Paolo
Cugini
I often experience strange
sensations that make me feel uneasy. Every day I am in contact with the
spiritual world—rituals, liturgies, prayers. And it is precisely in these
circumstances that I experience these strange feelings, namely the sensation of
being outside the world, that the spiritual is something detached from the
real. In fact, sometimes I feel that the spiritual is the exact opposite of the
real. I notice, in fact, that there is a whole kind of spirituality that,
instead of springing from reality, is born elsewhere—and I still haven’t
figured out where, though I’m starting to sense it—instead of arising from
earth, from flesh, from personal life, it emerges as if its goal were to shield
men and women from reality. There is a whole spirituality that seems to have
nothing to do with the life that men and women live, with real life made of
flesh and blood, joy and pain, sacrifice and enthusiasm, eros and agape, work
and play, life and death. It seems that a spiritual world is invented to protect
oneself from life, from the reality of life, as if this were something
negative, as if reality were negative, as if the life that springs from reality
were something to be protected against.
How does this spirituality of
escape from reality, from life, work? It operates by playing ahead,
anticipating the future, spiritually leaping over the present, in order not to
feel it, not to sense it, to dull as much as possible its explosive force. As
if the present were negative, as if life were something to flee from, and,
above all, as if living life fully and authentically were something
blasphemous. It is very strange that the spiritual is confused with the unreal
or even identified as such. Charles Péguy used to say that the spiritual
constantly lies stretched out on the storm's bed. These were the reflections of
a poet who made the incarnation of the Word the center of his life. One
immediately wonders: how did we manage to reduce it to this? How could it
happen that the great mystery of the incarnation was so debased as to serve as
a surrogate, as an anesthetic for reality, as if the spiritual were something
false? How could this great distortion happen, that the spiritual, in the line
inaugurated by Jesus Christ—a spirituality entirely saturated with flesh and
earth, blood and life, because He was a man like us—could become a tool for
religious paths that deny reality, that deny all those dimensions that are part
of life such as suffering, tears, smiles, choices for something definitive?
Above all, though, I ask myself: why do we let people believe it? How could the
greatest act of love in humanity be reduced to a rite and locked within it, as
if the love of Jesus were a matter of folded hands and not of life choices, a
matter of censers and lace rather than the total gift of self, a matter of
rubrics and formulas and not a matter of life lived to the fullest?
Every day, I live with the
sensation of being a religious official, an official of nothingness, someone
who dispenses nothingness, who allows people to fill themselves with nothing,
with emptiness, to feel good, to have the sensation of well-being or, at least,
of feeling better. Because that’s what devotions, disembodied spiritualisms,
devotees of nothing, and masters of the void produce: a momentary well-being,
like an anesthetic or a tranquilizer. This is what disembodied spirituality,
emptied of the mystery of the incarnation of the Word, proposes: a
justification for one’s life, a pass to not change anything, a quick fix for
what has become dirty, a cure-all to keep doing what one has always done. What
do I have to do with all this?
Jesus proposed the Gospel, the
Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice, of communion. Jesus walked the streets of
Israel inviting people to welcome one another, to respect each other, to
forgive, to give dignity, to not live as servants, to not seek the first place
but the last, to love each other, to share what one has, to not humiliate the
poor but to welcome them, to not consider themselves superior to others but to
stay in their place, to not seek happiness in material things, to not sell out
for money but to give one’s life for love. It is clear that, to accept his
proposal, conversion, change, the desire for a new life were needed. And yet,
no. Disembodied spirituality asks nothing of this, but offers only an inner
tranquilizer. The devotion of the easy candle demands at most a few coins, and
then you can stay where you are, keep doing what you did before, because these
wretches teach you that a couple of formulas well said are enough for
everything to be set right, everything to go back as it was, that with two
well-recited formulas and a few candles God is happy. As if the problem were
God! As if the whole issue of religion were God and not men, God and not women,
God and not the world. Wretches! What have you done? What a disaster you have
built, servants of the fleshless spiritual, of heaven without earth, of the
spirit that reeks of emptiness! The Gospel was so beautiful! Beautiful because
it tasted of life, of earth, of love and passion. Beautiful because it invited
you to reflect, to think, to go inside yourself, to look within, in order to
walk better on the roads of life. Because it was precisely there that Jesus
lived: on the road. And it was exactly there that he taught us to be: on the
roads of life, to be there with dignity, facing what must be faced. In the
Gospel Jesus invited us to be ourselves, to not be afraid of our weaknesses,
because with Him by our side even weakness turns into strength and peace
becomes the unmistakable sign of his presence.
