The hyper-real...

Good Friday and Easter festivities refer to mysteries; the mystery of the Eucharist (Maundy Thursday), the mystery of the Cross (Good Friday) and the mystery of renewal of life (Easter).

A mystery is "A truth above reason but revealed by God..." (A Catholic Dictionary of Theology). Mysteries involve truths that are accessible, though not apparent. Such truths are divulged through various means; through signs, symbols, gestures and language which convey these truths and engage the believer.

Good Friday and Easter celebrations were meant to introduce Christians to such mysteries through certain signs, symbols, ceremonies and ascetic practices. The point to keep in mind is that such signs, symbols, ceremonies and practices were related and conducive to some truth or other.

Unfortunately, all this has disappeared in our islands over the past few years. Good Friday has turned into an ornate extravaganza, with processions in various towns and villages to which additional characters are constantly being added; seasonal though anything but ascetic sweets like kwarezimal, karamelli tal-harrub and qassatat tal-helu sell briskly; numerous plays are performed in which Christ's Passion is re-enacted in Baroque dress and manner, though supposedly occurring 1,600 years before Baroque was in fashion, and being displayed some 250 years after the genre went out of fashion in mainland Europe (a fact that should ring cultural alarm bells); countless elaborate breast armour which would have bankrupted the Roman Empire in two hours had they any semblance to reality; new milestones in bad taste like black ivy and street decorations showing Passion symbols.

Then there are the numerous Last Supper displays whose variety is limited to two models (ornate style and what our fertile imagination considers to be the Jewish tradition), with only the addition of life-size statutes as the latest innovation, and without anybody asking why we need all these displays if they all look alike.

The end result of all this is not idolatry; the mistaking of holy signs for their referents or the accentuation of the former at the expense of the latter. Idolatry implies that a relation between the two termini (sign and referent) still exists, though the relation between the two and their respective significance is erroneous and ill-conceived.

On the contrary, the outcome is a hyper-real realm where images, symbols and signs refer neither to a reality nor present a way of conceiving the ultimate reality, as images, symbols and signs related to Good Friday and Easter mysteries were meant to be.

Hollywood blockbusters and local Good Friday statues are the sole sources of inspiration. Thus the only reality such images, symbols and signs refer to is other signs, symbols and images. They are endlessly repetitive. By being so they drain any ultimate, authentic or realist meaning or reference which originally they might have had.

Even the holiness associated with certain places, activities and times is lost. Rather than having humans participate in mysteries, which refer to determinate historical events, even though humans in different ages and in determinate places, times and occasions experience them in a mysterious manner; these events are endlessly reproduced at all times and in all places.

The mysteries of the Eucharist and the Cross are effortlessly recreated in a garage or a band club. Rather than the sanctity of place, time and ritual, contemporary Good Friday and Easter events manifest a 'have it and take it with you' attitude. Obviously, such representations can carry no sense of mystery because they refer to nothing beyond themselves.

The style of the representations is very conducive to such feeling. Most of these representations show a presumed 'as it occurred' realism, where the beholder is presented with a 'here-you-have-it-all' representations of events and symbols, as well as a spectacular but mediocre Baroque style which appeals exclusively to the senses, without inducing reason, feeling or the understanding to transcend the material spectacle and intuit a deeper and spiritual truth. There is nothing which points beyond itself to a transcendent dimension.

Those who truly cherish the mysteries of Good Friday and Easter need to recover the sense of a transcendent realm to which events point and the mysteries which convey hidden but accessible truths. This need not entail the exaltation of and a wholesale and uncritical return to traditional Good Friday celebrations.

Luckily, certain anti-Semitic overtones and masochistic practices and interpretation of the events have gone out of fashion. Nor need it entail a pietism unconcerned with the world and what goes on within it. Rather than merely detaching one from the world one is living in, mysteries induce one to look at the world, in particular at other human beings, in a sacred and different manner.

Indeed, it is only when Christians enter into communion with the 'other', share the cross which the inhuman world has forced upon her/him and accept the possibility of the renewal of life and the advent of the year of the lord wherein chains are broken; a possibility which our perverse common sense deems irrational, but which God reveals and invites us to accept; that such mysteries are manifested and observed.