We all are Lost and Loved

Reorienting for a new year

Photo by Ryan Hutton on Unsplash

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

—John Sullivan Dwight

Some days the world feels old—crumbly around the edges.

Some years we feel discouraged, as every hope dies just as it flickers into flame.

Some people leave us yearning for other faces, other places, other times.

Some moments we look in the mirror and wish a different set of features, a different kind of heart, stared back at us.

Sometimes, we wish we could ‘refresh ‘ every page.

The calendar tells us to start over in January. In August, the smell of sharpened pencils and musty gym lockers proclaim the new year instead. But the Christian church year begins with a birth. Because a fresh start arrives in the form of a baby.

New for everyone

In his last and, many say, greatest novel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky introduces us to Father Zossima, teacher and spiritual advisor to Alyosha, the youngest of The Brothers Karamozov.

The meeting? Imperial Russia, in crisis. The cry for human freedom, individual rights, and religious doubt swirled in the streets. The search was on for someone to blame for economic and social misery.

Sound familiar?

Wherever a nation finds itself in moral crisis, whose fault is it? Zossima points the finger not generally at criminals, bad politicians, or a restless populace, but specifically at the evil we all treasure in our hearts.

Greed, selfishness, jealousy, resentment, lust, the desire for revenge—even indifference to suffering—we carry these with us, like a virus, wherever we go.

We are the moral crisis. Therefore, everyone is to blame.

I hear your objection. Is it fair we get lumped in with those we loathe? But if we insist on a hierarchy (at least I’m not as bad as them), we’ll never know grace. This is the message of the gospel. Not, those people are the problem, not, those people need to change, but that we all are badly in need of saving, to be made new. Not just once, but every day, in every way.

And Jesus came to do just that. To open our eyes, to re-shape our hearts, and transform us, conform us to his character.

“And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love,” promises Father Zossima.

I wonder how many of us actually share that goal.

Even better

We’re not talking about one more item on a long list of should’s. Perhaps our New Year’s resolution ought simply be, Respond.

In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. But the Living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us.

Thomas Kelly, 1941