TVM recently broadcast a programme about a Żebbuġi who all Żebbuġin love: Leli Zammit, a 60-year-old who has Down's Syndrome and is really the most loved person in Ħaż-Żebbuġ. For many years, Mr Zammit used to visit my office on his way home. He would knock on the door and enter, say: "Hello", hug me and shake the hands of all my clients, sometimes even hugging them. It was not the first time that this little ritual made arguing clients stop to find an amicable way forward. Mr Zammit's presence would work miracles. I think it brought people to their senses, opening their eyes to the meaning of life.

Society has developed away from organised religion. Then again, society has not - and can not - develop away from the need for meaning. To find meaning in life is a deep human need: a meaningless life is so heavy that it can - and has - crushed people.

Christmas is one of those symbolic moments of meaning. The ideology behind Christmas is the ideology of a new beginning, a new direction in life. (The 'Testament' as in Old and New Testament, can also mean 'the giving of direction.)

Why should this be important in this day and age, when ignorance and superstition have (supposedly) been consigned to the dustbin of history? The short answer is that these things are always important. The long answer is that, when you think about it - and as funny or disrespectful as it may sound - many people live like caged hamsters. They run about their little cage, dash up and down the different plastic levels, sprint in the wheel - and it all adds up to a lot of activity and very little sense of achievement.

Mostly, I would say, this is because of the economic model we inhabit, in which the processes of industrial production have been divided into small, almost meaningless, tasks which rob the work of any kind of dignity and direction.

In an agricultural setting, the farmer participates in the production of produce from beginning to end - from sowing to reaping - and has long resting periods in-between that he can use for recreation.

In the industrialised world, on the other hand, the 'salaried slave'- the factory or office worker, that is - participates in small, specialised tasks which to him appear disconnected from the rest and allow him little satisfaction and only brief spells of recreation.

Short of a full-blown revolution - which I am not advocating - there is really little scope for inner personal advancement. (Much of the current buy-to-rent frenzy is a symptom of this search for meaning. Once the chimera is understood for what it really is, the depression will be felt far and wide.) Of course, one can join the rat race, but there is no guarantee of success in terms of inner personal achievement and advancement.

The spiritual path, on the other hand, offers a guarantee of achievement, because the journey is interior. Like all journeys, it offers a destination, and working one's way towards that destination can be a source of profound satisfaction.

(Then again, reaching the destination, as Robert Browning tells us in his poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855), might not necessarily bring much joy. It's the journey itself which brings satisfaction.)

Cut from the past

The main ideological point behind Christmas is a clean cut from the past.

Christmas has, however, been hijacked by capitalism and its promise of instant happiness upon receiving presents.

This consumerist ideology has been embodied in the figure of an overweight old man wearing a white beard and driving a reindeer-pulled sleigh while drinking a carbonated soft drink with past connections to cocaine! Somewhere I read that this figure could actually have come from Arctic folklore: people would spend the desolate wintry months holed up at home eating hallucinogenic mushrooms thrown down their chimneys by shamans dressed up as Amanita mushrooms (red clothes with white dots)!

That said, we could view the giving of presents as the celebration of the process of cutting off one's future from one's past. In other words, the future need not be a continuation of the past; it can be a "new" future, a new way of doing things with a more refined sense of ethics and duty.

The spiritual journey, unlike the drab journey in the material world, can bring satisfaction because of a sense of achievement. The psychologist Carl Jung described Christ as the 'archetypal Man', the ideal to which we should aspire to emulate. In Psychology and Religion, Jung says: "The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events of the conscious life of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny." Transformation is fundamental to a meaningful life, a life that seeks a higher destiny.

More directly relevant to Christmas, in his Collected Works we find Jung saying that "the individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born". 

Overcoming one's selfishness and being of service to others

The economic model in which we live - with its high-rise business-tower cathedrals and its shopping-centre parishes - does not promote that ideal. Instead, it insistently puts forward the religion of making more and more money, even at the expense of human dignity, ties and feelings.

