Why I, a doctor, love Christmas

Over many years as an oncologist, I have grown wary of anyone or anything that is too blithely cheery. Cancer remains too cruel a reaper, too wanton a destroyer, too brazen a thief of dreams for me to see almost anything with unbridled optimism. It's as if I sense a coming catastrophe around every innocuous corner because cancer leaves no group untouched: the young and the old, the healthy and the ill, the fit and the faint.

And perhaps that explains why I love Christmas.

From popular depictions — whether secular or, too often, religious — one would believe that Christmas featured a blissful new mother cradling a dewy-eyed newborn, as if all the participants in the nativity came straight over from the greenroom, doffed their slippers and robes, and sat down for a perfectly manicured photoshoot.

But, of course, logic, history and the biblical record tell us nothing could be farther from the truth.

Called from Nazareth to report for the census in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph would have needed to travel around 80 miles with Mary — now effectively at term, with a fullyformed baby wriggling in her womb — riding on the back of a donkey. The road would have been rocky and treacherous, either dry and dusty or made into a slippery mess, wet with rain. It's not as if they stayed in nice hotels as they made their journey, and I can only imagine (truly, I can probably hardly do even that) what it must feel like, nearly to term, to cram one's body onto a donkey to make such a journey.

Then, of course, no proper place could be secured for the labor and birth, and so the couple ended up in what may have been little more than a cave used for housing animals, with all the pungent aromas and unhygienic exposures that would entail. There would have been no anesthetic to ease the pain. Indeed, occurring as it did more than 2,000 years ago, Jesus' birth likely came at a time of high infant and maternal mortality, meaning that Mary took her life in her hands — birth would have been an existential threat to both mother and son.

What's more, Mary and Joseph were people of no obvious worldly account: poor, immigrants, refugees, members of a people in captivity. To an outsider, their journey to Bethlehem and then the birth of their son would have seemed like a happening of no importance, barely a blip on history's radar, hardly a thing to celebrate or remember.

But that is where the sacred symmetry of Christmas brings me back to my work as a doctor.

Because just as surely as caring for patients with cancer makes me suspicious of sunny optimism, so certainly does it also warn me against surrendering to cynicism. The funny thing about the human experience — seen in stark relief as my patients face suffering and death together with those they love — is that from the midst of that very suffering, I routinely see beauty materialize from the ashes: kindness amid pain, faith in the face of a bleak prognosis, love even as life winds down.

It is as if, in every tragedy, we sense — even if not yet quite visible — the stirrings of a phoenix ready to rise.

That, I think, is the message that comes to us on Christmas. Not that life is easy. Not that we are readily delivered from suffering and pain. But that the gritty, bumpy, dirty, tumultuous and even lethal realities of life are all too real — and yet somehow beauty, sanctity and meaning persist, regardless.

Somewhere, on a night otherwise suffused with what makes life unescapably real and almost unbearably hard, humanity and divinity found purchase, anyway.

May it be so for all of us. Merry Christmas.