Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1004621
22 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 JULY 2018 OPINION I normally try not to use this space to respond to other individual columnists di- rectly – not always with 100% success, I'll grant you – but there are moments when the temptation becomes simply too strong. I am, after all, no St Anthony: my flesh is weak, and my 'spirit' – when I happen to have any – gen- erally gets poured into a tall glass with tonic water, two ice cubes and a wedge of lemon or lime. So, when I read, in an opin- ion piece in the Times, that the collapse of the Azure Win- dow in Dwejra last year may have been 'the Lord speaking to us'... well, let's just say that it got my attention, alright. It's not every day that God Almighty Himself takes time out of His busy schedule to send us all a personalised mes- sage: still less one as dramatic and (literally) earth-shattering as that. If nothing else, I think it would be rude not to at least send back a little acknowl- edgement of receipt, and maybe even a short reply. Even so, however, under normal circumstances I wouldn't bother. I have long come round to accepting that the world is spacious enough to accommodate all manner of opinion, no matter how superstitious, bizarrely anach- ronistic, or just plain... um... 'fuzzy'. And besides: what poetry would there be left in the universe, if we all limited ourselves only to pointedly rational and uncompromis- ingly scientific observations... if such phenomena as 'the sea', or 'the sky', or 'a beautiful sunset' were reduced only to their precise molecular and/or chemical structures? Let's try it out, shall we? "Behold, how the [G-type main sequence Yellow Dwarf] descends majestically through the [gas-cloud made up of 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxy- gen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% car- bon dioxide, etc.], to plunge its fiery beams into the [mass of 85% oxygen, 10.82% hydrogen, 1.94% chloride, 1.84% sodium, with the rest made of up of magnesium, sulphur, calcium, etc.]..." Hmm. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer Keats, Milton, Shakespeare et al. Each to his own. And that, naturally, applies just as much to the author of that opinion column, a certain Patrick Pullicino. Like eve- ryone else, he is more than welcome to his own interpre- tation of the Dwejra collapse, or the two occasions he cites when lightning struck the cupola of St Peter's in Rome (not, of course, because it is the tallest building in that part of the city, and – like all tall buildings – therefore equipped with lightning conductors... but apparently, because God tried to strike down Pope Francis, and missed). In fact I wouldn't even bring it up at all, were it not for one small detail. This is an excerpt from said article: "Dwejra was certainly iconic for the Mal- tese and a great loss, so this suggests the crash contains a message for the Maltese. Many think that it was the Lord speaking to us." Whatever we make of the rest of Pullicino's argument, there can be little doubt that the last sentence is absolutely spot on. Many people in this country do indeed think along precisely those lines: not just with regard to Dwejra, but with regard to pretty much everything that ever happens... in this country, or anywhere else in the world. A few years ago, for instance, hundreds of people would regularly converge on Borg in-Nadur, Birzebbuga, to wit- ness the miraculous torments of a certain Angelik Caruana. Apart from watching that man writhing on the ground in beatific delirium – pausing to fight off the occasional invis- ible demon here and there – they were also treated to the spectacle of Angelik pulling out one of the thorns from Jesus Christ's crown... from his own mouth. Leaving aside that it happens to be among the oldest conjur- ing tricks known to mankind – the human mouth is full of cavities which can conceal long, narrow objects like an acacia spine – the question remains: why the heck would God even choose to insert that thorn into Angelik Caruana's mouth in the first place? If – like Dwejra – that was also a 'message from the Lord': what on earth was it intended to convey? For what it's worth, my own fuzzy interpretation – to which I am surely equally entitled – is that it could have been a Divine warning about the importance of maintain- ing proper oral hygiene at all times. (If so, it was pretty darn effective: heck, I've been religiously flossing twice a day ever since...) But interestingly enough, the same congregation also got to hear Caruana's 'prophecies' – which he claimed had been revealed to him by Our Lady in person – and what do you know? Some of those Apoca- lyptic visions bore an uncanny resemblance to Pullicino's entire argument about Dwejra last Thursday. For instance: in 2011 – short- ly before Malta introduced divorce by means of a national referendum – Caruana had warned that: "The time has come… for Malta's turn to ex- perience the tremors and you shall see buildings shake, es- pecially in that area that your ancestors built for defence: the area around the port..." More than seven years have since elapsed, and to be best of my knowledge the harbour area has so far been spared the predicted earthquake... even though we did defy Our Lady's warning, by voting in favour of divorce just a few weeks later. How, then, are we to interpret this failure of a Divine proph- ecy to actually materialise? Is it because Our Lady changed her mind? Or because Angelik Caruana was a fraud and a charlatan (as, in fact, he was judged to be by the Curia itself, in 2016)? Of course not! O ye of little faith, tut-tut, tsk, tsk, etc. Very obviously, the reason we averted Armageddon on that occasion is because enough people heeded Caruana's advice to recite the Rosary on a daily basis... "so that we may be spared the tragedy". (You've got to hand it to these divine interlocutors, though... they've always got absolutely every angle covered). Which is also remarkably similar to Pul- licino's own conclusion, that: "we need to pray the rosary for all the tribulations that the Church is going through. This might also be a message for us in Malta." And indeed it might. For another part where Pullicino is 100% correct concerns the following line: "Only the overconfident or spiritually disconnected would deny that it could have been a message for us." Who could argue with that? It would be highly illogi- cal to deny the possibility that random natural occurrences – such as lightning strikes on buildings, or the erosion of geological formations over millennia – could be some form of coded Divine commu- nication, for us to interpret as we deem fit. Just as they could also possibly be the handiwork of dragons, sea-monsters, or Olympian deities casting fiery spears down from the heavens: all of which were once considered perfectly plausible explanations for the exact same phenomena. Who are we to simply rule out such possibilities, just because they don't conform to our own pre-conceived Raphael Vassallo Ah, but.... the timing, the timing! Why would God decide to strike down the Azure Window on that particular day? Yes, God was talking to us. 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