Let’s do what the ancients exhort us to do: be kind and generous

Dear

Oreader,

ne of my first work experiences after I finished matric was a holiday job at a Jet store in Durban. I was an elf and had to dress up in green and red colours and a floppy pointy hat to take photographs of children with a fake white-bearded Father Christmas, who happened to be my younger brother.

It was cheesy to have teenagers sweating in hot suits in the sweltering subtropical African summer, pretending to be geriatric elven folk from the North Pole who would come bearing toys at Christmas on a sleigh dragged by reindeer. But this codswallop lit up the eyes of every child I photographed sitting on my brother’s lap.

I guess we all need a little Christmas, a little joy, a little magic. Even if the OG (original) Santa, St Nicholas, was actually not from the North Pole but from Myra in 4th-century Greece, now Demre in modern-day Turkey – where the warm Mediterranean weather is more like Durban’s than the melting ice caps of the Arctic.

St Nicholas may not have had a team of elves making and wrapping toys in a factory at the North Pole for him to drop through chimneys, but after his wealthy parents died when he was young, he is said to have given away his immense inheritance to the poor and needy, before joining the priesthood. His gifts were always given to alleviate the suffering of the poor, wronged and destitute.

A similarly wealthy and privileged 29-year-old Siddhartha Gautama did the same thing seven centuries before in southern Nepal. Siddhartha was showered with luxury, sheltered in a palace court from the outside world by his nobleman father.

Once he saw the harsh reality of death, poverty and disease beyond the palace walls, the founder of Buddhism eschewed his life of wealth and privilege to become a religious ascetic, pursuing a path to enlightenment in search of answers to the question of human suffering.

In Islam, the Qur’an speaks of the “recognised right, for the needy and deprived” over our wealth (70:24-5). By giving for the sake of others, a Muslim is fulfilling a duty to those in need. Dr Imtiaz Sooliman and Gift of the Givers’ incredible work in South Africa and around the globe is based on this fundamental philosophy.

The same notion of giving selflessly is present in the Hindu Vedic scriptures: “One may amass wealth with hundreds of hands, but one should also distribute it with thousands of hands. If someone keeps all that he accumulates for himself and does not give it to others the hoarded wealth will eventually prove to be the cause of ruin.” (Atharva Veda 3.24-25)

Jesus, whose birth Christmas commemorates and whose teaching St Nicholas followed, instructed a rich young man to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. When the man showed difficulty letting go, Jesus’ response was: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! ... It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:21-26)

This is a revolutionary part of early Christian teachings that so threatened the ruling classes of Judea that Jesus was crucified. But his ideas lived on, as was evidenced four centuries later when St Nicholas handed out his wealth to the needy.

What all these global spiritual traditions speak of is that our interconnectedness as humans demands a generosity of spirit to each other. Similarly, our African notion of Ubuntu holds that a human being achieves humanity through his or her relations with other humans.

This humanist exhortation of the ancients is the antithesis of the past year of Death, Famine, War and Conquest. It was a year that forebodingly felt like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had arrived to ride roughshod over us all.

But no, our disasters were not biblical revelations fulfilled – they were sheer misery wrought by a bunch of bad leaders all over the world who have placed power and profit above people.

How different our world would be if we all rebelled against this global philosophy of greed and destruction, and applied our considerable minds and skills to finding solutions as opposed to creating more problems. Imagine that, in whatever small way we can, we all become Santa Clauses, every day. Now that would be magical!

I wish all of you a well-deserved break and pause from the madness. Thank you for your generous support of our journalism by buying our newspaper every week.

This is our last edition for the year. Our next edition will be published on 13 January. Don’t forget to email your wishes for the New Year by no later than 7 January to heather@dailymaverick.co.za

Yours in defence of truth, Heather