By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
January 2008
[This is Bishop Paul Marshall's January 2009 column for secular newspapers throughout our 14 counties. It is published by The Morning Call, Allentown, on the first Saturday of every month. It usually appears also in ten additional papers. The combined circulation of papers that publish the column regularly is more than 400,000. More than 130 columns have been published over the past 12 years. If your paper does not publish the column and you would consider bringing it to the attention of the editor, please email Bill Lewellis.]
Your resolution is two days old: to exercise regularly for the rest of your life. Full of confidence and a little pride, you change in the locker room and head for the gym floor.
You are new at this. It’s Saturday, and you are not prepared for the discovery that lines are long for the machines you want. You can’t possibly get through your routine and make it to the grandchildren’s dance recital. So you don’t even begin. You leave the gym feeling like a failure. Your have “broken” your resolution. You surrender your hope for a healthier body.
You vowed to give up smoking. A week later, at a party, you accept an offered cigarette. As you finish, you realize you have “broken” your resolution, and feel that you are condemned to be a smoker.
You give up drinking, and stay sober for ten years. Your wife dies –– at a New Year’s party, you take a drink. You are horrified and don’t take another. Your buddies in your group tell you that you have lost all your sobriety time and must start over at Step Zero. You go back with them as though all you learned in ten years does not matter.
What’s wrong with all these pictures?
Obviously, we can say that human learning involves making mistakes, that bumps along the way are to be expected. We could simply say to the first person that she should learn to plan, to the second that he start again tomorrow, and to the third that he retain all the wisdom gathered in his years of sobriety and keep going to meetings.
There are other aspects to these all-too-common January stories. One is perfectionism: if it isn’t perfect, it’s broken. The three people whose stories I’ve told are real; in fact, there are thousands of them in our area. They have been given the sense that a new behavior or virtue must be perfectly consistent or it doesn’t matter.
In this view a single imperfection makes one a less worthy, less lovable person. The people I’ve written about may carry with them shame and guilt for not having measured up to the standard of perfection. Those people whose personalities have any tendency to torture themselves get a modest payout from such failure, but is there a different route that avoids masochism and gets us on the road again?
Psalm 130 represents a teaching model. “If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.” In our various traditions there are many dimensions to words like forgiveness, but here the message is that to get the job done, our formation, God himself is not a perfectionist but a pragmatist. Forgiveness puts us back to work.
New Year’s resolutions tempt us to split our perception of self as either success or failure. A more reasonable and spiritual approach might be to understand that failures occur normally in our species and to keep trying.
The American tendency in the “keep trying” department, however, seems to be “if something doesn’t work, do it more.” If repeated tries using one technique or discipline fail, doesn’t it make sense to look for another?
The woman at the gym might ask when the machines are least busy. She might also have used the time she had to do some limited exercise rather than just walk away. She might want to sign up for classes or training, so that equipment would be there.
The smoker and drinker might want to avoid parties for a while. They might want to talk with an addictions counselor about how best to contain the addiction while working on the issues that provoked the slip.
So let’s resolve away, and also be prepared to deal with what we learn about ourselves as we work to live into our aspirations.
[The Rt. Rev. Paul V. Marshall is bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem, 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania. His recently published book, Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less (Seabury), is a collection of ten years of his monthly columns for newspapers. Additional columns and sermons by Bishop Marshall are available at www.diobeth.org.]
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