2023, The Year of Our Lord

 I’m leery of New Year’s Resolutions. They seem like an open invitation to a year of guilt. The very word resolution sounds like a stern angry word. Legalistic. So I don’t make them. Or at least I try not to make them.

But one morning in December I was thinking back over 2022, feeling both grateful and frustrated, and I began dreaming about how 2023 might be different. Lighter and more hopeful. I am a list-maker; I can’t seem to help myself. So I made a list of things I’d like to habitually do in the new year. If that sounds like New Year’s Resolutions to you, you may be right, but I’m not giving them that label. I’m calling this list my “Rule of Life for 2023” (in spite of the legalistic sound of the word rule).

Let me back up and give another list, coming from an exercise I did at a retreat some 20 years ago. The assignment was to make of list of my life values, traits I would want people to use to describe me at my memorial service. The task seemed a little funny and presumptuous to me at the time (I don’t like thinking of myself as dead), but I went ahead and listed five values. The list became important as a vision of the person I wanted to become, rather than a description of my character at the time. Several years later I upped the list to seven values. Here they are. (Please jot them down in case you attend my memorial service.)

--Gratitude
      --Compassion
      --Wisdom
      --Poetry
      --Humor
      --Creativity
      --Beauty

For 2023, I wrote out seven “I will” statements that flowed from these values (not in any order).

In 2023, I will…
      --continue to make poetry part of morning devotion.

--make reminders to be awake to the presence.

--put poems on the door.

--keep up my blog.

--“say grace” more indiscriminately.

--consciously ascribe unsurpassable worth to the people I encounter, both in person and in my mind.

I plan to read this list every morning. Going on three days now, I have a perfect record.

Concerning the reminders to be awake to the presence, I recently read Greg Boyd’s book, Present Perfect: Finding God in the Now. He bases his book on Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God, a concept I’ve always felt drawn to but found impossible to live out. So I knew I couldn’t put on my list, “I will consistently practice the presence,” because I’d probably feel bad at the end of every day. But I can put little reminders around the apartment: “Be awake”. “You are here.” “You.” Open your eyes,” and so on. Boyd writes about the practice of the presence, “The challenge is not in doing the discipline; it’s in remembering the discipline.” Yes. Maybe the reminders will help.

Concerning “poems on the door,” it’s a decision to tape up one of my poems on the door to our apartment each week so that people in the hall can read them and maybe laugh a little. I needed to put that on my list because I’m tempted to think, “That’s ridiculous, Nancy. Who wants to read that stuff.” I won’t think that. Well, maybe I will, but I’ll put the poem up anyway.

“Say grace more indiscriminately” refers to something G.K. Chesterton wrote about saying grace: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” I said grace as I sat down to write this blog. Now, if only I can remember to do this throughout the day.

About “ascribing unsurpassable worth to the people I encounter,” this is motived by the pesky people in my life who sometimes serve as triggers to my anger. I don’t like this about myself and I think that trying to see all people through the eyes of the heart, as St. Paul puts it, might be a way of cooperating with God in my own growth and transformation.

Wish me luck. Or, better said, wish me grace with my 2023 Rule of Life. I guess we’re never too old to grow up.