A Christmas present

TVM recently broadcast a programme about a Żebbuġi who all Żebbuġin love: Leli Zammit, a 60-yearold 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 knoc

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 highrise 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.

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.