People living in the
world think very little about God and have little concern about their
salvation. Their sole occupation is usually with their temporal affairs and the
needs of the body. It would seem that most have nothing to hope for or to fear
beyond this present life.
(St.
John Baptist de La Salle - Meditation 58.3)
At the end of each calendar year, billions of people around
the world “welcome in the new year” with fireworks, parties, and resolutions
about personal diet, exercise, and healthy living. This utterly regular change
of one day into the next is transformed into a personal hoped-for change of one
way of life into another. A focused consciousness of time is suddenly leveraged
to pursue our deeper aspirations, and the beginning of a new year becomes a
celebration of hope.
People who have no common ties of culture, religion, family,
or profession gather in large public spaces to put on funny hats and glasses,
create noises of all kinds, and express the happiness of simply being alive.
For just a little while, it doesn’t matter what you do, who you are, who you
know, or how much you have. All share the aspirational nature of lived
humanity, of a consciously shared individuality. It’s not so much that we
really know what we want more of, beyond simply life; just that there is a certain
set of things about which “more” is desirable and worth pursuing. For the vast
majority, what we reach for at this time are larger, more comprehensive, and
less definitive objectives than those which we have just asked for and received
a week ago at Christmas. Where we had so recently asked for a coffee maker or a
DVD, we now aspire to world peace, a just society, genuine community, and a
happy relationship or family. The transition of time implied by the start of a
new calendar year reminds us that our own time is limited, and that we had
better start thinking about some of the things that we know, deep down, are
finally really important. Thankfully, such hopes are generally positive,
informed by our past experiences, priorities, and upbringing. They are
indicators of where our attention is drawn in the quiet of our hearts.
While such New Year’s aspirations tend to be uniformly
positive, the insight from the architect Mies von der Rohe applies: “God is in
the details.” This is the real challenge. The world in which we live and move
and have our being overwhelms - or at least helps to shape - any aspirations
that we wish to pursue. The details of contemporary life tend to aggregate
around ideals whose gravitational pull is largely determined by the untamed
political crowd-sourcing of social media and the “news” it generates. In contrast,
religion by its nature comes from different roots and drinks from far more
ancient, deeper, and less noisy wells, where details inspire and evoke what is
important instead of defining and determining it. They are the source of
meaning, of what we come to know as important, of what informs the character of
our lives. And as Andrew Sullivan has written, “if your ultimate meaning is
derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or
ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your
meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.”[1]
It would be a safe bet to say that the hopes of those whose
ultimate meaning is derived from genuine religious sources is qualitatively
different from that of those whose ultimate meaning is derived from politics or
ideology or a single, secular leader. Therefore, while I am happy that New
Year’s revelers harbor positive hopes of one kind or another, I pray that they
have the wherewithal to bring them into fruition. But I think that those whose
positive New Year’s hopes emerge from within an engaged, genuine, vibrant,
religiously focused community have a much greater chance of actually being
enacted, however provisionally and incrementally, because those dwelling in
such a community will be familiar with habits of perspective, relationship, and
justice that are further realized simply in the pursuit or in the doing of
them. “Christ has no body now but yours.” (St.
Teresa of Avila)
For those of us who constantly challenge ourselves to live
up to the aspirations of our faith, the sentiments expressed in the New
Testament – the details – are more than just nice ideas. They are, or can
become, the fireworks of our lives.
Happy New Year! “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him,
so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)
