By Father Myron J. Pereira, SJ
Napoleon was discussing a campaign with his staff, and the name of one of his generals surfaced again and again as the man to lead it. “He’s an excellent strategist,” they all seemed to say; “he’s courageous, and can take risks,” put in another; “he commands absolute loyalty from his men,” observed a third.
Napoleon listened patiently. “All that is true,” he remarked, “but tell me one thing – is he lucky?”
Napoleon knew – as we all seem to sense – that in the game of life, this one quality frequently outweighs all the others.
What is this mysterious gift called luck which everyone wishes he had, and no one ever turns away from?
The names are several. The Greeks called her Tyche, ‘Fortune’, the ‘bitch goddess’ because she was alluring but fickle and hordes of men lusted after her, but none knew how to keep her.
Lakshmi or Sri is her Indian counterpart, the goddess of wealth, in whose name Gujarati businessmen piously open their account books at Diwali, and ritually deposit one silver rupee.
“Lady Luck” or “Dame Fortune” is a more modern title, known to every frenzied gambler who longs for her smile at the tables or the slot machines at Vegas or Monte Carlo.
And the Chinese, more sophisticated as usual than the rest of the world, devised a whole encyclopedia of “good luck, bad luck, who knows?” – the I Ching.
Thinking about luck
There seem to be two ways of thinking about luck. One is, you can get lucky. The wise man is the one who shrewdly studies the odds and plays accordingly.
Luck, in this way of thinking, can supplement the three qualities most of us think within our grasp – beauty, brains and brawn.
Traditionally, physical beauty is a woman’s greatest asset – unless she is unlucky, like Rachel in the Genesis story, who is beautiful but barren.
Brains are the next best: you may not be lucky, but you can be street-smart, and as the folklore has it, the wily brahmin, the scheming courtier, and the learned pundit, may yet make it to the top.
Finally, where beauty and brains don’t succeed, sheer muscle power will. As the Americans say, “A Colt .45 will always beat four aces.” One of the characters on the doomed Titanic says, tapping his revolver, “We make our luck.” The sense seems to be you can force good fortune to come your way.
In this perspective, human beings are seen as active agents, changing their circumstances by force of will or cunning.
Knowing your fate
Most of us however think differently. The broad consensus is that you can’t make your destiny, you can only know it. Whence the enormous curiosity in astrology, horoscopes and any form of purchase on the future.
Whatever is in store for you has already been determined and preordained. It’s your naseeb, kudrat, kismet, karma, fate. Your individual actions – shall I go to college? Whom shall I marry? Shall I take this job or leave it? – are but a series of limited choices. The really important decisions about life and death, happiness and misery, success and failure have already been mapped out.
Knowing this in advance can help protect you against fate – or alternatively, it can encourage you to take life easy, for everything to the contrary notwithstanding, you’ll become a millionaire the day after tomorrow!
Amazing, isn’t it, how the single most valuable component of good luck seems to be money! This is why I believe that the urge to gamble, to get something for nothing, is far stronger than any other human drive, including sex!
But here too, luck comes in shades and nuances. We may be lucky in some things, but not in everything. “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” goes the common phrase.
Or the popular superstition that great luck also invites great envy, and consequently – by a perverse law of compensation – great disaster. In the well-known play, The Monkey’s Paw, any wish for good fortune also brought upon the recipient an unwished-for injury!
The Forces beyond our control
Amulets, charms, spells, incantations, auspices – these are mankind’s ways of handling the dark, unconscious torrents of life which rush past just below our rational consciousness, and which carry us forward whether we will it or not.
Good luck is the happy confluence that saves you midstream and bears you to abundant life. Bad luck is when you are caught in the whirlpools and rapids, and sadly, drown.
Most of us know that the decisions of this world are not taken on scientific evidence and reasonable truth, but are based instead on feeling, prejudice, lust and hate – in other words, they proceed from that deep stream whose patterns and processes escape us altogether.
Religious people don’t believe in luck – not officially, at least. But most religious people do believe in Providence, which is only a name for that benign and caring that tells us that even though we’re in a much larger game than we can even imagine, we need not be apprehensive, “for God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” (Einstein).
This means that there is Benevolence at work around us, even if some of us dare not call this “Father.”
Keeping in touch with this Power is what we call prayer. Keeping constantly in touch with the deep sources of life within us is the attitude of prayerfulness, that is, an opening to benevolence, goodness, strength and harmony – all the blessings in fact that good luck is supposed to bring.
In fact, it may sound strange to put it like this, but people who pray are always lucky.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
