Your thoughts on superstition also good & bad luck?

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englands123

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I once believed in both and many other things , like not walking under a ladder for example. Carry a lucky item around.

Since I returned to our Lord and gained more knowledge I believe none of the above is true. All situations created by human mind not God.

I’d rather use the expression fortunate or unfortunate nowadays.
 
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Some superstitions are so ridiculous it’s actually funny and sad, at the same time (measures varying).

Regarding luck there is the natural unfolding of events (social and physical) in the world, and there is also God’s intervening hand in Providence. [I’ve had good and bad happen to me, sometimes it was the natural flow of events, other times Providence was clearly at play.]

From the Catechism :
2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.
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Some superstition is rooted in fact. For example, if you walk under a ladder, something the person on the ladder is using, or even the person on the ladder or the ladder itself, might fall on you. Best to just give the ladders their space.

I have a couple of superstitions, but ultimately God is in charge. If I feel nervous about a superstition, I say a Hail Mary and turn it over to Mother Mary to handle, then I don’t worry about it.
 
I find some superstitions slightly amusing, especially ones from other countries. But in regards to my belief in them, I really don’t bother with it. I actually like to make the joke I was a “lucky” baby because I was born on a Friday the 13th, and even joke about how 13 is my lucky number.
I do kinda love black cats because they really are pretty and I feel bad that black cats don’t get adopted as much because of the unfortunate superstition of bad luck people believe about them. I would probably even name it “friday”, but that would be too corny. 🤓
 
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I don’t like when somebody on my shift says “it’s really been a quiet night!”
Because you know that’s when somebody is going to code, or have a nasty fall, or start bleeding from someplace they oughtn’t be bleeding, or a fire alarm will go off, or any of a dozen calamities.

Superstition? Mebbe.

My co-workers know better than to ever say that wretched phrase in my hearing 🤨
 
The ideas of luck or chance are not contrary to divine providence, so long as we understand them with relation to their proximate cause, and not their ultimate cause.

St. Thomas addresses this in depth in a couple places in the Summa on fate and providence respectively:

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1116.htm#article1

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1022.htm#article2

Ascribing a causal power over fate to an inanimate object would be superstition. See Chapter 20 here from St. Augustine:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12022.htm
 
I had been blessed with to very faithfilled grandmother. One was Catholic and the other Protestant. Neither of them were superstitious that I knew of. Except for one story.

My mother was a little girl and at the time stores and movie theaters would attract customers with door prizes. Church bazaars did the same thing! I grew up hearing stories about cake walks, even hotel ballroom Stanley Home products events. One I heard recently was about when my mom was about six years old she won a door prize. Normally this would have gone straight into a hope chest for her future marriage. Yes even at such a tender age they were starting to fill up a hope chest. One of her aunt’s friends hounded her that evening to gift her one of the pieces. So to please her aunt my mom gifted it to her.

My grandmother told her,” You gave your luck away!” Now my grandmother might have only meant this one item, one time, but my mom took it to heart. I was a little surprised because I had never seen my grannie say anything like that. But I grew up hearing how my mom wasn’t lucky. Often! Well I asked her about this the last time she said it, and that story I just wrote came out. But the fact is she then went on to tell me about three other times in her life she won prizes. I had to point this out to her. Chance won prizes. She’s ‘lucky’ enough!

I then had to point out how all of her adult children, me included, managed to survive our formative years. Car accidents, bad companions, stupid mistakes… Luck or Grace?

There is chance, sometimes no good explanation at all just being in the right or wrong place.

I have always been uneasy when I’ve heard, “There must be a reason…” behind some awful event. Some deeper meaning when a person gets a horrible medical diagnosis, or a flood washes away their home.

No, no good answer is enough.

But God can bring something good out of our misfortunes. That rotten chance. I can’t always see it. New opportunities when we are unemployed, new friends when we are displaced.

We have Hope as Christians.
 
In the past I use “good luck” more often than “may the Lord bless you”. Now I am trying to only say the latter especially for my family. With other people who are not Christian I still say “good luck”

I often feel like I should not say “good luck” because I don’t really believe in “luck”. I believe in Gods blessings.
 
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