There are many reactions to this spiritual sterility. Some people hold the radical view that one should not bring children into this corrupted and wretched world. Crazy as it may sound, there are countries that even allow the legal action of wrongful birth.

Others react by resorting to the age-old axiom that if you can't beat them, join them. They thus conclude that they should give free rein to their greedy desires. After all, since desire can never really be satisfied, these people will always be busy, like happy hamsters running on their ridged wheel, a bit like Sisyphus who was forced to roll an enormous boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down when it nears the top, and having to repeat this action forever. Until one day, that is, when bumm bumm il-bieb! ... Death knocks on your door. After a life spent meaninglessly, running (hamster-like) after material gain, your time is suddenly up.

Christmas, with its break-with-the-past ideology, is a yearly wake-up call to start afresh and take off on a journey through the inner world of one's spirit, the destination of which is a Better You.

A Merry Christmas to All!

Christmas commodification

Like many others, I watched the One interview with the Prime Minister and his family of a couple of weeks ago, in what appears very clearly to have been a propaganda exercise. But it was the brazen-faced exploitation of the two daughters which I found ethically objectionable.

The two daughters are not dauphines, they are not heiresses to a throne. They are not child prodigies either. They are two sweet children like many others, endowed with nice personalities and the innocence of childhood, but children to whom is being imparted a warped vision of the world and their place in it, and this is ethically objectionable. I wonder what the private thoughts of the Commissioner for Children are about this glaring example of child commodification.

The image the Prime Minister tried to portray of himself reminds me of Napoleon's propaganda strategy to portray himself as the heir to Charlemagne and Hannibal, and the redeemer of the French. We might now expect a series of David-like photos depicting Joseph Muscat riding on Cyrus Engerer's back, intent on crossing the Conservative Bigotry Alps to free the peoples who live beyond the mountains, with his finger raised toward the sky in the gesture typical of he who believes, acts and wins.

Dr Muscat's first ride, however, was not on Mr Engerer's back but on that of Joseph Cuschieri. Every Christmas I think of Mr Cuschieri, the sacrifice he was made to make, and the reward he was given.

Ten years ago, Mr Cuschieri was made to give up his seat in the House to make way for Dr Muscat's co-option. There is a lot that could be said about the pressure exerted on Mr Cuschieri and the great disappointment through which he later had to go, which apparently even manifested itself psychosomatically.

It is an important indicator of Dr Muscat's cheeky personality that he rewarded Mr Cuschieri by appointing him to an official role in Greece. I can imagine Mr Cuschieri's daily woes having to deal with everything in the Greek alphabet. Literally everything, but everything everything, is Greek to him now.

Christmas is the time to be nice and kind to one's neighbour. Perhaps with Mr Cuschieri, Dr Muscat had to be nice and kind all year round.

You gauge the moral intrinsic value of a man by the way he treats his friends and his enemies. It seems difficult to classify Mr Cuschieri: he seems to be neither Dr Muscat's friend nor his foe. He too rather seems to have been commodified.

A nice Christmas gesture

In the meantime, it would be a meaningful gesture to help others, not only during any other time of the year, but particularly during the festive season. I was struck by the efforts to bring into being the Maltese hospital in Ghana, by the Ghana Mission Foundation head-quartered in Santa Venera. This and similar causes are worthy of our moral and material support, particularly at this time of the year.

My personal library (33)

Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) is a children's novel (and a much-beloved 1980 Christmas movie starring Alec Guinness, Connie Booth and Ricky Scroder) which forcefully but delicately drives home the message that it's never too late to experience the Christmas changeover.

(Spoiler alert.) An old English Earl's son marries a commoner, an American to boot, whom the Earl never accepts on account of her social class. When the Earl's son dies, the widow and her son move to England. Ultimately, the grandson's love and innocence win over the grandfather, and the old man's heart melts, accepting his daughter-in-law and even taking an interest in his hitherto-ignored tenants' lives and economic predicament.

Although he is old, and old habits die hard, the Earl breaks with the past and embraces a new future.