Taming the resolution bully
My resolutions are not cheerful things. They bark at me like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
So I am a New Year’s Baby, which may explain why I compulsively make resolutions all year ’round. Unfortunately, my resolutions are not cheerful things, made in the spirit of hope and self-esteem. They do not come to me in the warm, caring inner voice of a Mary Poppins or Mr. Rogers or Richard Simmons. As much as I want them to gently beckon me to a more virtuous and faithful life, my resolutions always carry implied indictments of my character. They bark at me like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
“Get your big derriere to the gym three times a week!” commands this voice. “Stop drinking coffee before you become a totally nervous wreck,” it warns. And, “Write a check to that charitable organization, you spoiled suburbanite!” Nag, nag, nag. They come not as bells of conscience, but as guns of war.
And Jack Nicholson really gets going by mid-December. It all begins, I’m afraid, with the madness of Christmas shopping. As much as I admire and aspire to the kind of “live simply so that others may simply live” attitude some of my friends have managed to embrace, there is an acquisitive little demon within me who is driven to shop by guilt and desire. She gets her claws firmly into my credit cards soon after Halloween and offers brilliant justifications of all purchases--especially those for children. “Christmas is all about children!” she cackles, and as I drag another passel of bags out of the car, I--or is it Jack?--make the sternest vows not to let her loose with my plastic again. Meanwhile, she is already combing through the catalogs and marking pages, howling with anticipatory delight all the while.
It’s as though, despite my liberal Unitarian Universalist identity, I have a tiny Jonathan Edwards installed in my brain constantly preaching hellfire and damnation and fear of the Lord. How surprising to feel such spiritual kinship with our earliest Calvinist Congregationalist forebears, who constantly worried that their lives were not pleasing to God. Like the earnest New England Puritan goodwife, sitting up late by candlelight and recording every sin and naughty thought into a diary of self-improvement, I pour out my own stern admonishments into a journal on an almost daily basis and compulsively make to-do lists that inevitably get lost underneath piles of books and paperwork.
Because my resolutions are born as harsh judgments, when I do make good on one of them I can hardly bring myself to celebrate. Just as I’m doing a little victory dance because I got to the gym three times that week, an inner voice admonishes, “Big deal. Oprah Winfrey works out every day, and don’t you think she’s a little bit busier than you are?” When I proudly informed my doctor that I managed to quit coffee six months ago, my inner Jack Nicholson bid me confess that I slipped off the decaf wagon over Thanksgiving. When I want to congratulate myself for generosity, I remember a thank you note unwritten, a solicitation letter unanswered, or a call unmade. I know that the process of self-improvement should be connected to joy, but Jack Nicholson will have none of that. Don’t get soft! Get back to work!
How did all this guilt and admonishment worm its way into the soul of a late twentieth-century kid, who was raised on the gospel of self-esteem and “I’m Okay, You’re Okay”? Maybe it’s my non-conformist Unitarian Universalist upbringing, which led me to critique the dominant culture and the pop spirituality of our times--and then to turn that critique on myself. Maybe it’s my own inherent crankiness, which leads me to want to believe our UU claim that all people are morally improvable even as I harbor a doubt that we are making good on that potential and count myself among the C+ students of humanity. When I read nineteenth-century Unitarian James Freeman Clarke’s hopeful exclamation of human moral progress, “onward and upward forever and ever,” I grumble, “Good thing ole Jimmy never lived to see the twentieth century.”
Still and all, I doggedly believe in moral improvability, and I believe in planning for it, even on lists that we lose somewhere in the mess on the kitchen table. Resolutions are a good idea. They give us an opportunity to reflect, to revise, and (yes!) even to repent. In good, classical Unitarian sense, making resolutions aligns us with one of the most optimistic claims of our faith tradition, which isn’t that we’re terrific merely by nature of our DNA, but is actually that we were created to both want what is good, and to be good.
Of course there is another optimistic claim of our faith tradition--one even more radical, and given us by our Universalist forebears. It is a claim that my invisible committee of critics hates to hear, and it is the claim that the reason we’re made to pursue good works and virtuous hearts is because God loves us, all of us--even the ones with bad shopping habits, bouts of misanthropy when deprived of caffeine, and a wickedly persistent inner Jack Nicholson.
So this year, I’m thinking about making just two resolutions. The first is to put my faith in the good news of Universalism, and the second is to make no more resolutions until I can persuade my inner Jack Nicholson that I, and my resolutions, will do a lot better moving “onward and upward” without his help.
Happy new year!
