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A religious fanatic has always seemed to be a contradiction in terms to me. They all give me goosebumps. There can be nothing more intimate than one’s belief in the supernatural, in the afterlife, in the Almighty, nothing more intangible. To have it slapped in one’s face as if it were physics or mathematics is simply offensive, preposterous.
Faith, I have been taught, is a grace from God, not a geometry theorem nor a political weapon. Never before has religion been as widely abused as it has been in 2004. Never before in my lifetime.
Osama bin Laden has shed the blood of innocents including that of his co-religionists in the name of his belief. He has set the scene for absurdities as disparate as the French crisis over Muslim scarves and the Italian controversy over the crucifix in schools. God was a protagonist in the US elections and in the framing of the EU constitution. In Malta He was marched out in the EP election campaign. Only weeks ago He was called upon in vain to save Mr Buttiglione from the inquisition of infidels in the European Parliament.
Perhaps it is because Vatican Council II caught me in my formative years that I remain a liberal Catholic. It was a lunge for authenticity which appears to have lost its momentum. Perhaps it is because my great-grandmother was a convert to Catholicism that I do not consider other believers to be alien. I learned the Lord’s Prayer from my mother and she learnt it from a woman who first heard it in Devon two centuries ago. When I was told to correct it at my church primary school, I was deeply offended.
Since then I have lived and worked with Muslims and Jews, Jains and Zarathustrans, Lutherans and Evangelicals, Witnesses of Jehovah and Bahá i, Mormons and Anglicans, several Buddhists and a large number of agnostics, a few convinced atheists. It has been an education. Almost all of them are Maltese, if in rare handfuls and unique examples. Nearly all of them are invisible in the lee of my co-religionists. With every one of them I can exchange Christmas greetings and renew the warmth of our friendship.
They have enriched my life and often their devotion to their beliefs has challenged my own without their knowing. I do not want this to change. I would like all my friends of all religions and of none to exercise their right to freedom of worship to the utmost. I know them all to be men and women of good will and it is my belief that they were all promised peace on earth more than two millennia ago when Christianity was only Christ and Jesus was a newborn Jewish baby.
The year 2004 has been a tragedy for civilisation. It has been an unexpected challenge to our co-existence as humans quite apart from our religious beliefs. Islam has been abused by a cynic and Christianity has perceived a threat but neither religion is under attack. In the hardening of attitudes and the panicked response to outrage, the collateral damage is to fragile tolerance. It is a conquest of humanity after centuries of intolerance and inhumanity, a bridgehead barely 50 years old.
We have taken tolerance for granted much in the way many of us assume an inherited faith to be a given. It is a shock to realise that tolerance can evaporate so easily, that the fanatics can be sprung out of the woodwork so quickly and appear to take over the earth. The quest for tolerance is mandatory for all authentic believers and only more so for agnostics.
Christmas is a good time for us all to renew our bond. While Christians celebrate the Good News, they lose nothing by sharing it with all others: The Child Jesus came into this world to the announcement of peace to men (and women) of good will. The heart of his message in his maturity was to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbours as ourselves.
It remains an almost impossible challenge to believers and to the most powerful of politicians today. It is a religious and a political message and rarely has it reverberated so loudly across the world as it does this Christmas. Our fragile globalised world needs it more than ever, nowhere more desperately than in the streets of Bethlehem itself.
Christmas has travelled around the world with yesterday’s first moment. Everywhere people have wished each other well and often exchanged gifts. My guess is that there has been every possible combination between people of different religions. It is not a bad thing. Once more Christmas brings hope and light to us all at the darkest time of year.
harry.vassallo@alternattiva.org.mt
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