Note: This article was published as an edited opion piece on Times of Malta
As Malta discusses the possible legalisation of euthanasia, the national conversation often narrows quickly to slogans: dignity, choice, suffering, and the right to die. These are important words. But are they enough? Do they truly capture the weight, the mystery, the transcendence that death represents in a human life?
I have been a Franco Battiato fan for a number of years. His lucid, poetic meditations on death, both in interviews and in his music, have always moved me. They led me to seek out some of the sources that shaped his thinking, including In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, a book that chronicles the teachings of the mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Although it was written in the early twentieth century and speaks in a language some might find arcane, the book was a major inspiration for the Sicilian maestro. Gurdjieff was concerned with one thing above all: awakening. Learning to live and die with presence, not passivity. This could offer an unexpectedly timely lens for Malta’s moral crossroads, as we confront the complex ethical terrain surrounding the possible introduction of euthanasia.
Gurdjieff’s central claim was startling: that most human beings live in a state of waking sleep. We are ruled by habits, fears, and fragmented identities. We believe we are free, that we choose, but in truth, we are often driven by unseen forces: mechanical reactions, emotional pain, and cultural scripts we never questioned.
This matters profoundly when discussing euthanasia. In our public conversations, we tend to assume that a person requesting euthanasia is doing so out of rational, autonomous will. But what if that will is fractured? What if the ‘I’ making that request today is not the same ‘I’ that found beauty in life a few weeks ago? What if they are simply exhausted, not just physically but existentially, and no one has helped them interpret their suffering in a deeper way?
I have encountered such exhaustion firsthand during my long hours at St Vincent de Paul, the home for the elderly. One resident once confided in me, without hesitation, that if a doctor were to come and offer euthanasia, they would immediately accept. “I’m tired of this world”, they said, not with drama but with quiet resignation. It was not just about physical decline. It was about feeling removed from community, from agency, from meaning. For this person, life as it had been known seemed to have already ended the moment they were relocated and made to feel like a burden. In such a context, is this truly a free choice? Or is it a silent protest, against invisibility, against emotional exile, against a society that no longer knows how to hold its elderly with dignity, presence, and love?
Gurdjieff’s teachings push us to examine what kind of consciousness we bring to life and death alike. He argued that true freedom only begins when we start remembering ourselves, when we awaken to the reality of our situation, our nature, our impermanence. From this perspective, death is not just a biological endpoint. It is a portal, a moment of truth, perhaps the final invitation to be present, to reconcile with ourselves and with what lies beyond. This mirrors, in some way, Jesus’ teaching that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), pointing to an inner dimension of spiritual awakening that transcends ritual.
Another passage in this context is Jesus’ radical instruction that his followers must “hate” their father, mother, spouse, children, siblings, and even their own life to be his disciples (Luke 14:26). This is not a call to emotional rejection, but a provocative teaching about detachment. It speaks to the need for liberation from the attachments that bind us to identity, comfort, and ego. Not liberation from love, but from clinging. It is about choosing a deeper identity, rooted in what is eternal or divine, over societal roles, tribal belonging, or inherited scripts. In the context of death, it reminds us that spiritual freedom often begins with the courageous act of letting go.
This is not an argument against euthanasia as such. It is an appeal to resist simplifying the conversation. Suffering is real, and compassion is essential. But so is the sacredness of dying, the way it can sometimes transmute pain into meaning, loneliness into connection, fear into surrender. That kind of death does not always happen on its own. It takes inner work, accompaniment, and cultural maturity.
Malta must ask itself hard questions. Are we offering people the tools: spiritual, emotional, and communal, to meet death consciously? Or are we asking them to choose between unbearable pain and bureaucratic mercy? Are we cultivating a society that sees the final chapter of life as a space for transformation? Or are we writing it off as a medical failure?
We must also ask what it means to die freely. If the one requesting euthanasia is abandoned, under-resourced, ashamed of being a burden, or living in a society that fears ageing and illness, is that freedom? Or is it despair dressed in legal language?
There is a danger too in seeing euthanasia as a technical solution to a human problem. The Gurdjieff work insists that life is not mechanical. It requires attention, intention, and inner struggle. Euthanasia risks becoming another clinical response to the messy business of dying, bypassing the existential encounter that can arise at the threshold. When we reduce the dying process to symptoms and metrics, we risk falling into clinical reductionism, the flattening of a profoundly human and spiritual experience into merely medical categories.
There is also a deeper mystery we often overlook: we can never truly know the state of consciousness of another person’s soul, even when the body appears unresponsive or in a vegetative state. To presume that all awareness is absent is to reduce the human being to biology alone. But if there remains some quiet, hidden flame of presence, unseen, unmeasurable, then the choice to end a life carries even greater moral and spiritual weight.
And yet, I believe this conversation could be Malta’s moment. Not to divide into ideological tribes, but to pause and reflect on what we owe to one another in life’s most intimate passage. We owe more than palliative care. We owe meaning. We owe presence. We owe a language that makes space for sorrow, for slowness, for mystery. We owe spiritual resources beyond religion.
Gurdjieff spoke of “intentional suffering”, the kind that awakens rather than diminishes us. That does not mean we should glorify pain or deny mercy. It means we should avoid choosing comfort at the expense of consciousness. Death is not just something to get through. It is something to be met.
Battiato captured this in his final song, Torneremo Ancora, where he sang of the eternal return of the soul. To journalist Vincenzo Mollica he once said:
“We are all spiritual beings. We are on a path towards liberation. Until we are free, we will return again, many times, to this earthly life. Existence is cyclical and it repeats until the soul is completely free from the disturbing emotions of the ego which holds it captive. We are slaves to our emotions, which dominate us. Liberation, on the other hand, can have no ties.”
This is a moment to speak not only for those in pain, but for those who see death as a passage, not an error; as mystery, not only as problem. If that speaks to you, let your voice be part of the conversation. What would it mean for Malta to explore euthanasia not as an end in itself, but as a mirror reflecting how we accompany, how we see the other, how we awaken to our own mortality? That kind of discussion is harder, slower, and more miraculous.
“Le nostre anime / cercano altri corpi / in altri mondi / dove non c’è dolore / ma solamente / pace / e amore / amore.” — Franco Battiato
