Morning Reflection for the Season of Christmastide
January 3, 2026
Resolutions
Don’t you see?... we could be in paradise today if we opened our eyes and saw the world as it really is! That’s what you – what most of us – are guilty of: closing our eyes to all the beauty, all the wonder, all the happiness that could be ours, that God wants to be ours; guilty of living in the world as if it was a prison house or a gambling hall or even as if it was just “ordinary” and not the paradise that it is. We’re all guilty of making the world less than it is and, even worse, stopping others from seeing it too. And please observe that it’s not a matter of trying to love the unlovable, which always fails, but of seeing that all people, if you see them as they really are, are lovable – and once you see that, loving is not so hard, the heart does it on its own.
George Pattison: Conversations with Dostoevsky
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
I’m not much of a fan of New Year’s. The general tenor of so many of the celebrations seems contrived and a bit forced. Cheer is made the order of the day. It’s worn like a bright and festive costume that we have to don – and often it appears, and feels, ill-fitting and thread-bare. And we have to carry on with this charade deep into the evening. And after all the waiting for the exact moment when the year officially changes, nothing but the date is really affected. And we can wake the next morning having to make the confession that there’s almost nothing that’s truly new in our lives: the end of this week is not dramatically different from the end of last week.
In order to compensate for this disappointment, we have turned to the making of resolutions. We choose to try to make the new year different by our own resolve. It’s well known that most resolutions fail in fairly short order. But, more interesting to me, is what these resolutions imply. Most of them point to a certain unhappiness and a restlessness that needs redress: our lives, we are convinced, are less than they should be. They are in need of improvement. So we feel obligated to better them. We’ll lose weight. We’ll drink less. We’ll exercise more. We’ll seek the satisfaction of changing habits, and, in so doing, we’ll find greater happiness for ourselves. A deficit will be eliminated, and what was once lacking – something about us or about the world – will be subjected to the progress that we can accomplish by sheer force of will. Our claims, about things both great and small, are that they are simply not good enough. Each New Year’s, this is where we begin again. It’s a rather downward perspective.
But what if we could rid ourselves of this habit and make an opposite realization? What if we could begin each year with the reminder, strong and substantial, that the world is already – and is always – an amazing gift, that it is beautiful beyond the reach of our comprehension. What if our true task was not to take up some new discipline but was, instead, to open our eyes to what is all around us. What if we could stop chasing after things that we rarely achieve and could look on everything as the product and the instantiation of God’s love. We’d need no resolutions. We’d have no reason to play charades. We’d touch on a truth that never fails to offer us vivid pleasure and contentment. Imagine being able to begin the year at this high point.
Imagine, instead of fruitless resolutions, coming to the place where “the heart” naturally reveals and engages us in the love of the world – in the love that is the world. I’ve long thought that it is so fitting for the turn of the calendar to happen right at the midpoint of Christmastide, when God’s love for us is made so intimately clear. Jesus’ birth happened quite without any resolutions, and without the need to mark all – or anything – that was wrong and required fixing. It was an expression of pure joy, which God extends to us in all the years that we can mark.
Start, always, with the conviction that this gift is – and never can be – undermined.
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