Pessimistic optimism

Was 2009 more of an annus horribilis than the others? Yes and no. We did have the credit crunch in 2009, which translated into very low-key retail therapy this festive season and a great number of people, myself included, opting to spend a quiet and relaxed New Year's Eve with close friends without the usual glamorous excesses.

I have always had very mixed feelings about New Year's Eve. We are all desperately keen to bury the old year without a tinge of regret and usher in the new one with the highest of hopes. It has always been like that and the older one becomes the more meaningless it gets. New Year resolutions become a stale joke and New Year's Eve is just another night out.

When I was younger and the normal curfew for most people was around 1 a.m., staying out till four, five or even six in the morning on New Year's Eve was a yearly thrill. Today, this staying out till the late hours of the next morning is the norm. So what's the big deal about New Year's Eve today? Nothing very much really except some people dress up to the nines in black tie and go to some glitzy party costing an arm and a leg to down champagne... since the Millennium these tamashas have become rarer and rarer.

As we conclude the first decade of the millennium we realise that all those high hopes we had for new beginnings have long been shattered. Right form year one, Osama Bin Laden changed our entire psyche. The world has been at war since September 11, 2001. What crystallised in the eight years since the destruction of the Twin Towers was a deep and hurtful mistrust between Cross and Crescent that was never so acute since the Crusades 1,000 years ago. No matter how we try to be enlightened and open-minded the chasm exists and continues to widen alarmingly.

I had hoped, with the election of Pope Benedict that he would be instrumental in engineering a reconciliation between Christianity and Islam just as his predecessor had smoothed the path towards the eradication of the Iron Curtain but, no, the present incumbent of the Throne of St Peter, a kindly intellectual of an introspective disposition, has no feel for politics, nor has he got a grasp of the mood of the times and I fear that, without a strong and inspiring lead, Catholicism and, hence, Christianity itself will decline.

The number of letters about religion in this very newspaper is astounding and practically all of them are on the defensive, taking up the reactionary stance conveyed by the Vatican as more and more people around the world decide to throw over or ignore its precepts and go their own way.

I am in two minds about this. I have always viewed the circular colonnade designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini around St Peter's Square as a Mother's embrace; a protecting veil against the terrors and evils that beset the world, which is why I feel sadly let down by what I perceive to be retrograde policy. Not that I altogether blame the Pope and the College of Cardinals. The scandals that have rocked the Church in the last decade have coloured the Vatican's outlook. Only a few days ago, an Archbishop in South America was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption of minors and as for what is still going on in Ireland, words fail me.

In Malta the Church is strong and its influence enshrined in our Constitution that no Lisbon Treaty will ever dislodge. Yet, it is the Maltese Church itself, if one can read between the lines of the latest pastoral letter, that wishes to separate itself from the state. As I have said so many times before, one lives a Catholic life out of free choice and not because it's approved lifestyle dictated by the law of the land. We will otherwise resemble that not-so-fictitious land in that most intriguing book by Jill Paton Walsh called Knowledge Of Angels that almost won the Booker Prize in 1994, which I consider to be prophetic and uncannily similar to the Gonzian Malta of today.

There are forces that are infinitely more powerful than that wielded by the Church at work, which have coloured our perception of the life to come. The propensity towards cataclysmic natural disaster that escalated with the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 is now ushering in the dire predictions of 2012 when the entire planet is, according to some Mayan prophesy, to self destruct. When you pair this off with the failure of the Climate Change Conference of Copenhagen a month ago, the impressionable will be full of fear as the prophets of doom predict one disaster after another and Hollywood panders to people's ghoulish side by financing terrifying films of an event to which there is no logical or scientific explanation apart from dark, morbid and irresponsible superstition.

What do I expect of 2010? More of the same? Probably. As I spend a quiet New Year's Eve playing bridge with close friends whom I love, I hope that you will all wish each other well and consider our totally man-made calendar as just a scientifically-numerical exercise to impose some order and method on the calculation of time and nothing more.

Happy New Year to all.

kzt@onvol.net