I consider myself an avid reader. Yet, I never write anything that has got nothing to do with my academic profession: teaching the Italian language and its literature.
However, I was simply devastated when I read on the media lately that a large shooting range is about to be built close to Mount St Joseph in Mosta, a spiritual retreat where one can find much-yearned-for solitude – and in the process, oneself.
I was impelled to do something about it. Besides praying, I felt the necessity to write this article, which is less of a form of protest and more of a simple social comment. I must say it clearly: I love Mount St Joseph. For me it is a serene island in the tugging, swirling and damaging currents of life.
I usually spend a week in this place in September and another week following Easter.
The place, with its picturesque environs and idyllic life, grants me the opportunity to simply stop and reflect about what is happening in my life and about what, above all, God seems to be asking from me in the here and now.
Nowadays we live in a society where being ultra-busy has become a status symbol of sorts. I notice all the time, that people rarely have time, or, I must say, find time, to stop and reflect about what is going on in their life and where they are heading. “Being busy all the time” has become equivalent to “being important”.
We define ourselves not on who we are as human beings but, rather, on what we do or how much we have to contend with in a day.
It has become almost scandalous even to suggest to anyone to stop and find some time to relax and reflect.
This reality I see it all the time at school and at the university, with my students, but also with priests, nuns and fellow lay people. And, yes, with me too.
We live in a society where being ultra-busy has become a status symbol of sorts
This inherent inability to stop, reflect and be in touch with our inner selves for a period of time is leading to a number problems: mainly boredom, resentment and depression. As Henri J. M. Nouwen rightly puts it in his book Invito alla vita spirituale (An invitation to the spiritual life), one of the greatest paradoxes of our contemporary age and time is that most of us are simultaneously busy and bored.
I am no psychologist and don’t pretend to be one. However, my subsidiary area of study at the University of Malta was psychology. When dealing with the topic of depression, I remember clearly reading a study by Ustun and Chatterji (2001) affirming that “[d]epression is a very common mood problem which has been growing at an alarming race since the middle of the 20th century [and]… if the trend continues, by 2020, depression will be the second biggest healthcare problem after heart disease”.
Similarly, according to a study done by Nesse and Williams (1995), “young people are more likely to suffer from depression than previous generations. Furthermore […] rates of depression were found to be higher in the richer societies than in the poorer ones”.
The reasons they propose for this would be mass communication, where, according to them, while in our ancestral past we would have compared ourselves only to our relatively small forager group, today, thanks to social media for the most part, we constantly compare ourselves with images of the most successful on earth.
Yet, this seems to be mainly occurring because we are unable to stop and reflect on what is being presented to us by the media.
We are not digesting this feed and neither are we satiated.
In view of this, I sincerely believe that Mount St Joseph is one of the very few places left on this island which offers to us all, believers and non-believers, the opportunity to escape from the frenetic life we now find ourselves living.
It allows us to be in touch with ourselves, with who we really are and, above all, with what can really make us happy and fulfilled.
Mount St Joseph runs counter to everything that is the glorification of busy.
It is both a physical and symbolic process of slowing down, a cessation of movement and time and, finally, the realisation that being ‘busy’, too busy to notice what life is about, is not what we desire after all.
Let’s not ruin it.