Feeling Joy When Feeling Blue

The Worth of Mirth

It can be really hard to feel joy during the winter holidays when you have cancer or any serious medical problem. If we try, we can hold our fears back enough to feel smatterings of happiness and moments of mirth. The uncertainty about what the coming year will bring can make it feel like a blue Christmas, a blue Hannukah. We are so not bubbling over with festive joy.

The holidays are traditionally a time when we renew our faith in people and in matters unseen, and we try to pile up enough hope to get us through the coming year.

Hope Is

 

Hope is the thing with … barbed wire. 

Hope definitely doesn’t have FEATHERS, all fluttery and light, although it might if a circus clown like Emmett Kelly is trying to sweep up a spotlight with a feather, making us feel sad at his seemingly impossible task. I want something solid. 

Hope is a great stone mountain that doesn’t move. It’s the bright North Star in the night sky that I know will always be there, even if I can’t see it because of the clouds. 

Grace of Community

Perhaps in no other season are people as aware of what is missing in their lives. In December we look for signs of hope, renewal, faith, and affirmation that the struggles we are in are worth the trouble.

In the midst of celebrating, we see people who are suffering, who are poorly dressed for winter, who are hungry, who are alone, and we try to help, because something reminds us that we are members of the same community.

December is also when much of the natural world in the northern hemisphere goes into hibernation. There is grace in this, in the letting go of what is past, in the retreating from active life and preparing for spring, and grace in the slower movements of the season. We think of people we had to let go, and in this holiday season we are reminded again and again of how much we miss them. We think of our own mortality. We think of the sources of energy for our life, what inspires us, and we feel the pull to live what we believe in everything we do.