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Resolutions and Promises

At a week-and-a-half in to the new year, how are you doing with any new year’s “resolutions” you decided to make? Still attending that yoga class? Sill managing to limit your Facebook scrolling to 30 minutes or less per day? Still sending out one thank you note each day? Still on the Dry January bandwagon?

Indeed, turning the page into a new calendar year is an opportunity that many people take to flip the switch off on a bad habit or turn the juice on to power a good one. And, of course, we know that so many new year’s “resolutions” get “broken” barely a few days in. For us in more-liturgically-aware Christian traditions, another opportunity will come around the bend when some of us choose to “give up something” or “take up a new practice” at the beginning of Lent. But the piling on of some sort of spiritual significance doesn’t seem to make resolution-keeping much easier or more effective for most people. It would seem the old quip is true, that resolutions are made to be broken.

I was caught quite intrigued, therefore, that in this season of resolution making and resolution breaking the Rev. Peter Marty, an ELCA Lutheran pastor and the editor/publisher of the leading mainline Protestant Christianity magazine in the US, The Christian Century, decided to take up the subject of “promises” in his issue-opening editorial this month. Promises, it would seem, are different from resolutions. Aside from some internal disappointment or possibly a little lighthearted social teasing, at the end of the day the breaking of most New Year’s resolutions really isn’t all that big of a deal. A promise, on the other hand, feels much more substantial, and much more consequential to be broken.

We need to be careful, though. “Promises may indeed be lovely,” Pastor Marty writes, “but some of them should never be made, and the worst of those deserve to be broken.” He is particularly wary of the promises that are made “more on good intention, fanciful wish, or self-interest than on solid wisdom.”

Of such promises, one that has especially disturbed Pastor Marty time and time again are the pledges he’s heard people make to loved ones to never place them in care facilities, to keep them at home until the very end, no matter what. Such promises “never should’ve been made,” he reflects, and not being able to keep such a promise “doesn’t define [one’s] integrity,” he offers.

I know that this is a tender topic for so many… an issue that many around our congregation have faced in the past, are currently facing, or well could face in the future. So, I commend to you Pastor Marty’s thoughts as food for your own deep reflection on what being “a person of constancy and fidelity” actually means. Click here to read it, and feel free to share with me if it sparks something for you.

Yours in the journey,
--Pastor Matt

 

Continue reading… https://www.christiancentury.org/first-words/made-be-broken