Why I will not bury St Joseph

Selling a house, as my wife and I have been doing in preparation for our move from Sandton in Johannesburg to Simon’s Town in the Cape, is said to be one of life’s more traumatic experiences.

But I don’t believe the actual packing up and moving is the source of trauma. It stems rather from a phalanx of prospective purchasers, all complete strangers, trooping through the private preserve of one’s home and within earshot of a very houseproud wife, saying that they don’t like the kitchen.

A secondary source of trauma is when after a month of invasive and disruptive showdays, no one has made any offers.

Desperate measures start coming into play. Getting the garden to look like springtime in midwinter, for example, by pumping half the contents of Vaaldam on to your lawn; or baking bread in the oven when potential buyers call round; or testing Eskom’s main circuit-breakers to the limit by turning on every light in the house day in and day out, just in case some poor-sighted purchaser thinks that everything looks a little too dark.

A Catholic friend, quite obviously influenced by some distinct Irish antecedency, suggested quite seriously that I had no hope whatsoever of selling my home until I buried a statue of St Joseph in my garden.

I would, let me say, condemn myself in perpetuity to the smog and traffic of congestion of Gauteng and forego in an instant my dream of the fairest Cape before allowing myself to even contemplate burying St Joseph in my backyard. After all, this patron saint of workers has kept me and my family gainfully employed for decades; and there is no way I am going to risk redundancy and mass unemployment among my kith and kin by burying our benefactor in the begonias.

All this got me thinking about how often we allow faith to turn into superstition. Take those e-mailed novenas for example. These are a sort of religious chain letter that pitch up on your computer out of the blue and insist that if you don’t pass it on to ten friends or family within 24 hours, you will be damned for eternity. They generally go on to give gory examples of what happens to people who break the chain. Motor accidents, falling off mountains, getting scalded by boiling water in kitchen accidents, or getting taken for a ride by seemingly trustworthy people who leave you bankrupt and homeless.

Now, what worries me about these things is not that religious fanatics or the ecumenically insecure might take them seriously, but the dilemma they might pose for St Peter.

Will he take into account, for example, when one arrives at the pearly gates and is sentenced to Hades for eternity for not responding to some e-mail novena or other, that perhaps this might just have been when Telkom was working on the main phone lines in your area, and your computer was off-line? Or, that one of your kids hit the “delete” button by mistake and wiped out three days worth of e-mails—including that unsolicited chain letter?

And what, one wonders, will St Peter have in store for those who prey on ye of little faith and superfluous superstition? Frankly, I hope he condemns them to an eternity of sitting in front of a computer with a thoroughly neurotic hard drive.

And what about those merchants who are now mercifully kept outside of the gates of the convent at Lourdes which houses Catholicism’s most holy grotto?

I think the purveyors of this crude commercialism are in for a bit of heavenly how’s-your-father when they all pitch up at the pearly gates one day. Because they spend their lives convincing gullible pilgrims that if one does not gird one’s loins with Taiwanese underwear featuring a silkscreened illustration of the Sacred Heart, one will never stand a chance of being cured of anything. (No, I am not making this up, I’ve seen them myself.)

And I wonder today whether my closest friend and naughtiest altar boy of them all has quite recovered from the trauma of being told by our parish priest in front of a packed congregation at Benediction that he would “go to hell forever and a day” for swinging the thurifer a full 360 degrees?

No, I won’t bury St Joseph in my backyard but will rather show a little faith in things all working out for our big move. It’s a lot more rewarding that being superstitious, I’m sure—in fact, I’ll bet my house on it.