“The 21st century will be religious or it will not be.” This statement, apocryphally attributed to André Malraux, could end up proving prophetic. The theologian Karl Rahner rephrased it this way: “Christianity in the 21st century will be mystical or it will not be.” In other words, in a world besieged by … technology and productivity, the experience of God can only occur in the form of an intimate and personal encounter with divinity. Without individual contemplation, detached from the infinite network of screens and reflections, without a renewal of the human being who claims to be “in search of meaning” in the face of a liquid reality, the religious fact becomes impossible.
Rosalía’s album, her dazzling “Lux”, testifies to her own enlightenment, to a path that she opened alone in the middle of the dark jungle of reggaeton and noise. And that’s why it makes no sense to hermeneutics their songs or videos. Rosalía is not a theologian, she did not nail Luther’s ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, even if she shot a flaming arrow into the eye of modernity’s Horus. With the brief flame of the flamenco lamp, from Pastora’s hand, and the torch of her saints and mystics (Simone Weil’s fragile angel in the background), she renounced the world, the devil and the flesh, as Lorca did in his time in his “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar”. It is the language of art, of contemporaneity, which plunges into the sacred forest, beyond the symbols, into the concentric circles of Dante, so that grace can once again speak to the world in a language that it is not ignorant of. Rosalía, like the apostles, has the gift of tongues and sings in thirteen languages. Thirteen? In their songs, Kabbalah also burns and the whirling dervishes of Sufism whirl.
Is “Lux” a sign of the times? Are there other spiritual manifestations like the movie “Sundays” or the Hakuna concerts? Tranquility in the room. It does not seem that Spain will once again become the spiritual reserve of the West, while we are still, with Urtasun at the helm, the reserve of enlightened wokism. Let no one hyperventilate, the ghost of patriarchy does not haunt the peninsula and the stadiums are not filled with Eucharistic congresses, dances and popular choirs either… Even if, “eppur si muove”, the arenas are full of young people.
However, it would also be naive to attribute Rosalía’s success, its global resonance, to a commercial operation on the lookout for a passing fashion, a Christian “new age” or solely to the incontestable greatness of its art. There must be something more behind this spiritual concern and, at this point, it is always convenient to turn to the Gospel:
“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say: we’re taking a shower, and this is what happens. When the south blows, you say it will be heavy, and that is indeed the case. Hypocrites: if you know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky, how can you not know how to interpret the present time? (Lk, 12, 54-59).
And what does the present time tell us, this 21st century of which we have already completed twenty-five years of perplexed pilgrimage? In the last quarter of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the Balkan War or the first Gulf War, humanity seemed to have reversed the course of the age of the atom and the concentration camps. Now it is not so clear, the century was born under the rubble of the Twin Towers and during the pandemic we heard the earth groaning in pain. We have more doubts than certainties and no hope.
The all-powerful state has taken the form of a technological oligarchy that threatens the last vestige of individual freedom. We tell what they didn’t know about us on social networks and what we still reserved for ourselves until three years ago, we tell ChatGPT, which replaced the psychiatrist as it replaced the confessor.
We lack benchmarks and for those who one day have them, they seem very far away. The enlightened debate between reason and faith has been replaced by the empire of post-truth and the polarization of emotions, which constitute the supreme value of a narcissistic era. Yet something resists, rebels against the nausea of being nothing but broken mirrors delivered to death.
And suddenly, a Lux lights up, reminding us “that there is something divine here,” that we are more than stardust and links in a double helix.
Goethe died demanding “light, more light”, but it is the light of reason, the Luciferian torch that deceives us into the cavern of screens. The 21st century will be mystical or it will not be, and it demands grace for itself. Lux, more Lux.
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