By Peter Oliver, Executive Director of the Catholic Health Association of Saskatchewan

This Advent I offer a personal reflection on the theme of hope in relationship to mental health. Speaking from the perspective of faith, what is hope and how might we embrace Advent as a time that strengthens our hope?

Recently a friend called to ask, “Are you OK?

My wife and I had been invited to a lovely social filled with warmth, good food and generous hospitality but I was uncharacteristically silent for much of the evening. “Just deeply depressed,” I responded.  “And with grace-filled humour, he chided, “Oh, is that all?”

My experience of 40 years of chronic depression is something my friend and I can laugh about. Some people struggle with addictions, others with persistent and acute pain, and many with profound losses—depression is one of the things I endure.

In my case, depression and its companion anxiety can be eased with exercise, vitamin D, counselling, prayer and meditation, good physical care, belonging to a faith community, the discipline of work, commitment to my vocation, and cognitive behaviour therapy.  It all helps but… there are times it doesn’t help.

Suffering, whether physical, mental, or existential, can be experienced as an assault on hope, but this is less true if one is grounded in a Christian understanding of hope.  Advent can be a very good time to ponder the meaning of suffering in relation to Christian hope.

In “A Sign of Hope: A Pastoral Letter on Healthcare,” Joseph Cardinal Bernardin makes an important statement about hope. “Let me be clear about what I mean by “hope”. It is not a hope for something (my emphasis). It is not the expectation that something will happen.”

One might add, hope is not the fulfillment of a wish – the future satisfaction of a present need.  I hope I will get a job.  I hope I will recover from cancer.  I hope my husband will stop drinking.

One day I said to my therapist, “Do you think I will ever be able to overcome depression?”  He responded, “It’s unlikely.”  If hope is, “something that is going to happen”, his response would be devastating.  But Christian hope does not exist in the future; it exists in the present.

Christian hope is a strengthening of our relationship with God.

What does this mean?

I’m a disciple of Dorothy Day and I’ve taken great interest in her grandaughter Kate Hennessy’s, book about Dorothy.  It’s a loving account of Dorothy’s relationship with her daughter Tamara, the foundation of the Catholic Worker, and the joys and sorrows of a life lived in solidarity with alcoholics, thieves, the experience of seven incarcerations, protests, journalism, and incarnating “the works of mercy.”

During a particularly difficult period, Dorothy withdrew from the Catholic Worker for a six-month retreat.  Kate tells us that she “baked bread, carded wool, made soap, and prayed for three hours a day in the chapel… [and she] started to write more of the natural world, finding it helped relieve the ‘dryness and pain of prayer.'” (Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty p. 148).”

Dorothy was very depressed, and her response was to strengthen her faith. That meant prayer but it also meant being present – “made soap” and “wrote about the natural world”.

A Christian understanding of hope is tangible. It is faith that is being worked at and worked out in the gritty “here” and the painful “now.” It’s the Christ conceived with all the uncertainty inherent in the annunciation to an unwed woman; the Christ gestated and born amid the inhospitable circumstances that the Bethlehem account conveys; the Christ vulnerable as the holy family flees the terror of King Herod’s massacre.

God, Emmanuel, the Messiah, Star of David, Wonderful Counsellor, the very creative power and source of all that is, the Word of God, Jesus, Bread of Life, Savior, Redeemer, healer – how can the glory of our encounter with God in Christ be stated strongly enough?

Our giving flesh and blood and bones and brains and will and laughter and tears to “Christ” in a faith-filled response to suffering is hope!   It is the promise of Christmas made real, and it never disappoints.

Happy Advent and Merry Christmas.

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Peter Oliver is the Executive Director of the Catholic Health Association of Saskatchewan. Learn more on the CHAS website: LINK.

Communications and Catholic Saskatoon News are supported by gifts to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal: dscf.ca.