The paradox of Christmas loneliness
National Post, 25 December 2024
Love is more reasonable than loneliness, hope more reasonable than despair, because God is with us
“If you feel lonely, you’re not alone.”
So declared Statistics Canada three years ago, in a study on loneliness,indicative of what catches our attention now. Too many Canadians fear that no one is paying attention to them.
Some 10 per cent of Canadians aged 35-75 reported feeling lonely, before it ticked up to 14 per cent of the more elderly, as widowhood leaves its mark. But younger Canadians were the loneliest ones, contrary to what one would expect in the flower of life; nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of those 15-24, and 15 per cent of those 25-34.
It’s not a Canadian problem. In 2017, the Cox commission in the United Kingdomreported that loneliness had adverse health effects equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
After the pandemic, in 2023, the Biden administration’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, published a report on the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
In addition to the emotional and psychological suffering of loneliness, Murthy wrote that it produces worse health outcomes than obesity and inactivity, and is “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.”
In Canada, we learned this year that loneliness is more directly linked to premature death.
This month our Tristin Hopper reported that Canada has “likely already surpassed the Netherlands as the world capital of assisted suicide,” with Quebec “easily the world’s most euthanasia-heavy jurisdiction.”
The rapid growth of what is euphemistically called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) is, perversely, the only “medical assistance” that our health care-system seems to provide quickly and efficiently. Behind the aggregate figure, Hopper found that loneliness was a major reason for requesting assisted suicide in those patients with non-terminal prognoses.
Even the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association — which filed the suit that led the Supreme Court ruling that assisted suicide is a Charter right — is now concerned about “MAID as a result of intolerable social circumstances.”
Sobering thoughts in these winter days. For many, the cheer and conviviality of Christmas is experienced by their painful absence; it can be the loneliest time of the year.
It is not only a personal, or even social, matter, but a cosmic one. Astronomers, both ancient and modern, have looked up and wondered: Are we alone? In the unfathomable vastness of the universe, is this little blue speck singular? Is reality, quantifiably at least, more of an emptiness than a fullness, more a loneliness than a togetherness?
Christians give their answer at Christmas. We are not alone.
God, by definition, is distant. The gap between creator and creature cannot be overcome from the creature’s side.
So it must be that God draws close. Two millennia into the Christian story, that billions believe that Jesus is God, eternal Son of the Father, seems utterly unremarkable. But it is the most remarkable thing of all. In our cosmic insignificance, we matter. For Christians, God has become one like us, born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.
Cosmic reflections can be the cause of despair. If reality is a vast nothingness, to invest life with meaning is a delusion, even a fraud. If everything is some never-ending working out of random processes, then why pretend that there is some purpose to it all?
Canadian law and medical practice now offer a way out. Lethal injection. It ends the pain and suffering. Lethal injection ends the loneliness.
The Christian solution is similar. But it is a vital injection.
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