The notebook · August 16, 2026

The Superstition I Still Have

I heard myself praying for someone this week, and I tripped over my own words. I was asking that everything go well. That was it. Five words that ask for nothing in particular, and I had chosen them on purpose.

What I meant, and did not say: if there has to be bad news, let it come gently, and let nobody be alone when it lands. I did not put it into words because some part of me still believes that putting it into words would summon it. As if naming a possible outcome were a vote for it.

I don’t believe that. If anyone asks me, I answer without hesitating that God is not a mechanism you set off by accident. And yet I go around. I make my sentences wide enough that none of them can be held against me later.

I learned this week, working on the anointing of the sick, that many families do the same thing on a larger scale. They don’t call a priest, not out of indifference, but because calling would mean saying out loud where things stand. It isn’t the sacrament they are refusing. It is the sentence they would have to say in order to ask for it. I found that absurd for half a second, and then recognized my own half second inside it.

What bothers me most, coming back to it, isn’t the superstition. It’s what the superstition protects. As long as I name nothing, I don’t have to stand in front of the thing I actually dread. My vague prayer keeps me at a distance, not the event. It isn’t sparing God. It is sparing me.

I did not redo my prayer tonight. I kept my five words, because they were sincere too, and because I could not find what it would take to add the rest. But I saw, this time, which side the caution was on.

Maybe next time I will go to the end of the sentence. Maybe not. At least I know now what I am leaving outside, and that it isn’t God I am protecting from a bad idea.

In Manna, the prayer of the day sometimes says exactly what I don’t dare put into words myself.