Perhaps this is what people
are looking for when they go to church: a tranquilizer, to feel a little
better, to flee for a few moments from real problems, from the problems of
life, from all those problems that have piled up and for which there seems to be
no solution, no way out. Luckily there is religion, churches, priests in
confessionals; luckily, there is someone who can relieve pain, suffering, the
malaise of living. So it's not just devotions, but also those who encourage
them, propose them, invent them. There aren’t only devotions born in an era—the
modern one—when everything was derived from humans, as if we men were the
center of the world, lords of history: there are also those who keep them alive
and, let’s say it, those who find it convenient to do so. Spirituality as a
synonym for the unreal, not necessary for life, something one can do without,
useful precisely for distraction, to feel better in a moment of displeasure or
depression. For this reason, many people do without the spirit, the churches,
and feel no need for this kind of spiritual guide, who lead you, that is, into
the unreal, outside of time, out of history, out of life. Those who live well,
who love life, who feel good in reality, do not seek something to distract them
from what they love, that leads them out of reality. Those who love life, who
are comfortable in this world, will never seek that kind of religion that
offers the kind of spiritual proposal I have described above and will stay as
far away as possible from the priests of nothing, from the masters of
emptiness. To return to the Gospel so as not to die, to escape from empty
religion and find the light of life, the reality of things: this is our task.
When Elia was young, he
thought religion was something serious. He thought it was impossible to do
without it. Elia was convinced that all men and women were religious. In a
sense, he was not wrong. We know how much religion shapes the culture of
peoples. For this reason, Elia committed himself so much that everyone would
believe. He was so happy to be God’s favorite prophet and did his best not to
disappoint Him. But perhaps, he had not well understood that God was not much
interested in his religious performances. God wanted Elia to become a free
person, not a warrior; He wanted him to become an open-minded person, not a
bigot, ready to destroy the opponent. Understanding what God wants is not
always easy. The difficulty increases in periods when you feel driven by a
divine force, from the awareness of having understood exactly what God wants
from man and woman. When the mind is too clear about God’s ideas, it means that
presumption has taken over and the distance between His will and ours has
become abysmal. Only a wall can stop the arrogance that has invaded the soul of
the religious man or woman. And Elia already had his wall waiting for him.
Perhaps this is what threw
Elia into crisis and led him into the desert: the realization that everyone has
the right to believe what they want and that no one can despise the gods of
others. In the end, the urge to suppress another's religion is a sign not only
of great ignorance, but also of fear of the other and a lack of certainty in
one’s own faith. In fact, after killing Jezebel’s 400 prophets, Elia flees into
the desert. Perhaps he had long been considering the possibility of the
coexistence of many religions, that everyone could worship what they wanted.
It’s true that in his case it was about solving a political problem. This, too,
is an aspect worth attention. Religion can become a tool of abuse and
injustice. In such cases, it’s no longer a matter of religion or God, but of
human instruments to obtain and defend one's own benefits. Perhaps Elia was
wondering what he was doing, whose service he was at. It’s possible to enter a
crisis, to have doubts to try to understand. Sometimes, carried away by enthusiasm,
we embark on dangerous paths, headlong in defense of values whose origin,
history, and evolution we do not know. And then it happens that, the more we
enter life and have experiences, the more we feel the fragility of our
certainties, a fragility that increases the more we have embraced causes with
the stomach rather than the heart, more with passion than with love. In these
circumstances, two roads open before us: either we harden our faces, our minds,
closing ourselves in the extreme defense of those certainties that have now
become nothing but smoke, or we stop, give ourselves time to understand and to
reconstruct ourselves. Elia is the great prophet who taught us precisely this:
it is not virtuous to stand and defend the indefensible. One is not more a man
or a woman by being tough, but by admitting one's confusions, giving oneself
time to understand.
Every time in our journey we
meet arrogant people, we can be sure that deep insecurities are hiding there.
The desert, then, as a necessity to rediscover the god received in childhood,
to realize that he probably does not need our muscles or our reasoning to
defend himself, to realize above all that it is nothing but a heap of cultural
fantasies, not even very elaborate, indeed, often poorly thought out and poorly
developed.
If personal identity is built
on the hardness of a monolithic god, we are destined to become hard and cold,
full of insecurities to be defended tooth and nail. What an unsettling mirror
this reflection offers us, on all those religions built with spears and swords,
inventing the fables of the lord of armies. How many tough fathers had to make
sacrifices to an unmerciful god, who demanded the destruction of enemies. How
many sons and daughters suffered the harshness of these heartless and monstrous
gods. How many people in the world have never been able to free themselves from
the moral, ritual, existential slaveries created by hard men, incapable of
love. How I suffer for them!
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment