c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

LA MADDALENA, ITALY _ My late-afternoon search for pastries has come up empty. I step into an open church door, to see how religion expresses itself on La Maddalena, a small island off the coast of Sardegna, not far from Rome.

This 12-square-mile island is home to the Italian Navy. Tourists flock to the grave of Italy’s 19th century unifier, Garibaldi, as well as rocks and beaches for summer sunning. Even so, the people of Sardegna resent Rome’s control and continue to speak in dialects that mainland Italians can’t always understand.

The village church is surprisingly plain. Before tourism, this was a fishing town. Even now, the 40 or so worshippers listening to a Lenten homily are plain folk, not the glitterati whose summer prowls have given La Maddalena a reputation as a”jet-set island.” In the pulpit, a large priest dressed in purple chasuble speaks in low, calm but forceful tones. I can’t follow his sentences, but his meaning is clear. The refrain is peccatori e culpa, sins and guilt, but also speranza, hope _ spoken in the tone of assurance, and accompanied by a hand motion that resembles a parent calming a panicky child.

Jesus forgives, he seems to be saying. You are forgiven. Your hope lies in forgiveness. This is God’s gift: release from guilt, the assurance of pardon, peace in the end.

Italians seem to be quiet people, at least in public. Boisterous laughter usually means Germans or Americans. But even quiet people live in a noisy world.

Ferries come and go every fifteen minutes. Italian naval trainees, looking young but grand in their new uniforms, walk up and down the narrow streets, searching for home. Hammers and saws signal the imminent onset of summer. Village men gather in open doorways and eye the tourists. Now that it is warmer, mothers are starting to bring their children out for walking-around time. Young men have cellular phones to their ears.

A short drive from downtown is a top-secret Italian military installation, which prevents all boats from landing anywhere but the harbor. A short boat ride away are American nuclear submarines, the rarely seen part of the United States’ massive military presence in the Mediterranean.

The”global village”comes even here. The forts of Sardegna and nearby Corsica might have been built centuries ago by rebellious pirates, but they, like onetime revolutionaries in Europe and Asia, have joined a world pulsing with electronic commerce. All dialects, even those of religion, seem a quaint conceit of the past, enjoyed in the way Sardegna’s wines are treasured for their unique heaviness.

And yet the calm assurance of pardon rises above the noise. Maybe the priest also said, Give lots of money to the church, drive the foreigners out of Italy, smite the heathen, trumpet your greatness as the only ones whom God loves, sneer at the world. But I doubt it. I might not understand much Italian, but I can recognize the assurance of pardon and a patient priest’s attempt to calm the panicky and guilt-ridden.

For along with noise _ along with life _ come peccatori e culpa. We are, as we said 40 days ago on Ash Wednesday, fallen creatures, merely dust, large and sometimes monstrous in our egos, but also small and frail, unable to escape the torments that touch all lives, unable to glitter so brightly that no one notices our scars, unable to find enough sun to warm our souls, unable to evade death.

We try to escape. We build monuments to ourselves. We cling to distinctions that promise an edge. We fight endlessly to control people, marketplace, nature, even life itself. In some tragic ways, religion has been handmaiden to that flight from reality. Religion has provided outlets for our pride, built armies on our fears and hatreds, and promised God’s special blessing to whatever tribe or nation seemed likely to pay the bills.

But even religion’s own noise cannot stifle the calm assurance of pardon. Even chasms of language and history cannot stifle the bedrock truth, that Jesus forgives all who seek forgiveness, that God cares nothing for our monuments and pride, but sees us as beloved children who are frightened by the very noise we make.

DEA END EHRICH