What's the point? January 2006
8 February 2008 - 8:50pm — Sarah Hall
The presents have been unwrapped, the tree is starting to shed its needles, Christmas is over and the New Year is upon us. Are you looking forward to 2006 hopefully, I wonder, or is it more a question of keeping on keeping on?
Maybe pleasurable anticipation is easier for children and young people, who have so much less experience of life. Both their joys and their sorrows may be more deeply felt, because they have not yet learned how to expect less of life, and thus how to avoid disappointment. I still remember my deep chagrin at the age of nine or so on getting a Christmas present that wasn't quite what I'd wanted - and my parents' firm suggestion that I should feel grateful for getting it at all!
Yet while this appreciation of what we have been given, rather than what we hoped we might receive, may be an essential part of growing up, the downside is that we may find it hard to look forward in hope to anything at all. If we've seen one springtime, we've seen them all; as Ecclesiastes rather gloomily says, ‘There's nothing new under the sun.' Why should we hope for anything good to come of this year, given the dangers and crises that we have already experienced in life, given the fragility of the human body and of human civilization itself? Much safer to expect little from life - and to be able to say, ‘I told you so' when things do go wrong - than to open ourselves up to the pain of hope disappointed.
Such pessimism can be founded on a very solid basis of experience: the vexed question of New Year's resolutions. Do you make them? And if you make them, do you keep them? I've never yet found anyone willing to admit that such resolutions helped them to achieve anything constructive in the long term - though I stand ready to be corrected! But maybe this has something to do with their content. If we bind ourselves to never ever saying another cross word, to forswearing alcohol or chocolate cake or whatever may be our own particular indulgence for the rest of our lives, to jogging ten miles every morning before breakfast - aren't we setting ourselves up for disappointment? Such extravagant hopes for the New Year remind me of two of my housemates at college who decided one year to give up coffee, tea and alcohol for the five weeks of Lent. That lasted all of two weeks, and the rest of us were rather glad when the effort had lapsed, because of the effect denial had had on their tempers in the meantime.
But I don't want to go to the other extreme, and join in with Ecclesiastes saying that everything is useless. Indeed, even Ecclesiastes doesn't completely agree with himself, because it is also his opinion, a few verses further on, that there is nothing better for people than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in what they do. So maybe we need to make a rather more modest New Year's resolution: to look out actively for signs of hope and joy this year, in our lives and in our world. We may not be popular in doing so, for we will be going agwainst the grain of our culture, where only bad news is news. Yet Jesus promised us life in all its fullness. If we think he knew what he was talking about, we'd be daft not to keep an eye out for it, wouldn't we?
Maybe pleasurable anticipation is easier for children and young people, who have so much less experience of life. Both their joys and their sorrows may be more deeply felt, because they have not yet learned how to expect less of life, and thus how to avoid disappointment. I still remember my deep chagrin at the age of nine or so on getting a Christmas present that wasn't quite what I'd wanted - and my parents' firm suggestion that I should feel grateful for getting it at all!
Yet while this appreciation of what we have been given, rather than what we hoped we might receive, may be an essential part of growing up, the downside is that we may find it hard to look forward in hope to anything at all. If we've seen one springtime, we've seen them all; as Ecclesiastes rather gloomily says, ‘There's nothing new under the sun.' Why should we hope for anything good to come of this year, given the dangers and crises that we have already experienced in life, given the fragility of the human body and of human civilization itself? Much safer to expect little from life - and to be able to say, ‘I told you so' when things do go wrong - than to open ourselves up to the pain of hope disappointed.
Such pessimism can be founded on a very solid basis of experience: the vexed question of New Year's resolutions. Do you make them? And if you make them, do you keep them? I've never yet found anyone willing to admit that such resolutions helped them to achieve anything constructive in the long term - though I stand ready to be corrected! But maybe this has something to do with their content. If we bind ourselves to never ever saying another cross word, to forswearing alcohol or chocolate cake or whatever may be our own particular indulgence for the rest of our lives, to jogging ten miles every morning before breakfast - aren't we setting ourselves up for disappointment? Such extravagant hopes for the New Year remind me of two of my housemates at college who decided one year to give up coffee, tea and alcohol for the five weeks of Lent. That lasted all of two weeks, and the rest of us were rather glad when the effort had lapsed, because of the effect denial had had on their tempers in the meantime.
But I don't want to go to the other extreme, and join in with Ecclesiastes saying that everything is useless. Indeed, even Ecclesiastes doesn't completely agree with himself, because it is also his opinion, a few verses further on, that there is nothing better for people than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in what they do. So maybe we need to make a rather more modest New Year's resolution: to look out actively for signs of hope and joy this year, in our lives and in our world. We may not be popular in doing so, for we will be going agwainst the grain of our culture, where only bad news is news. Yet Jesus promised us life in all its fullness. If we think he knew what he was talking about, we'd be daft not to keep an eye out for it, wouldn't we?
