Tag: curse

A Short Ritual

Sometimes it’s hard to believe

It doesn’t seem to matter what religion or spirituality one belongs to — it’s difficult to believe. In oneself, in one’s deity, in one’s face, in one’s calling. Faith does not exist without the humanity involved — the struggle to believe.

We pray, we talk to ourselves, or we talk to respected elders, or do rituals. We connect to the avatars of our beliefs, even if they are a quiet place in the woods. And we ask for reassurance, for calm, for help, for confidence, and for support when we tune in. The answers do not fix our fate (for those who believe in a deterministic outcome) or the factors we can’t control (for those who feel they have more control of their fate). But they may give us hope that something better comes down the road for us. Or that our pain will lessen. Or that there’s comfort.

I am a rational (yet complex) person

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With a PhD and years of academic writing, I have developed a rational bent, as evidenced by the above paragraphs. (Ugh, that academic writing again!) I think people need comfort, need to know about the afterlife, need to feel there’s a sense of justice, and need to feel that there’s a force beyond themselves. I even teach that in a class.

Still, I have some irrational beliefs, embarrassingly irrational.

I believe in superstitions.

Moreover, I believe in curses.

Curses!

When a string of bad things happen to me, I decide I am being cursed. I do not know who’s cursing me — I have suspected everyone from God to the old Italian grandmother who thought I was defiling her great grandson (it was his idea to take me on a tour of the backyard on his dirt bike for what it’s worth). It doesn’t matter — it’s a curse.

People can think of curses as bad luck, a losing streak, “someone hates me up there”, terrible fates, unfair consequences, or “the devil’s trying to beat me”.

And nothing is going to get better until one breaks the curse.

How are curses broken? That depends on one’s belief system. Prayer, ritual, good luck tokens, a visit from a shaman — all are ways one breaks curses.

For me — a strange and convoluted story I’ll leave for another time — I use a ritual of burning all the bad things out of my life after writing them on a piece of paper.

To be truthful, I felt better. More importantly, from a strictly psychological view, I quit framing every minor annoyance as another terrible proof of the curse.

That may be the only result of the ritual, but hey, it works.

My Family’s Curse

I believe that families have curses; however, what I mean by curse is a way of thinking, believing, or acting that hinders coping, relationships, and outlook. For example, a family that keeps trauma bottled up creates a dysfunctional habit that will pass from generation to generation.

My family’s curse is a killing of joy, a pervasive belief that joy is dangerous because good things never happen. For example, suppose there is a child who is looking forward to their birthday. Their grandmother says in a sepulchral voice, “Don’t look forward to anything; you’ll only get disappointed.” The child integrates this world view and passes it to their optimistic children so that children strangle their joy and grow up with the dreary world view.

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I have only partially internalized the curse; I feel elation every time I write queries for a book of mine. And then the family curse wakens in my mother’s voice and version: “My grandmother said you should never look forward to anything, because you’ll only be disappointed.” Her version of the curse invokes a matriarch whom I have never met, but stands as the forgotten fairy at the christening delivering the curse.

The faulty curse wobbles around in me — I feel hope and elation, followed by guilt I should feel this way, and caution in my mother’s voice: “Don’t look forward …” I do not hug the family curse as a reality I should adopt, but it has not died in me either.