OpinionChristmas This article is more than 1 month oldChristmas joy feels more elusive than ever. Look for quiet contemplation instead
This article is more than 1 month oldPaul DaleyIn troubled times like these it’s hard to know where to find beauty and meaning, let alone any joy
Christmas, most of us are brought up to believe, is all about joy.
Joy about being with loved ones. Joy about giving and gracefully receiving. Joy about the permission we all have to kick back and be festive. Joy, for many, about the pageant’s religious significance.
But joy feels as elusive as a Tassie tiger right now. It is a unicorn. A needle in a haystack. I know I’m not at all alone when I say that, this year, finding joy feels almost impossible.
The very notion of joy raises so many burning questions right now. Can we experience it? (By can, I mean, is it even psychologically/emotionally realisable when the world is so broken?) And if the answer to that question is “yes”, then another question must surely follow: should I feel guilt at the joy I’m going to experience when I know there is so much pain in my global village?
I’m asking for friends. Yes, really. Friends gripped by the ennui that comes from observing, yet again, that there is no bottom line when it comes to man’s inhumanity to man.
Some people loathe Christmas for its loneliness. I understand that and feel for them. Others are wary of the crass commercialisation, as Tim Minchin so eloquently puts it.
I’d always quite liked Christmas as a kid. Except for the part where my uncles would, late in the day when lagered-up, sometimes argue politics and start shirt-fronting one another.
Christmas was always lovely when our kids were little of course, especially when their grandparents were around to shower them with love and, yes, stuff. Christmas is so much about the joy of kids and the joy that comes from watching them. In recent years, however, with the kids grown and only one grandy left, I can never help but partly feel each Christmas is but another melancholic toll on the clock of rapidly passing life.
A certain whimsical sadness about family absences has crept into it. But that was usually offset by the joy. Yes, there was still a joy about it. But not so much this year.
As 25 December nears, it’s hard to know where to find beauty and meaning, let alone any joy.
Best in these circumstances, I often think, to look to the universe – the stars and the moon – for comfort.
Over here, at the bottom of the world, we can look to the stars and the moon with its magical tidal pull and just sit with it for a while and know that the universe is bigger, more meaningful, than the globe with all its determination to destroy itself. But then again, it must necessarily dawn on you that this is the same moon seen from where all the human pain and suffering it is possible to experience is now being realised.
Many people tell me that right now they feel fortunate by dint of birth. I understand that. I have often felt that, but never more so than right now. But there is also a weight – some sort of heavy self-satisfaction, perhaps – associated with recognising, let alone holding too fast to, one’s fortune.
Every day people tell me they cry when the news comes on. It happens in my home. A sense of helplessness pervades the good. But let’s face it – there is also an abiding and very deep sense of guilt. It’s not too much to call it survivor guilt. Such guilt has no anchor in personal responsibility – though there is a strong sense of broader culpability that as citizens of a nation and a global community we are incapable of building polities that can stop civilian slaughter, deliver peace on Earth and stop trashing the planet.
In the absence of joy, in the acknowledgment that we do enjoy precious peace, safety and prosperity where it’s cruelly denied others, I wonder also this Christmas at the moral righteousness of the very act of giving thanks for fortune’s many gifts.
Now is when, I think, religion – if I had it – could be such a balm. Perverse, really, given it begins so many wars and is responsible down the ages for so much killing.
In the absence of joy, this Christmas must be one for quiet contemplation.
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