living out our claim of being a “Christian nation” or a “Catholic nation” and not prioritize or actually being sold on pagan rituals and practices where we burn millions that could have gone to help the poor.
Second, divorce ourselves from activities that have no basis in our declaration of faith like putting up a patchwork of mirrors or Chinese pendants in our European or Balinese inspired houses. Not only is it heretical it is downright tacky!
Third, believing in God’s ability to prosper us in the New Year and not going to some black magic woman engaged in arcane arts or believing some TV celebrity who promotes practices that are totally foreign to our culture or to our faith.
And finally, to go out honoring the dignity of labor, having excitement for what you envision, to work for honest gain taking pride in who we are and what we have and to be a real blessing to others. In 2007, the big names who became even bigger celebrities were not the people who made even more money but those who gave more money to the needy, who gave more time to the lonely, and went out to those in need of hope and carried the message.
Angelina Jolie, Tony Meloto, Bill Gates, John Gokongwei, Bono and of course Warren Buffet have all showed us what true prosperity is all about and you don’t have to go home empty handed for doing it! May God bless all of you and the Philippines in this Happy and Prosperous New Year!