This Year, to be More Christ-like

The beginning of the year is the time when most people do their New Year resolutions, renewals and so on. I’m not a fan of resolutions, or a planned life for that matter, but this does not mean that I try to escape my responsibilities by living in the moment with no thought for tomorrow.

There’s an old adage that says the sound of one tree falling is greater than the sound of the entire forest growing. I can’t see the forest grow but am certainly aware of a falling leaf. My character is such that it tends to pronounce and magnify my failures more than virtues. My good side is mostly hidden from the eye of my active imagination. This is why I don’t like resolutions. When I fail to meet them, my internal reaction is usually most frustrating.

When I try to understand my constitution, I discover I have an open mind but conservative tendencies. I attach particular importance to respect for tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation. My character is Stakhanovite in habits and monastic in private living. I think restriction and self-discipline breed better character and values than licence and unbounded freedom. This is probably why I subscribe to conventional religious beliefs and accept the mystical, including paranormal, experiences. I’m Catholic despite my failings and those of the historic side of my Church.

I distrust resolutions because when I became an adult most things were becoming less authentic; when they were becoming slave to fashion and propriety. When short-cuts and instant gratification became the order of the day, and aping foreign cultures was taken to be a sign of progressiveness.

I think what is being lost in our inauthentic way of doing things is a natural progress of moral order. We’re losing the link between the growth of social organisation and progress towards moral truth. It has been lost, rather misplaced, because of the dearth of values that has accompanied our progressive attitude, and because of superficial cultural of relativism.

The writer Jonathan Franzen once commented that we experience our lives in narrative form If you can’t order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush. Our lives are becoming mush because we’re losing moral and traditional structure.

Self-love could be our main problem

This is why pretension and inauthenticity is so common in our era. There’s a clear precipitous decline so remarkable in its constancy as to be without historical analogy. That’s the loss of narrative form Franzen is talking about.

These days believing in God, let alone practising religion, is seen by many as naive, something that cannot explain itself in rational terms. In his old age the Lithuanian born Polish poet and philosopher, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote: Ought I to try to explain why I believe? I don’t think so. It should suffice if I attempt to convey the colouring or tone. A man’s subconscious or not-quite-conscious life is richer than his vocabulary. Existential tension is much like a toothache. Not only can he not express the pain in words, but he cannot even tell you which tooth is aching.

Those who know St Paul’s God of Abraham, the living kind of intelligent introspection under the eye of God (modern times substitute God for conscience) know the dark void left by vanishing religion. No worldly activity can ever fill or replace this.

We must not confuse resolution with ability. If I believed that man can do good with his own powers, I would have no interest in Christianity. But he cannot, because he is enslaved in his own predatory, domineering instincts, which we may call proprium, or self-love The more we rid ourselves of illusions, the closer we are to the truth. Perhaps the only resolution we should really strive for is that of ridding ourselves of self-created and promoted illusions.

Yet, for Christians, it would be incomplete if we were to overlook the true good news, the news of victory. The victory, that is, of the resurrected Christ. That is where our hope and ability resides. May our authentic strivings bring us closer to God through the Christ-like Spirit.