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In the aftermath of the Spain Portugal semi-final, I read in the newspaper reports somewhere how Cesc Fabregas, who scored the winning penalty considered it to be a miracle.
“I had a premonition, an intuition that things were going to come off and that life had reserved something for me as nice as this. When I stepped up to take the penalty I said to the ball that we had to make history and it shouldn't let me down. I talked to the ball four years ago [when he scored the winning penalty against Italy] and it didn't let me down.”
It made me think how that’s how most of us live our lives. In the hope of minor miracles that will help make the difference in our lives between failure and success. The spin of the lottery balls in the tumbler, a sudden attack of temporary blindness on the policeman holding the speed camera, or the way an inanimate object might wing its way from my foot and bend and twist into the back of the net. We find ourselves, whether we have faith or not, offering up instant and urgent prayers to some superior being to intervene “please don’t let it happen!” or “please let it be so, this time!”
And the tragedy of all of this, is that in all of this quest for minor miracles to happen at a time of need, we ignore the Major Miracle that makes everything happen in the first place. For in Him we live and move and have our being. He is before all things, by Him all things were created, and in Him all things hold together. ** Men will scoff at the idea of divine intervention on the grand scale through the saving power of Christ on the cross giving us life for all of eternity, while at the same clutch at the straws of a talking ball that will somehow help me towards the winners podium on a football field.
Now, I have no idea about Cesc Fabregas’s religious affiliation or spiritual outlook, but that kind of vague superstitious belief that something somewhere is out there looking out for me, and will intervene on my behalf, if I’m lucky, or am kind to animals or something, is so so common. So if you’re ready to believe in talking balls, why not consider something miraculous that is a lot more rational, and with hugely more significant benefits.
** Acts 17:28, Colossians 1:17
Yesterday, it was all flag waving, horns and cheering, across the capital, in the build-up to the Euro 2012 semi-final against Spain last night. Spain - our nearest neighbours, closest cousins and biggest rivals. The form guides and the bookies predict a Spanish victory, a repeat of the last time the two met in the World Cup two years ago. And so it has turned out, though not quite as expected. Portuguese resilience kept the scoreline to 0-0, and the verdict had to be settled with that infamously random contest of the penalty shootout.
So the drive back from where we had been watching the game with friends in Cascais, was eerily subdued and quiet. But a comment today from someone posting on Facebook this morning caught my eye as being quite perceptive.
"We are portuguese, and this is our "fado", we will be sad for a bit, but we still have our sun, our ocean, our fish! Tomorrow we'll be fine again...”
Fado, roughly translated, means fate, and of course, it’s also the name for that musical genre of melancholy that is so essentially Portuguese. But, not only in regard to football, also down through history and even in the current stoic response to the massively serious financial crisis that’s hitting us, it marks out the character of the Portuguese. A readiness to accept whatever comes our way, and get on with life nonetheless. This is a great strength. But this same “fado” can also be the downfall of a people who seldom seem to really rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity to believe in themselves and become really great.
With the news of the passing of Ray Bradbury this week at the age of 91 yesterday, I had to pull my copy of “The Illustrated Man” off the book shelf and have a read. Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a science fiction writer, famous as everyone would remind you for “Fahrenheit 451” and the “Martian Chronicles”. Even Bugs Bunny (”) refers to his novel “Something Wicked this Way Comes” in the classic “Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court! Buts its a shame, if this writer is consigned to the SciFi shelves of the local library, (In between Western and Popular Romance) because there’s a lot more lyricism and beauty in Bradbury’s prose than first meets the eye.
I will always remember him as the author who opened my mind up, as an impressionable teenager to a sense of wonder in the things of the everyday world, and also to finding the potential for horror and mystery in the most ordinary of subjects. The dark spaces between the lamplights on the way home from school, through Bradbury’s imagination, became peopled with ghouls and monsters. His “Dandelion Wine” in particular evokes a world, on the surface normal, even humdrum, and at the same time, full of mystery and wonder. Probably why, quite often, his short stories are set in a funfair or a circus, where the weird, the ghoulish and the over-the-top theatrical are plonked right down in the middle of a mundane suburban neighbourhood. Hope people will still be reading your books a generation from now, Ray.
