What We’ve Always Gotten: Resolutions, or Wishful Thinking?

Ah, the secular marking the New Year through various Resolutions, 80% of which will be discarded before March 1st!  New Year’s Resolutions have become, in some senses, nothing more than New Year’s wishes and hopes.  We hope we will get in shape.  We wish we would stop using our phone so much.  In the days before Jan 1, we use the start of a new Gregorian Calendar year as a convenient signpost to point to to justify continuing our bad behavior because, well, “it’s not the new year yet!”  In short, too often New Year’s Resolutions are nothing more than a cry of want: that something or someone enters into our lives and saves us from the bad habitual choices we continuously make, year in and year out.  The fact is, that Someone has already come; but now it is our turn to complete His task in our own lives.

For Catholics, New Year’s Day falls on the last day of the Octave of Christmas, the Incarnation which is so fundamental to our Salvation we cannot contain it’s celebration to any less than eight days.  However, amid the celebrations and family get-togethers, a close examination of the Liturgical calendar during this Octave shows that we move, in the span of 24 hours, from tranquility of a manger to the horrors of stoning, on to maniacal infanticide, and then to even violent murder at the foot of the Altar.  I am, of course, talking about the respective Feasts of St. Stephen, the Holy Innocents, and St. Thomas Becket.  It can be jarring to live the emotional rollercoaster of these feasts, but the martyrdoms of these saints are intricately linked to the coming of Christ.  These feasts do more than show us that now we have a Faith worth dying for; they show us the path we must walk in order to accept His grace and mercy in our lives.  We, like they, must suffer martyrdom.  

There is a saying I am fond of, and repeat to myself just as often as I say it aloud: “Do what you’ve always done, and get what you’ve always got.”  How true this statement is!  But it is particularly relevant during this time of resolution.  Christ came to render atonement for the sins of all, and Ascended into Heaven so that He might send the Holy Spirit to convince the world of sin.  When we are reminded and consequently convinced of our sins, we become inspired and moved to a reconciliation with God.  We can live in the same space as new creations, shedding off the burdens of our past life (or year) and live in grace and freedom.  But this is only possible if we die to ourselves.  It is not an automatic thing that, because our Savior has come, we are therefore saved.  If we desire our lives to get better, we must experience a death of self.  The old ways must die to make way for the new.  Let us use the start of this new year, this year of Jubilee, to act in ways we have never acted before, so that our returns might be the grace and freedom our resolutions promise us.  Our Savior has come: let us respond as martyrs.