I
t seems a curious custom to make resolutions at that time of year when there is so little to encourage the keeping of them. There is the bleakness of the weather, when the days, as Alan Coren put it, ‘never quite manage to look like anything but a dispirited pause between one night and the next.’ There is the depletedness of one’s financial resources by the Christmas overspend. There are the endless reviews of the year that is finished and the prophets of doom forecasting financial misery in the year ahead with no jubilympics to cheer us up. What incentive is there to keep such resolutions beyond the day on which they were made? In 2007 a study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol involving 3,000 people showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, despite the fact that 52% of the study’s participants were confident of success at the beginning. And yet making resolutions at significant moments in the annual calendar is something that has been going on for a long time. The ancient Babylonians did it, the Romans did it, but in both cases their resolutions were in the form of a promise made to a god, in the latter case to Janus (as in January). Christians have made similar promises but normally in association with seasons of preparation for major festivals as in Lent and Advent. The modern New Year’s resolution is not really made to anyone unless it be to oneself. Does this make any difference to our ability to keep such resolutions? And if it does what kind of God are we making such promises to?
We might begin by wondering how we decide what resolutions to make. Perhaps the failure of such resolutions is caused by the lack of thought which goes into making them. As a simple example we might resolve to lose weight. Why? Because of what the scales tell us? Or would it be better to ask what it is that makes us eat more than we should? Might it be because certain kinds of food are comforting? And why do we need such comfort? What is going wrong in our lives, causing us distress? Might it not be better to address that issue before we think about trying to lose weight, which we probably won’t do very successfully unless we have addressed it? Resolutions are often based on things that seem to us wrong about our lives and which we want to correct. They are based on guilt and perhaps a sense of the disapproval of God or, if we have a more liberal view of God, the disapproval of the superego. But wherever the guilt comes from what it needs is a commitment to the ‘grace and truth’ which St John at the midnight mass tells us, filled the word become flesh, dwelling among us.
Grace and truth; grace to seek out and recognise the truth, grace to act upon the truth, and truth which liberates the activity of grace. Making a resolution requires attention to grace and truth. And the truth can only begin to emerge as we take time to look at ourselves and our lives and our relationship with God – though perhaps that should be done in the reverse order. In what ways do I understand myself to be in relationship with God? And perhaps more importantly in what ways do I think I should be relating to God, even though it never seems to happen, so that my faith is based on an expectation that this is what the relationship ought to be like and one day it might happen. That seems to be rather an inadequate basis for faith – a kind of extended wish-never-quite- fulfilled. In the meantime we continue to go to church, to worship, to get to know fellow members of the congregation and to do our best to serve our neighbour and help those in distress. And each one of these things is, if we do them thoughtfully and sincerely, a genuine way of being in relationship with God. If there is truthfulness in our adherence to such things then grace comes and we grow in faith. But to do these things truthfully needs a commitment which in itself grows out of a personal sense of God. And that comes from becoming more familiar with Scripture, prayer and faithful, saintly lives. And in this case the reading of Scripture either alone or with others requires us above all to be imaginatively open to the text, to find texts that inspire you, texts that make you want to remember and hold onto them. And prayer by contrast then becomes a stilling of the imagination, and an exploration of silence, or rather an openness to the possibility of silence exploring you, getting into the corners of your mind where it is constantly active and unable to be still. And thirdly the attention to saintly lives means watching for signs of the difference that faith makes either to people you know or have read about. In his Christmas sermon Archbishop Rowan described people of this kind:
‘When people respond to outrageous cruelty and violence, with a hard-won readiness to understand and be reconciled, few if any can bring themselves to say that all this is an illusion. The parents who have lost a child to gang violence; the wife who has seen her husband killed in front of her by an anti-Christian mob in India; the woman who has struggled for years to comprehend and accept the rape and murder of her sister; the Israeli and Palestinian friends who have been brought together by the fact that they have lost family members in the conflict and injustice that still racks the Holy Land – all these are specific people I have had the privilege of meeting as archbishop over these ten years; and in their willingness to explore the new humanity of forgiveness and rebuilding relations, without for a moment making light of their own or other people’s nightmare suffering, or trying to explain it away, these are the ones who make us see, who oblige us to turn aside and look, as if at a bush burning but not consumed.’
Scripture, silent prayer and the communion of saints past and present, these are what will strengthen the sense of God in us, and will at moments bring down the barrier that so often seems to exist between us and God. And only when that happens will we begin to see how some things in our lives might need to change. Only when we find the grace and truth which the sense of God initiates will we be able to resolve something about or lives or rather perhaps we should say that only then can we allow love to resolve something about me. The resolutions which last are the ones which we allow God to make in us.
A HUGE THANK YOU to all those of you who responded to my plea for a contribution (rather than chocolate) to a fund to help my nephew attend a rugby camp in New Zealand, starting in February; it raised £180 which would have been far too much for me to eat and would have necessitated radical resolutions about losing weight!