Who cares what day it is! Let’s have some Takes.
One
I want to close out this year by saying how grateful I am for the Christian Research Journal. 2023 was the year they made all their content free for everyone, thanks to so many generous donations. All their great apologetic resources on a huge range of topics are available, not only for people like me and you but for those beset by persecution in the 10/40 window. It’s not just that Matt and I both regularly write for them (I have kind of an enormous catalog of articles over there on subjects ranging from how terrible The Book of Longings was, to whether or not you should make New Year’s Resolutions, to Platonic Marriage and so many more) it’s that they have a theologically diverse and thoughtful set of writers who don’t all sound like each other, and who write intelligently and provocatively on a whole range of issues. A lot of people, lately, are sad about the demise of some more famous and prominent Christian publications that are all basically writing from one ideological position—if that’s you, check out CRJ and maybe leave them a tip for their excellent work.
Two
For the first time in a long while, I’m not planning on making any New Year’s Resolutions. Monday will roll around—unless God thinks better of it—and I will carry on doing all the things I’ve been doing for the past few years. Which is to say not that I am much holier than all of you, but that I’ve spent the last few years trying to retrain myself to be a functional person. I learned out to read books again after losing that ability in the aftermath of nursing so many kids over a decade. I’ve integrated an untoward amount of exercise into my daily life. I listen to the Bible, pray, and join in the Daily Office with my church on Zoom. I basically don’t eat carbs unless it’s a special occasion. And, while my house feels—to me—like it is a dumpster fire of clutter and dirt, in reality, it is actually basically put together, notwithstanding the astonishing fact that my children went together and bought their father what amounts to a throne for Christmas… which means I have to rethink my living room—again.
Let me be the first to tell you that if your life is not in the same kind of order that mine is—like, you don’t know how to clean and you don’t read the Bible and you know you need to take some regular exercise but haven’t figure out how to fit it in etc etc—if you do do the work and pull yourself together, don’t worry, you still won’t be happy. The gnawing ennui of being human will persist, biting at your heels and making you wonder why on earth you’re working so hard.
Three
I’m pretty sure this is where the various ‘Positivity’ trends come from. They must be the result of a poor sap working terribly hard to be happy and then discovering that all the striving availed naught but, then, instead of throwing the hands up and going to church to find Jesus, demanding that everyone else rally around to confer feelings of happiness by affirming whatever preferred state of dysfunction—like, being sexually promiscuous, or out of shape, or unable to “adult” or whatever.
It’s not as if no generation before mine has experienced existential dread. It’s just that mine decided to leave the God part out of the equation so entirely that all a person can do is eat another French fry. There is no spiritual vista that invites any of us to construct a pretty building or park for our grandchildren to aid and abet them in their search for meaning, purpose, and the world to come. Who could have foreseen that abandoning belief in God would turn the world into a grasping, petty, ugly place where all the calculations are about today? Gosh, how depressing.
Four
Like so many, I did watch that clip of Francis Collins trying to explain why those in public health decided to shut everything down and keep it that way with the advent of Covid into the world. It was, he said, to “attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life.” This posture allowed those “public health people” not to consider communities far-flung, in towns and neighborhoods afar off from New York City and Washington DC. “You attach zero value,” he said, “to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way they never quite recover from.” It was, he said, “unfortunate”—quite a delicate way of underestimating the difficulties and sorrows of the last four years.
I love the expression “actually totally.” Yes, indeed. It was so disruptive. And I wish that rather than reclining back in a chair and trying to passively deflect the sheer magnitude of what was done—for, indeed, it wasn’t just the disruption of lives, it is that so many people died, not of Covid, but from missing regular screenings for diseases like cancer, and from isolation in nursing homes, and that is before one begins to enumerate the lost jobs and businesses, and the people who didn’t fall ill but succumbed to despair and anxiety, and were then not allowed to go to church but could only go to Walmart to buy cheap plastic, for, remember, since Covid, millions of people who had regularly gone to Sunday services just never made it back—I wish he would take responsibility, in the way that so many less important people did do.
Those “public health people” didn’t take responsibility, but ordinary people did. They knuckled under and made life work, even though it was narrow and painful and lonely. They took stock and decided to do the difficult thing.
The people who are “actually totally” responsible both for the creation of the virus and the subsequent response should repent for having done it. It will do them good, in the long run. One sign of their repentance might be to give all the money they accumulated as a result of their actions away to those who lost theirs. Then they could go to church and ask to be forgiven by God.
Five
I’m not terribly sad about Covid, though, apart from still mourning all the dead. I learned in the last three years that it’s not my job to be happy, but it is my job to be grateful. Everything that happens to each person in the world, no matter how important and rich they are, nor how sick and poor, is the provenance of God’s plans. If you get sick, it is his gift to you, however painful. If you get well, it is his gift to you and you can rejoice. If you lose everything, it is his gift to you to make you long all the more for the world to come. If you gain a throne in this life, it is his heavy gift and you should sit in it humbly, and patiently, counting everyone as more significant than yourself. You can’t control anything but your own meek and mute appeal to God for his mercy. Gratitude for everything he gives is a better and ultimately happier place to be than counting out what I imagined it should have been like.
Six
It’s so interesting to me that so many of the trends toward “positivity” are more like small kingdoms built on bitterness and entitlement, rather than affirmation and love. Gratitude leads to a true, profound acceptance of the only Person who can make all manner of things well—that’s God, in case I’m being too vague. Whereas, demanding the acceptance of others for your gender identity, sexual proclivities, or physical shape is an ever-narrowing posture, the business of taking from others something they don’t have the power to give. It’s a beguiling kind of inversion of the mercy of Christ, the gifts he gives of death that leads to eternal life, of sacrifice that leads to the healing of another person’s soul, of love that reconciles the alienated and lost.
Seven
So anyway, Happy New Year!!!!
Ingratitude really is at the back of all the other corruption of the soul. "For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened," Paul says in Romans 1. Adam and Eve had everything they needed (and more!), and yet they chose the ultimate ingratitude.
Love this! Very Ecclesiastes of you. Point 5, amen.
I never understood until this year (full of life-changing events like a new baby, an international move, a broken hand...) just how comforting God’s sovereignty is. The story of Joseph is what I keep coming back to (“you meant it for evil but the Lord meant it for good”).
The other thing that put a stone in my shoe are the New Testament commands to do everything without complaining and with rejoicing. I used to think that was quite literally impossible. That it was only reserved for the super-spiritual, not for the likes of me. But when you really see that God is ordering all of it, the temptation to complain about everything becomes easier to resist. It just feels like distraction. My focus has shifted from scoffing at the fact that I should ever be subjected to difficulty to learning to bear difficult circumstances with grace.