Joy’s There If You’ll Stop To Feel It
“It’s just the very worst time.”
The woman’s voice on the phone was quiet, hesitant. As someone with clinical depression, she said, she has suffered through the holidays that some see as “the most wonderful time of the year.”
These days, her illness is controlled by medication and therapy. But she feels for every soul for whom Christmas’ tinkly Muzak and cheery TV commercials bring despair, not delight.
“There are more suicides … more people are institutionalized,” the soft voice continued.
You needn’t be clinically depressed to understand what she meant. Certainly, emotionally healthy people’s fleeting melancholy is nothing like true depression’s vast bleakness. But the holidays can sadden and confuse anybody. It’s not just that they pounce on us earlier and earlier or that there’s never enough time or money for them.
But, as annoying as the season’s forced gaiety can be, it’s the relentless cynicism of everyday life - the cool, can’t-be-bothered pessimism we live with the rest of the year - that’s the real pain. The true spirit of Christmas has become too cutting a contrast, making the holiday one more dissonant event in a paradox-filled universe.
Think of it. We live in a peaceful nation in a largely prosperous time, but few of us seem truly happy. Secure behind locked doors, linked by faxes, pagers, cellular phones and e-mail, some of us have never felt more scared or more alone.
How do we reconcile Christmas’ tidings of comfort and joy, its images of a child’s healing spirit, with the hatreds and horrors presented us by TV shows, movies, news and the Internet? Hourly, they detail for us assorted meannesses, stupidities and cruelties from around the globe. Dazed by ugly scenes unfolding in my daily paper and on the nightly news, I wonder: Is there a disaster anywhere of which I’m unaware?
Last week in Washington alone, the police chief resigned when his crony was arrested on charges of embezzlement and extortion; residents worried that six women’s deaths may be the work of a serial killer; a teenager was convicted of slaying a boy of 12; and a Harvard study revealed that the city’s black men live 14 years less than white men across the Potomac in Fairfax County. The only American men with shorter lives reside on a South Dakota Indian reservation.
We may not be at war, but we feel under siege. Jobs grate, or usurp our energies. Adults confront their parents’ failing health and threats to their children’s well-being; youths confront pressures their parents never imagined. Single people despair of finding love or commitment; married people search for meaning in their bonds and lack time to find it.
Even leisure can sap you, as a friend’s sudden revelation while watching TV showed.
“You sit there,” he realized, “and hear that your hair is bad, your breath smells, you don’t have enough insurance and you better buy these tires or your child may die. … Death is the premise of 90 percent of the dramas.
“Its messages are terrible. But we barely notice.”
Christmas, the ultimate, upbeat blowout, no longer fits. No wonder we’ve made it about rushing, partying, spending - frantic busy-ness that we understand - rather than about its namesake’s preachings of peace, unconditional love and redemption, notions we can barely fathom. No wonder its rituals - the gifts we buy for those who don’t need them; the decorations that look more festive than we feel - often make us sad for what we’ve lost.
Of course, I’m part of the problem: the media for whom “news” usually means some failure or disaster. But you don’t have to be a journalist to see that the more sophisticated our communications systems become, the more awful stuff they’ll reveal to us. More and more, we’ll feel overwhelmed, pinned down by the weight of the awfulness we perceive.
Paralyzed by all that’s bad, we’ll fail to see what’s good in our lives.
Christmas isn’t dissonant; we are. Innately spiritual beings, we nevertheless focus primarily on what we can see, hear and touch, knowing everything in the world but this: The faster and more far-reaching our technology becomes, the greater our need to slow down. The more panic-stricken the holiday - or any day - makes us, the more necessary it is to become as still as those plaster figures in those old Nativity scenes.
If we stop to breathe in our blessings, we’ll feel what’s right. Even during the most chaotic time of the year.
xxxx