Life comes at us fast. It isn’t unusual that a few days fly by, or even an entire month, and everything blurs together. All the memories are one, long, vague reel. I follow the same routines, make the same jokes, watch the same teams play sports. It isn’t unpleasant, necessarily, but I do wonder if this is the way it’s supposed to be. There’s no issue at all with stability and being faithful to the rhythms and routines of our lives, but within that, I sense a certain passivity in myself that I don’t really like.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe you feel like life is something that is happening to you rather than you being the one making the decisions. The world is up-and-down and we cannot change it one way or the other. People in positions of power make decisions and we’re captive to them. The boss says do this so it must get done. On the commute home, traffic must be endured. Life goes on. Things happen. What’s our role in it all?
I sense passivity in the spiritual life, too. I tell the priest my sins and only realize after I’m finished that I framed all my sins as ongoing tendencies or the result of stress, habits I’m powerless to break because I’ve convinced myself they arise from exterior circumstances. Do I really believe I can take control of my behavior? That I can improve?
Reasserting our power
The whole point of making a resolution to change, whether it be motivated by the new year or every single time the act of contrition is prayed in the confessional, is to reassert the ability of personal willpower and choice to actually make a difference. Life comes at us fast, but that doesn’t mean, with God’s grace, that we can’t navigate it. We’ve been given a destiny to achieve, but it really is up to each one us to get there. No one else can do it.
The reason resolutions can and do work is because they eliminate passivity. They make us responsible for our decisions and help us identify specific, concrete changes we would like to make. No longer are we victims of circumstance. The key, though, is to take up our resolutions actively and make them very specific. Vague passivity makes for disappointingly vague results, which is why, if we don’t actively choose to address our sins, they’ll never change.
Over at Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas recently shared a Christmas poem by John Donne. I like poetry because of how specific poems are. A poem can only be written by the exact person who wrote it. It’s personal, not a generic, passive thing. It’s alive. A poem represents the active struggle of the author to make a connection, to communicate something intimate about the way he is experiencing life.
Donne’s poem is a meditation on the power of the Nativity, beginning with an unforgettable opening line, “Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.” Donne marvels over the impossible grace Our Lady brings to birth. At Christmastime, he has been shocked into stillness before the newborn Lord, God come to find us, searching for us. God personally and actively bridging the gap between us.
That’s how I think of it whenever I manage to make even a small, permanent shift in a sinful habit. A gap bridged. A connection made. An impossible grace. But nevertheless, it happened.
Donne’s Nativity poem is part of a series, seven poems total in which he names and celebrates very specific events during the year. He actively meditates on those events. He names what he would consecrate. The series is called a “corona,” and forms a crown that thematically link together. The last line of each poem connects to the first line of the next, and the final line in the whole series links back to the first; “Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.”
At the outset, Donne is feeling melancholy, so he decides to offer the coming year to God. He won’t passively allow the time to flow past but, instead, chooses to embrace all of it. No matter what the year brings – victory, suffering, hope, new challenges – he makes his resolution to give it all to God. God will crown his activity and raise up his “Muse” to Heaven.
We must get active
I’m no poet but it seems to me that we can think of each life as a poem written by God. Each of us is a creature made, written into existence and joined to the Logos, the Word-made-Flesh, the Christ Child who redeems all of our efforts. Like Donne, before the unfolding of your life, pause, be still, and pay attention. Linger for a while in the beauty of your existence, the way you are joined to the very life of Christ through the unfolding of the year.
I’ve realized that, for me, it simply won’t do to continue being passive. My choice for this year is to actively consecrate it. In all it’s specificity, all the days God has given to me, I’ll make a crown of prayer and gratitude.
We really can make our lives beautiful. We really can make progress in the spiritual life. But it takes time and attention and we must get active. This is the year of impossible grace coming to fruition in your life. God has grace for you but it’s up to you to search it out and cooperate with it. No one else can do it but you.
