This is not sacrifice, but selfishness

Life is beautiful, the priest said during his homily last Thursday at the funeral mass of five people who were blown up by fireworks.

Yes, it sometimes is – not all the time, to be sure – and that is precisely why we shouldn’t make a mockery of it by flying repeatedly in the face of death.

A funeral mass is not the time and place to hold up the deceased as an example of a cavalier attitude towards life and of an irresponsible attitude towards family.

But nor is it the time and place for platitudes which treat those deaths as though they were the result of a natural disaster or the actions of a capricious God whose will is beyond our comprehension.

The Christian God is not one who demands human sacrifice. The Madonna is not Astarte, who we must appease with the deaths of our sons and daughters.

When men die while making fireworks, they have not died for God, or for the Madonna, or for Christ. None of these ‘took’ them away, and if we think they did it means that we have not evolved beyond the Old Testament and so much for Christianity.

Fatalism is anathema to Christians, but a rich seam of fate runs right through the peasant culture of Mediterranean Catholicism. The expression ‘God’s will be done’ means that we have to do God’s will whatever the circumstances. It does not mean that we have to accept everything that happens because it’s God’s will.

Yet we Maltese use the expression very differently, turning it on its head in translation: Hekk Alla irid/jekk Alla irid. We use it in the exact same way as the fatalistic Muslim ‘insh’ Alla’, Christianity having been slathered onto a Muslim veneer in many aspects of our religious and social culture.

‘Hadituli l-Madonna!’ ‘Alla haduli t-tifel!’ ‘Heqq, xi trid taghmel, hu – ir-rieda ta’ Alla.’

This is not a belief in God’s will being done. This is sheer blasphemy to believers – for yes, it is blasphemous to lay at the Madonna’s door the blame for a fireworks explosion which kills six people. People do this only because they are immature and refuse to see that the fault lies down here on earth.

It perplexes me that this attitude is encouraged by the very people who should abhor it: priests and politicians. They know what they should do and say, but not one of them has had the guts.

Instead they line up to crowd the front pews at the funerals of those who are outrageously irresponsible, paying tribute to them for that very same outrageous irresponsibility. Not one of them – because they are too frightened of the consequences of sticking their neck out – says, “Let this be an example to you all. If you must work with explosives in an unstable environment, then make sure you stay single and childless and that you have no parents still alive.”

To risk your life when you know that your death will cause havoc and a lifetime of undiluted agony for those you leave behind is the ultimate act of selfishness.

This is the main reason why those who died should not be framed in the context of heroism. The essential element in heroism is altruism, the polar opposite of individualistic thinking and selfishness. Heroes are not people who risk death for something as mundane as fireworks when they have great responsibilities towards the living.

I remember writing these very same things some years ago when several people died in a fireworks factory explosion in Haz-Zebbug and the president, the prime minister, the leader of the opposition and armies of politicians crowded into the church to pay their respects at the funeral.

And I thought then, what hope is there for change when even our leaders fail to lead?

One man who works in the fireworks business was quoted by a newspaper as saying: “Whoever works in the fireworks sector is making a sacrifice for himself and his family. The hobby is a sacrifice. It’s a major commitment which keeps you away from the family. You are pleasing others who watch the fruits of your work.”

No, you are pleasing yourself because it is what you want to do. The sacrifice for those who love making fireworks is not in making them but in giving that up and saying “I’m married now. I am father. I have responsibilities and duties and foremost among them is the duty to stay alive.”

It is because these men don’t want to sacrifice their dangerous, life-risking hobby which they enjoy so much that they carry on putting at risk the stability and happiness of their wives and children. And sometimes, they even risk the lives of their children and their children’s spouses, and get them killed.

Because of the hideously irresponsible behaviour of the father of her children, the man who should have loved and cared for her most, that poor, poor Mary Farrugia in Gozo is utterly bereft, condemned to living out her remaining years in a wakeful hell which sickens me with fear on her behalf.

And what about her five-year-old grand-daughter, who lost her father, her grandfather, two uncles and an aunt on her fifth birthday? She has been handed a life sentence too.

‘Life is beautiful,’ the priest said to the three broken, desperate widows and two small children who are all that remains of this once-happy family. ‘Don’t collapse. Keep going.’

Well, that’s easy to say, isn’t it? The barest understanding of human psychology should tell him that it is impossible – yes, impossible – for a woman to suffer a loss like that in her twilight years and keep going. People have been known to kill themselves in that situation, to sink into mental illness or to remain heavily sedated for the rest of their lives.

That, and not ‘keeping going’, is the normal human response. You have to be psychopathic to keep going after a loss like that, incapable of normal human emotion.

Mary Farrugia is at the tail-end of her life and not at the beginning. There can be no fresh start for her. Only her eventual death will bring relief, and only a fool will pretend otherwise or proffer shallow words of consolation. How can there be consolation with something like this? Even if she somehow manages to get back into a sort of routine, she will crawl through the years that are left with grief howling constantly within her.

A great part of her pain will be caused by the knowledge that it could all have been avoided had her husband given up playing around with fireworks when he married and, most particularly, when he started a family. This was not some unforeseeable tragedy, like a family holiday in which everyone dies in a plane crash, or a flood which kills many members of the same family. The risk of death is ever-present in the way fireworks are made in Malta.

She will lash herself now, when it is far too late, for not doing enough to stop him, for not putting her foot down forcefully when he began to involve their young sons, who were only 10 years old at the time, in the fireworks workshop.

Mrs Farrugia told a newspaper that her sons “inherited” their father’s passion for fireworks. But these things are not inherited like blue eyes or a musical ear. They are taught. A father who teaches his sons to make fireworks cannot truly love them. Part of love is keeping our children away from life-threatening danger and not throwing them right into it when they are 10.

“I was always a bit scared,” Mrs Farrugia told the press. “I knew it was dangerous. I used to ask him not to take our sons there but they loved going with their father. He adored our children and now he has taken them away with him.”

I must say at this point, though I find it difficult to do so, that her behaviour was perhaps as irresponsible as his. By not standing up to their father, she failed to protect her sons.

A woman’s first duty, once she has children, is no longer towards her husband but towards those children. Unfortunately, this is not spelled out in preparation for marriage in Maltese society. Women in Malta, and the further down the social ladder you go, the worse the problem is, are not taught that it is actually their duty to stand up to their husband and defy him in the best interests of their children, should it be necessary, and that prejudicing their children’s safety, well-being or best interests just to keep the peace with their father is a dereliction of that duty.

“I trusted him,” she said. “I knew he was careful.” But five years ago, the factory had blown up already, when nobody was in it.

If she hadn’t been aware of the danger until then, or if she had been keeping her fingers crossed, she should have certainly changed her stance after that.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.