On September 1, Gordon Vassallo, an “accredited spiritual guide”, published a diatribe against tradition. His article deserves consideration. Not for its merits (it has none) but because his views have gained significant traction among the public and are increasingly affecting the practise of religion on the islands.

Vassallo bases his article on two related premises. His first premise is that the truest practise of religion is spirituality. His second, following naturally from the first, is that any practice that does not conform to the inner life of spirituality is invalid.

These are not new ideas.

They hark back to the earliest days of civilisation and usually form part of every Dualist philosophy.

The origins of Dualism fade back into the dawn of time but it is not difficult to discern the original thought that led to Dualism. For early thinkers, the corruption and mortality of the body relative to the resilience of the soul was self-evident. From this they erroneously concluded that the body and its functions are corrupt while the soul is pure, immortal and transcendent and the only thing of true worth in the human being.

The first Dualists, however, wereno mainstream thinkers. They were the elitists and the aristocrats, the ones rejecting the idea that the life, practices and values of the man in the street are of any value whatsoever.

For the Dualist, no effort is too great to sunder himself from the crowd. To this end, he cultivates the soul, the mind and the internal life and scorns and rejects what he calls the “uneducated”, the “fanatics”, “the pique lovers”, the “loud”, the “unhealthy”, “the extravagant and the pompous” and so on.

In this respect, Dualism has always been the mark of the snob and those so poorly educated that they fall for any nonsense as long as it is clad in fancy language.

Religion is a markedly different phenomenon and to fully understand its real nature one needs to go to the root of the word.

‘Religion’ is ultimately derived from the Latin religio, which is of unknown origin but the consensus is that it was derived from some variant of the verb lig- ‘to bind’. The prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’. Hence, the original meaning of religio is something akin ‘to bind again’.

What does religion bind again?

The only possible answer is that it binds men together in a community with the divine, a community that religion seems to assume was the original state of things but, after an estrangement, needs renewal.

Now, to build a community one does not do it by locking oneself up in solitary spirituality. The key to building a community is to share one’s life with that of others and this includes every aspect of human life, from the refined to the mundane, from the daily to the memorable. This, religion has always done, bringing significance to every activity of man, be it sacred or profane.

The key to building a community is to share one’s life with that of others

Moreover, religion unites the living and the dead, not only because the community it seeks to build is universal (catholic) in time and in space, but also because the form of human life is a recurring constant as well. This is tradition, the acknowledgement that the lives of our ancestors, and their tastes, culture and ideas, are as essential a part of the community, which religion strives to build, as our own lives. No wonder G. K. Chesterton calls tradition the “only democracy extended through time”.

It is for these reasons that, though belief in a specific deity changes from epoch to epoch, the form and traditions of religion rarely do. Thus, lazy thinkers see the similarity between a Maltese festa and an ancient Greek or Roman festival (they are not similar, they are practically identical) and decry the festa as an exercise in paganism. Doing so, they reveal their own intellectual provincialism and spiritual parochialism.

The similarity is there not because the Maltese festa reveres the same gods as the pagans did but because every healthy human being enjoys a good party. And what better way to celebrate something than to throw a party? Even the Eucharist is a party in its essence.

Thus, people carelessly identify elements in Christian celebration with other cultural practices and condemn them on these incredibly spurious grounds. Even a wise man like the Bishop of Gozo feels justified in making statements such as that “some liturgical celebrations are more akin to theatrical presentations than an experience of the sacred”.

Theatre was invented by the Greeks as a communal religious activity.

Theatre is a product and instrument of religion and is far more effective at communicating the sacred than the bishop’s and most of our priests’ sermons ever were. Why, therefore, is it wrong that some liturgical celebrations are more akin to theatrical presentations?

On a more theological note, this whole matter needs to be understood by reference to the central mysteries of the Christian faith. These are the incarnation and the resurrection.

The very word incarnation means becoming flesh and resurrection means returning to the flesh. The Christian religion is really a celebration of God made flesh and of the holiness of communal life in the flesh. It is not some kind of spiritual praxis that spurns the material life for isolation and introspection.

Jesus himself went to parties. He talked about parties (Luke 14 & 15). He loved parties enough to decide to provide superlative wine in quantity when it ran out at a party (John 2).

The attack on tradition and feasts is the old heresy of elitist Dualism rebelling against joining the common herd in activities the Dualist considers “gross”, “impure” and “unworthy”. And the Dualist calls “Pharisees” those who defend the religious validity of feasts.

This is truly ironic. For the Gospels show that the Pharisees are the ones who complain that Jesus eats and drinks with sinners (Luke 15:2). They are the ones who use their spiritual power to keep their flock under their control (Matthew 23:4).

It is about time that we turned away from spiritual guides that offer nothing more than this same old revolt against the true humility of full communion with all the members of the Church, the lofty and the simple, the educated and the uneducated, the living and the dead.

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