Someone asked me what my New Year's resolution was. I usually don't do these because they're pointless and hardly ever work out. Not that it's bad to have goals, but you know...keeping something up for a year is usually an effort in the futility of, well, human effort. No one ever says, "My NYR [because it's tiring to keep saying/typing such a long phrase all the time, hah] is to be gracious, or to accept grace more." You know why? Because people don't see that as effort, as something they can tabulate and quantify; you can't mark it down in a chart or give yourself bonus points for grace. But it's stuff like that that I think we should actually be focusing on a bit more. I digress...

My answer to the question is simple: I actually missed the deadline by just over a month. November 30, to be exact. This is an exercise in irony, because the resolution I've made according to the Gregorian calendar is that I want to orient my life more distinctly to the Church calendar. So I'm a month late...the new Christian year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which this year happened to be November 30. Whatever the historicity is concerning the creation and implementation of the Church calendar, for catechesis or whatnot, it should still hold prominence in the lives of all Christians, even those who are not a part of a catholic church that recognizes the Christian calendar. Invariably we all orient our lives toward a cycle of repetition, whether we realize it or not; primarily, this is a seasonal repetition, but secondarily, this is a "secular" (not using the world in an evil sense, per se) orientation that looks at January 1 as the hinge-point. This is how we measure birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, etc., and like I said, this isn't inherently bad.

But what if we oriented our lives toward the Christian calendar, so that others knew we were Christians by the way we acted and lived out the Christian story? What if people could see us bursting with hope during Advent rather than trudging around dismally about the cold and the darkness of winter? What if people could see our grief over sin during Lent, despite the secular calendar's increasing hope of plunging into Spring from the depths of Winter?