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New Year Resolutions may or may not be your thing. They’re not mine. Nonetheless there is something about the mere midnight flicker of that one number “7” turning into an “8” (welcome, 2018!) that prods us to think about life, at least for a minute or two.
Where have we been this past year? Where do we want to be? Is there in fact anything we might need or want to change, anything we could in fact be at least a little resolved to do differently over these next twelve months?
But how to organize our thoughts under that heading? If your life is anything like mine, taking stock of things can feel like a cross between herding cats and juggling chainsaws (juggling cats?)—there are just so many parts moving in different directions all at once. And some of those parts have sharp edges!
I suggest that the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (this year, January 14) has a good key question with which to center our New Year stock-taking.
The Gospel is John 2: 35-42, the encounter of Christ with his first disciples. On John the Baptist’s recommendation—Behold the Lamb of God—they are following him. He turns to look at them, and asks them the simple question, “What are you looking for?”
This seems to me to be the right place to stop and take stock in the time-honored January way. What are you looking for? What do you seek? What do you want, basically?
It’s good to sit with that question for a while. Don’t rush with an answer. Especially, don’t rush with a conventional pious or virtuous answer: “Well, I want God, of course! I want to be holy!” Or, “I just want my family to be happy and healthy!”
These may be true, and if so, that’s great. But it’s good to just let the question sit without trying to force an answer, especially the “right” answer that (if we’re being honest) we know will let us off the hook, reassure us that we’re basically all right, and that 2018 can just keep going along exactly as 2017 did.
I did just that in poustinia recently, allowed that question “so what do I want, anyhow?” to percolate around in my innards (which at that juncture had precious little else percolating around in them).
What I came up with was a rather disconcerting answer, and if you don’t mind my being a little personal or even confessional, I don’t mind sharing it.
I discovered that, for much of my life, I have basically wanted to be left alone. For a distressingly large part of my life, “Stop bothering me!” has been my inner refrain. I am an introvert; I am by nature a thinker, a philosopher, a writer.
I’m also the youngest of six children. I was one of those dreamy, meditative children always off in a corner staring into space, or heading off by myself away from my large noisy family looking for quiet places where I could just be alone and think my thoughts without being interrupted all the time.
It was a bit embarrassing to realize while sitting in poustinia where I now spend three days a week (ahem, alone) that somewhere deep down lurking in the dark places of my innermost being has been not so much a poustinik as a somewhat grumpy and (I assure you) thoroughly irreligious hermit!
Now the Lord in his great love and mercy (and, I might add, wonderful sense of humor) has placed me, aside from poustinia, in the midst of a large and very warm religious family, and has filled my days in and out of poustinia with scores of people who it is my delight and pleasure to serve and be served by in my Madonna House priestly vocation.
The crabby kid who wants everyone to leave him alone to think his thoughts may still be lurking in there somewhere, but so far the little brat hasn’t been indulged too much.
And it’s not doing him any harm, either, to be thus “bothered.”
This is the point I want to make. Whatever answer we come up with, truly, to the Lord’s question “‘What are you looking for?” (I just gave you mine), the key thing is that it is the Lord who asks it, and our answer, whatever it is, is met by him, not with scorn or contempt, but with understanding and merciful love.
My childish desire not to be bothered is actually a desire (I now know) that my life be undiminished and whole, that I have what I need to be able to express the fullness of my interior being outwardly, according to the words and means God provides.
Jesus hasn’t left me alone, but he has indeed met that desire in me.
And he continues to show me that this deeper desire is met, not by hiding in my room, but by opening my heart to all humanity, and opening my mind and soul to the Word of God speaking the fullness of His Being in His words and means. All of which is what poustinia in fact is.
And so it is with all of us. The disciples answer the Lord’s question with another question: Rabbi, where are you staying?
To my mind, this translates to, “What are you offering us?” The Lord knows what they are looking for without asking them. He knows what you and I are looking for, even better and long before we figure it out.
And he knows how to meet not only the surface desire of our being (Leave me alone!) but the deeper longing for wholeness, security, fullness of life and joy that it really is about.
So whatever other resolutions or irresolutions we make for 2018, I suggest we all resolve to place all the desires of our hearts, the nice holy ones and the ones that seem to be neither nice nor holy, into the hands of the Lord, trusting that if we follow him and “remain with Him” not only for a day but for a lifetime, he will see our desires met, and bring us at the end to the fulfillment of all our desires in the kingdom of heaven.
