Whenever I happen to be abroad on a Sunday, I always try to go to church. There is something about sitting on a pew next to people you have never seen in your life and follow a ritual that is familiar, but in a language you don’t understand.

There is no chance of a priest, during a sermon, coming up with an “il-mara ħsiebha biex tlesti l-borma u tgerger meta jiġi r-raġel iħamġilha” sound bite which, incidentally, happens often enough and I want to chew the pew in desperation.

Instead, when I am in a church in a foreign land, the priest still gives his sermon, but I am oblivious to what he’s saying because I am lost in the wonders of the medieval architecture and art around me: the stained glass, the sculptures, the paintings. Unlike the minimalist modern churches, centuries-old ones are treasures of historical art.

Last Sunday I found myself in a beautiful 16th century church in Wallonia, Belgium. I understand French, but it’s neither my first nor my second language, so unless I frown and focus, it’s very easy for me to drift off. The music helps.

Unlike in Malta, pipe organs are almost always a feature in churches on the continent. I have a special affinity for the pipe organ because of its grandiosity and its gravitas, but mostly because I feel that it plays directly to the soul.

And there is something comforting in the fact that in the Christian world, church songs are universal: the lyrics may be in a different language but I am happy to simply hum along. Just as I am happy shaking people’s hands and getting blessed with a ‘Peace be with you’.

I always come out refreshed, my thoughts in order and feeling at peace with myself and the world.

This is what religion is about.

Reflection, meditation, space, appreciation of beauty, singing, peace and quiet and soulful moments, which therefore allow people to become better, for their benefit and for the benefit of the community.

Religion does not include killing or revenging or avenging – although over the millennia it has been used as an excuse for that by barbaric fanatics who are anything but religious. It still is, as we saw last Wednesday.

I was driving with the radio on, when BBC World Service broadcast the Charlie Hebdo shooting attack.

We stopped talking. At the end of the clip, my daughter turned to me, wide-eyed: “What was that? What is happening mamà?”

How do you explain these things to children? Part of me wants to shield her from all this ugliness, this waste of life, this madness. And yet part of me wants to explain as she is part of the next generation that can put a stop to it.

We had a little chat about the cartoonists and how their drawings might have made some people feel angry but that no one should ever be stopped from saying, writing or drawing an opinion, with violence.

“But isn’t it better to stay quiet if they tell you they are going to hurt you?”

The answer to that came from a quote from the murdered editor-in-chief of the magazine, Stephane Charbonnier, who had said back in 2011: “It’s better to die standing than to live on your knees.”

Later, we watched the Paris vigil, with people symbolically holding up a journalist’s pen in the air, and I hoped this would instil in her and in all of us, shocked and distraught, the importance of freedom of expression – even when offensive to some – which is a symbol of democracy of the West.

It was an attack close to home for all of us. Friends from all walks of life were seething at how extremism is taking over – at how they even aimed at satire.

“Fundamentalists do not have a sense of humour – that’s their weakest point,” said my friend Faye. A Guardian columnist, Suzanne Moore, wrote about this too: “Fanatics… don’t really do jokes. They fear laughter.” In response, she said we must laugh at them and ultimately disrespect them.

Last evening I dug out Michael Morpurgo’s book The Mozart Question. It is about a Jewish violinist, Paolo Levi, who has never performed Mozart’s music because his parents were forced in concentration camps to play Mozart to SS officers.

In the book, Paolo’s father tells him how they managed: “You simply lost yourself in music. You played with total commitment. Every performance was your best performance not to please them but to show them that what you could do, to prove to them how good you were despite all they were doing to humiliate you to destroy you in body and soul.We fought back with our music. It was our only weapon.”

We are all different but each one of us has a weapon to fight for the soul of democracy: writing, drawing, sketching, creating music, organising vigils, standing up for our rights.

But let us not forget that all of us have the most powerful weapon of all: laughter.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti