THE RITUALISM WHICH ENSLAVES – AND FREEDOM OF SPIRIT

“Whoever has tasted a drop of God can find no rest until it dives into the ocean of this great and eternal reality.”

Every religion, however pure, spiritual and divine, once cast into the midst of men and entrusted to profane hands, runs the risk of being suffocated under the excess of human elements which, over the centuries, have fatally accumulated around its divine core. Thus, religion can fall victim to ritualistic hypertrophy and spiritual atrophy; it is no wonder that the fate of divine sparks is so sad when they land from heaven into men’s hands.

Preserving the healthy tree of divine revelation from the parasites of human formalism is the most honoured task of the great religious geniuses who feel called to fulfil a spiritual mission. The brave attempt of the true spiritual reformers of the world is to free the religion contaminated by these parasites.

Jesus was the greatest religious restorer of humanity, the most daring spiritual evolutionary and even revolutionary, for he fearlessly confronted the powerful pontiffs of the official and classical religion of the time and unmasked them before the deceived people as “blind leading the blind... whitewashed tombs.” He plucked without mercy the rotten roots with which forty centuries of Jewish ritualism had contaminated the tree of revelation that God had planted at the foot of the cradle of humanity. For this “crime”, he was declared “the one who insults the law” by the supreme head of religion and had to walk to Calvary, where he expired between two wicked, as the greatest of them.

And this is true, for according to the defenders of the religious formalism of the time, proclaimed as the only religion divinely revealed, infallible and saving, Jesus was the greatest unbeliever and atheist. In contrast, before God and the true spiritualists, he was the most religious man in the world, the greatest saint, the Son of the living God.

The great defenders of the purity of Divine revelation are often misunderstood by their contemporaries in trying to renew that disbelief with the demolition of their idols and the return to the primitive simplicity of religion.

It is because not all religious men have the ability to reach the soul of true religion, and the followers of fabricated formulas will hardly comprehend what is the meaning to “worship God in spirit and truth” for to travel from the periphery to the centre is not a task indicated to all.