Spiritual progress requires diligence

There is nothing special about the dawn of a new year that makes it any more advantageous as far as personal resolutions are concerned. Our numbering and naming of months and years is little more than a convenient measure of time. Perhaps the strained relationships and excesses that sometimes surface during the shopping season and family holiday gatherings help tweak the conscience in the afterglow of Christmas and inspire the ideals of self-improvement. That’s not a bad thing: God knows we all need a good tweaking now and then.
 
But January 1 is no better a day for firm resolutions than, say, April 26 or July 17. There’s danger in focusing too much on a “new year” resolution. It can be deflating to start off the year with lofty intentions only to fail miserably in a matter of days or weeks. Fall off the wagon, stray from the keto diet, or allow that crass comment to escape your lips, and it’s tough to climb back on board.
 
Good habits develop by consistent repetition, but vices work the same way. The difference is that we must put our will firmly behind the good in order to build virtuous habits. All we need to backslide into bad habits is to give in to our animal desires and creature comforts. Lukewarmness is a pathway to that inert state.

Vices and status quos are also easy to rationalize: I need to relax. I’m too hard on myself. I’m doing okay. I’m better than most people. Everyone has faults. I’m human. It’s not a big deal. I work hard. 
I deserve this. I’ll do better later — maybe next year.
Thomas à Kempis, the author of The Imitation of Christ, understood this spiritual struggle well. And it’s a daily struggle.

“If each year we would root out one fault, we should soon become perfect. But, alas, the opposite is often the case,” he writes. Ideally, he adds, “our zeal and virtue would grow daily; but it is now held to be a fine thing if a man retains even a little of his first fervor.”
 
Change for the better — conversion, let’s call it — is rarely easy any time of year. “It is hard to give up old habits, and harder still to conquer our own wills,” à Kempis writes.
 
He urges daily prayerful recommitment in order to maintain fervor: Help me, O Lord God, in my good resolve and in your holy service: grant me this day to begin perfectly, for hitherto I have accomplished nothing.

“As our purpose is, so will our spiritual progress be,” à Kempis notes, “and we need to be truly diligent if we wish to progress far.”

The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium reminds us that the Church is “always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and renewal.” That’s also true of us, and the Church provides the means for this through the sacraments. That continual interior conversion is a resolution we ought to renew not just at the dawn of a new year, but at the dawn of each new day.

GERALD KORSON is editor of Legatus magazine.