Oh man, can I make me some resolutions!
There are a multitude of stops along the ebb and flow of my year where I do what many are doing today. My Christian faith sets up some of these watering holes:
- the beginning of Advent (the Christian new year and inward reflection on readying oneself for God's arrival, both then and now)
- the beginning of Lent (the night after carnival)
- Easter Sunday (new life)
- and Pentecost (a little help from above).
And there are some non-religous stopping points. My birthday in mid-July being the main one. But if I stumble after that occasion, I crawl on over toward the beginning of the school year a few weeks later to try again. My wife's being a professor and my being a youth minister means our household is shaped by semesters. It's one of the things Karen had said she likes about being a teacher. There are new beginnings every five months.
I count these up and it comes to about seven different times in any given year when I think about starting over. I want to be a better person, more disciplined, to spend more time on things that are valuable and have meaning, spend less time wasting psychic energy on things that stunt my growth. So to this end I resolve:
- Open and close my day in prayerful meditation.
- Understanding the helping of my wife keep an orderly house as a spiritual act.
- Spend enough time running that I enjoy it again.
- Significantly increase my speed on the five string banjo.
- Build a bench in the workshop where my son and I can build things.
- Begin teaching Noah about money.
- Spend less time on the internet (specifically the Huffington Post) and more time reading books.
- Stop eating after 7 PM (God help me).
- Learn more about wine.
- Be a better friend.
Open, close, understand, help, spend, increase, build, teach, spend less, read, stop, learn, be--these are the verbs of my pending growth, the verbs of becoming human. I dare say that other living creatures don't reflect consciously on the meaning of existence. In the words of Hebrew poetry, it is what makes us 'a little lower than the angels.'
The 1st of January in our Spiritual calendar is called "The Feast of the Holy Name." Infant Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised (by the way, if you are interested, there is a fascinating celebration of the relic of Christ's foreskin in a small village of Italy that David Farley of the Daily Beast has written about). I've come more to embrace the significance of this naming as I've increasingly understood salvation in a holistic way. The name "Jesus" was the aramaic pronunciation of Joshua, which meant "salvation." The name was spoken to both Mary and Joseph from the angel Gabriel. It was important that he be given the name "salvation."
Strike from your mind the idea that this only means salvation after death. It means much more than that. Jesus cared deeply for what was happening to people now. His life's work was as a healer and teacher, teaching that love of God was love of neighbor, and in that exchange we are saving each each other from all kinds of maladies. His name pointed to the theme of his life, and to what might become our own theme--saving one another from destruction.
Isn't that the crux of resolutions? Being rescued from all that destroys us? Naming what isn't helping by naming what helps? If you can name it, you can begin to focus on it in practical ways.
My old friend Bill Mallonee, a song-writer from Athens, has a recent tune called "Name, Its Name" that captures some of this on-going struggle. Below is a link to hear the song (which if you like click on over to Bill's website to buy it, from the "Cabin Songs" album).
Name Its Name
Ah, but on to something better, kid!
Past those places you should flee
past all those prisons we fashioned
and those chains for jewelry
On to something so elusive still
and plainly hard to tame
so much so that poets and theologians
can barely name it’s name
Now hating yourself and all you are
it don’t get much sadder than that
And I say you break God’s own heart
when you fall into that trap
On to something so elusive still
and plainly hard to tame
so much so that poets and theologians
can barely name it’s name
Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart the love of him who is the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
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