Why I didn’t bury St Joseph

After a lot of soul-searching, I have decided that there really is only one New Year’s resolution worth thinking about: that is, to have faith. Which reminded me of something I wrote in The Southern Cross in 2005 about having faith. I never did report back on the outcome of the personal example I chose.

It was all about selling a house, as my wife and I had been doing at the time in preparation for our move from Sandton in Johannesburg to Simon’s Town in the Cape.

Selling houses 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 house-proud wife, saying she doesn’t like the kitchen.

A secondary source of trauma comes after a month of invasive and disruptive show days: not having anyone make any offers. This is what happened to us.

Desperate measures start coming into play. Getting the garden to look like springtime in midwinter, for example, by pumping half the contents of the Vaal dam on to your lawn, or baking bread in the oven when potential buyers call round.

A Catholic friend, quite obviously influenced by some distant Irish heritage, 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 was no way I was going to risk redundancy and mass unemployment among my kith and kin by burying our benefactor in the begonias.

Of course this all 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.

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? Or, indeed, that the spam filter was just too efficient?

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.

So, I most certainly didn’t bury St Joseph in my backyard, but rather tried to show a little faith in things all working out for our big move. As I said at the time, I was sure it would be a lot more rewarding than being superstitious. I was prepared then to bet my house on it.

What happened in the end was that the committee of saints whom my wife and I had selected for the task of selling our house came up trumps. One single offer after four months of trying and dozens of people tramping through the house. But then, as my wife pointed out, we needed only one.

I found out that having faith, in my humble opinion, is not a question of getting on one’s knees and begging day in and day out. All one has to do is ask once, sincerely and passionately,and then sit back with complete confidence and let it all happen.