My mother passed away last week after a protracted period of invalidity. I dedicate this piece to her as I found in her all the support and love needed to develop my character. My mother’s nickname was Summer.
As a child, I had always thought it strange that she had such a particular nickname; nonetheless it was appropriate that she should pass away in the season consonant with her name.
When I grew up I realised that her name was only a pun, a play on words, but it fit her character perfectly. My parents had a small two-room summer residence at St Paul’s Bay (Xemxija) when my sister and I were still young. We used to fit into these two rooms like sardines in a can but it was fun while the summer lasted to get up in the morning and jump into the blue sea and stay there all day swimming, fishing, snorkelling and boating! At the time we knew nothing about UV rays and all that! Getting up at 5am with my father to catch octopus and then rushing to hear 7.30am Mass at the Capuchins where I was an altar boy.
Staying up with him fishing at ic-Cumnija till the wee hours of the morning was also unforgettable. Incidentally, my mother used to send me along to make sure nothing happened to him. I used to look up at all the stars in their uncountable myriads, very prominent in the surrounding darkness, and inevitably dozed off on my deckchair. Some watch I proved to be!
At the time it was the custom for all the extended family to sit outside in the evening reciting stories and telling what happened to us during the day or week. It was all so much more interesting than TV. The Spanish have a name for this − Tertullia! Incidentally, the pun on my mother’s name arose when our relatives used to visit us in the evenings, they used to say in Maltese “Ejja mmorru sa ghand Mar” (let us go visit Mary) and it was abbreviated to “Sa Mar”. So my mother ended up as ‘Summer’. I imagine now that her summer, which she loved so much, has really started in earnest!
The second part of the article, like the first, deals with natural things. It is becoming incumbent for politicians and social groups to declare human rights ambiguously in order to win points with certain sectors of society. Human rights are based on the recognition of fundamental respect by all members of the human race towards each other.
They are or were up to the recent past, all based on natural law. However, I recently observed that many human rights are arbitrarily popping up which have no basis in natural law, that is in objectivity and are vehemently declared by certain sectors of society very subjectively.
They are human rights based on purely subjective opinions. I quote a notorious one as an eminent example, which is the right to have an abortion! Parts of the globe unfortunately no longer take any cognisance of Natural Law especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The masters of natural law such as John Finnis, Eberhard Schockenhoff and Thomas Aquinas all base their conclusions for natural rights on natural law. There is generally the wrong impression with natural law that the main operative is nature, that is, the laws of nature. This plays only a minimal although important part.
The really important operative in natural law is human reason not nature. So natural law essentially calls us to natural human reason by observing the natural world around us and applying the proper interpretation. Therefore granting rights, which essentially go against natural law, means essentially granting rights that go against human reason. We build a society that must have a grounding of natural rights in human reason. Basing our society on those rights is basically a call to reason. Trying to build a society which does not have a grounding in human reason can only lead to its ultimate collapse as the lines between reason and unreason are forever blurred and the lines of our being permanently confounded. Let us all heed the natural call to human reason and base our society on objective building blocks of ethical and legal thinking.
Dr. Michael Asciak MD. PhD.