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The season of joy

Your Mental Health
joy

It’s cold outside. And the night will soon be at its longest. 

In your home, I trust, you will be warm and contented with friends, family, and hope. 

Hope. Her sisters are “faith” and “charity.” 

As our beautiful blue planet completes her faithful pilgrimage around our Sun, I wonder if we can tell ourselves that we, too, have been so faithful – to the essential virtues of faith, hope, and charity. 

Faith is such a tricky word. When we hear it we think about religion. About devotion to a guiding god. Which is OK, but insufficient. Faith is so much more. It is trust. Trust in goodness, however innocent and näive that may be. Faith in human kindness. 

Charity flows from our open heart. It is more than giving. Charity is our sense that we are one, that we are a community of souls. When one of us in trouble calls, we pack all we have and go. To help. No matter storm or turbulence, we do what is right. We do what our heart tells us is the only road. 

Hope. Hope’s dark siblings are pessimism, cynicism, and regret. These emotions, these intellectual constructions, are corrosive. They eat away at what makes us good. And, most horribly, they deny joy. 

Joy. This is the most deep and personal of quality of being. I don’t think it is an emotion. Rather, it is a state of our innermost substance. That essential thing that creates in us wonder. That gives us the ability to feel beauty, however we may sense it. 

The trees around me, the cedar forest and all the pesky critters who share with me this lovely raincoast – this is beauty. And in my walks up the mountain. My joy. 

For the past eight years, I have written this column about mental health. And for the past eight years, I’ve written my Christmas piece that deals rather directly on psychological well-being – mostly in a tiresome clinical sense. Not this year. 

As I trawl my memory of the last 12 months, I recall brave and generous people who made a difference. People and places who have brought joy and happiness to us all. 

Arrowhead. It’s been quite a journey since Jim, Carey, Janet, Denise created an environment for folks in need. 

Community Services. So understaffed. So overworked. Doing what the hell they can. 

The food banks. Our big shopping stores are so generous. The bakery we all love, Wheatberries, likewise. Local producers. Same. 

Janice Williams, who puts on the greatest parties and invites the most shy of us to read our writing and sing our songs and share our hidden flamboyance. 

There is a natural justice in all of this. 

We are a community not without difficulty. We experience crime at a high rate, have an intolerable number of homeless, and so on. 

Yet, we accept. We give. We donate. We put on our best clothes and go to the charity dinner/dance evenings. I think always of the late Bob Darney. Mary Anne Darney. Maureen Clayton. And of Bob Smith. Jim Chisholm. Brian Smith. All such giving and wonderful souls who embody the quality of selfless giving. 

Faith. Hope. Charity. Joy. 

It is in us, and all around us. We are blessed. 

Happy Christmas.