Editorial Comment:  Gifts

In most religious traditions, there is some season in which gifts are exchanged.  The Christian metaphor most often used is that of Wise Men bringing gifts to a newly-arrived Jesus, an analogy which commerce – meaning, department stores, the automobile industry, everyone needing to exchange a good or service for money - has leapt upon with vigor. It’s not surprising that they would do so.  In making “gift” a trope, they have invested it with a spiritual value that makes the endless and fervent buying-and-giving-and-receiving-and-exchanging seem somehow a little sacred. It undercuts the crassness of the process, removes it just far enough from the realm of the profane as to give us some comfort when we are looking at January’s credit card statements

But that analogy misses the point.   The gifts in such seasons are not those by us to spiritual entities, but from them to us.  The gifts in the nativity scene are not the goodies presented by three guys, weary and dismounted from camels, but the child in the creche, bedded on a manger of hay.   And to the extent that the gift does not represent an offering but is in fact what the gods and God have given to us, it is rightly a season for gratitude.   This month and January, it will be nigh on impossible to go to a recovery meeting, an assembly of those who are seeking or who are accomplishing relief from addiction without hearing the announced topic as “gratitude.”  The same will be mirrored in meals with friends and families: expressions of appreciation for even a moment of relief. 

And of course, it is the readers of this column to whom we, Nick and Deedee and Bob and Karen and I, direct personal thanks, for guiding our shared patients to a place of sustained relief.

- Editor-in-Chief: William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM