A Traveller’s World

I went to church to pray yesterday, and as I walked in, four people had just started praying the Rosary out loud in English. This unplanned-for Rosary praying reminded me of Maundy Thursday in Valletta this April.

The Maltese have a tradition of visiting seven churches on Thursday night or Friday morning during the Holy Week. The Body of Christ is carried to an Altar of Repose that is usually decorated with flowers and statues and candles. After the Mass, the faithful would go to make seven visits to any of the Altars of Repose, spending any time from a couple of minutes to a quarter of an hour or longer before our Lord.

In Valletta, where I stayed, the number of churches far exceeds seven, so we never had to go anywhere far for the visits – which I thought were a good tradition to imitate. I wasn’t prepared for the power of the moment, though. The first church I entered seemed incredibly noisy. I am used to adoration, but I am also used to silence in church. This place seemed to buzz like a beehive. What an unusually talkative population we’ve got here! I admit thinking. Then, when my eyes and ears got used to the sounds and symbols around, I noticed a pattern in the noise. It sounded like prayer.

Oh but of course! The people were not chatting leisurely, they were praying the Rosary. Aloud. Two middle-aged British gentlemen behind me prayed a decade in English together and left for another altar. A family with a pram squeezed inside. Some were kneeling, some were standing, and reciting a decade, usually in pairs, husband and wife, mother and daughter, taking turns to say the Hail Mary, then perhaps linger awhile and leave to give space to the newcomers. The Republic street was surreal that night. Filled with tourists by day and completely empty by night it looked like a scene from a typical pilgrimage site that Thursday. Men, women and children with rosaries in their hands, candles on the ground, the buzz from the open over-packed twenty-something churches. We took turns to pray the last decade in St.Dominic’s just across the street from our house. Feeling sad that it was only seven visits, and not twenty-seven, I contemplated the two angels placed in front of the altar. One was holding a cluster of grapes and some wheat while the other was holding a cup. It was a beautiful thought that in his omniscience Jesus, the Incarnate Word, may have drawn strength from our prayers during that hour at Gethsemane that began His sorrowful passion…

I find it difficult to write journalistic prose about Malta, something along the lines of 5000 years of history, beaches and diving and 300 days of sunshine. Granted, the history is incredible, the peoples who have lived on the island made it an eclectic mix of baroque architecture, antique furniture, British fast food and a strange language that is almost a dialect of Arabic – with a lot of Italian loanwords.

Last time I went to Malta, I stayed in a house in Valletta that must have been 400 years old. Cold and damp it was, indeed, but just touching those stones feels like hundreds of yoears of history become real, that you become part of that history.

To me, Malta is also a profoundly spiritual place, and much of its history is intertwined with the history of spirituality and later Christianity. St. Paul landed on the island and the first bishop of Malta, Publius, whose church is in Floriana just outside Valletta city gates, was ordained by Paul. Today, the charismatic aspect of faith is widely practiced. Alongside the well-known prosessions, festas, and the carnival season. It would be naive to assume that the whole country is united in one eager practice of faith – there are atheists and libertarians on Malta as anywhere else, but still the visual aspect of faith is striking to me, someone who grew up and lived in a visually deprived post-Protestant environment of Northern Europe. After the Holy Week celebrations, I started thinking in images. Words seemed to take much more time to utter and had linear meaning, while images seemed to strike at the heart and allow for multiple interpretations.

Then again, time seems to flow differently on Malta. Having to wait 40 minutes for an order in restaurant did not seem to annoy anyone but us. But, when I asked to pack my order to have it on the go, because we were in a hurry– and what’s the point of that I wonder? – it only meant we had to eat it on the street waiting for a bus that didn’t come util much later anyway. When you get into the rhythm of it, it flows smoothly.  Initial adjustment can probably drive someone mad.

I look forward to going back this September. I will probably enjoy the sea, the sunshine and the history. But there is also something else, something that is difficult to descibe and easy to overlook – the old-fashioned unadulterated life that has not yet been polluted with materialism. I hope it will last. For some time, at least…