|
Resolutions or No Resolutions?
Perhaps New Year's Resolutions Testify to Faith
Many of us make New Year’s Resolutions, keep them for a while, and then, eventually, sometimes by January 2, break them and fall back into old habits. Our intentions are good but old habits, especially bad ones, are hard to break.
Dr. Sophie Lazarus, a psychologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, says we may be better off without making resolutions. While there really is nothing inherently bad about making New Year’s resolutions, things can get problematic when they’re done from a place of pressure or obligation. “What we don’t want to do is set a really large sweeping kind of goal and resolution and not meet it and feel more stressed and discouraged,” said Lazarus. “We sometimes think it’s going to help us get more done or be more productive. I think it really tends to just increase our stress and make things worse.” (https://www.cnet.com/health/why-you-shouldnt-make-a-2022-new-years-resolution-according-to-a-psychologist/ ) She suggests being kind to yourself and not making any resolutions.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser (January 9, 1995) has a different perspective. He agrees our human nature fails often when it comes to new resolutions. So, why do we continue to want to make new resolutions when we know that, barring miracles, we will not, in the end succeed in keeping them? We all want the wall of our bad habits to come tumbling down and the part that wants it down is the best part of us. There is something inside us that hates our own laxity. There’s something inside of us that is driven to the higher, that refuses to settle for second best, that wants to sing a new song, that believes in the possibility of resurrection. There is something inside of us that needs to keep on keeping on.
Rolheiser says, it is a sign of health that we keep making new resolutions, despite a life-long history of failure. Why? Because in striving to renew ourselves in the face of our own failure we are making an important act of faith. In making new resolutions we are saying: “I believe in a God who continues to love me, even when I can’t live up to it.” Every time I pick myself off the floor after a fall and begin again with some hope in my heart looking for a new start, I am saying the creed in a way that is considerably more radical, in terms of expressing actual belief in God than is my too-easy Sunday recital of it.
To make a new resolution is to believe in God. But it is more. To make new resolutions is to express faith in the God of the resurrection. To try for new life, for a fresh start, precisely when a bad habit has kept me so long in a certain helplessness, is to say: “I believe in the resurrection and the life.” Martin Luther once put it this way. “Just as God in the beginning of creation made the world out of nothing, so his manner of working continues unchanged”. Our inner world, akin to the physical world is, to all outward appearance and to our own feeling of it is pretty empty as my history shows. Within it, certain things are possible and certain things are impossible. The case for the impossible is pretty strong especially when I as judge know the history of failed resolutions.
That is where faith and the resurrection enter in. As the angel Gabriel tells Mary: “For with God nothing is impossible.” Somewhere deep inside of us, in that place where we want to make New Year’s resolutions, we still carry that faith, in that place we still say the creed and still believe in the resurrection. Because of that belief, because of New Year’s resolutions, God can still make something out of nothing.
Many Blessings as you enter this New Year!
Preview Sheet 2023-2024
PS: Since we cannot accommodate overnight retreatants at the motherhouse, you might consider spending the night before or after the retreat at the hermitage so you can be in a peaceful quiet environment to reflect.
| 
