MIND MOVES:Our darkest hour comes before it gets brighter
AT CHRISTMAS time, we wait. We think about the days ahead and what could happen. Some scenarios we anticipate give us a warm feeling. Others are less comforting, even distressing. We wait, wonder and some of us pray the ghost of Christmas past won’t appear this year.
Some people think God invented Christmas to give us something to celebrate, but this is not true. People invented Christmas to give each other hope. It has its roots in rituals that sprang up around the winter solstice, which we celebrate today. Christianity hijacked the occasion and gave us a modern rendering of an ancient tradition: Christmas.
I'm not denying that a child was born to a virgin, angels appeared in the skies, or Santa rode a sleigh across them. I'm just saying that human beings had been doing something special around this time of the year long before the angels sang Gloria in Excelsis Deo.
Over several generations our Celtic ancestors designed and built Newgrange in Meath. It turned the shortest day of the year, when the sun is low in the sky, into an ingenious symbol of hope and immortality.
This megalithic structure spoke powerfully to a nature-based people who looked with dismay as the sun shone for less and less time each day, and the earth below appeared to be dying. They were frightened. They felt helpless in the face of powerful forces that could decide their destiny and over which they felt they had no control. Sound familiar?
Newgrange was built to reassure them that neither the sun nor the earth would die, regardless of how bad things looked. The geometric alignment of its roof light and inner chamber enabled Newgrange to capture the sun’s rays on the shortest day of the year. And what looked like a low point of creation, became the moment when the sun penetrated deep into the earth and both were reborn.
Perhaps at another level, Newgrange spoke, and still speaks, to the human heart. It reminds us that it can take hitting an all-time low in our lives, before we come alive.
A good friend phoned me to share her own personal Newgrange moment. Last week, she experienced a recurrence of a brain tumour and required emergency surgery to remove not one, but two tumours, a day later. But now she was well enough to be discharged, and she was clearly relieved to be going home for Christmas.
She was well again, but what was different was that she sounded more alive than ever. There was energy and vitality in the way she spoke. Her appreciation for every breath and every step she took was palpable.
She said something that felt to me like the low light of a near-death experience had touched her in a deeply personal way. In her view, she said, it had taken the shock of a relapse to shake her free of the terror that remained after she had an earlier tumour removed last year. Her greatest fear was that she would have another. Now that she had survived exactly that, she felt strong and liberated.
My one persistent insight into Christmas is that it rarely comes in the grand and biblical way that we have been conditioned to expect. It can come in moments when we least expect it to. Something simple happens that touches a tender place in our heart and brings out the best in us.
It may be while we are on a walk with a friend, or watching some black and white re-run on St Stephen’s morning when everyone else is still asleep. Or it may come wrapped in some unexpected news that is hard to handle, at least initially.
Waiting for Christmas can be like waiting in frustration for a friend you expect will let you down, or for a friend who read your secret Santa letter and understands precisely what it will take for you to rediscover magic in your life.
Thank you dear readers for your kindness and support in the past year. Please know how much that matters to me and to every other contributor in this supplement. May the magic of Christmas, wherever you find it, open your heart, and make you feel alive.
Tony Bates is founder director of Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health. See headstrong.ie