Spiritual leaders’ resolutions for year 2006 run the gamut

What are your New Year’s resolutions? What resolutions would you like to see others make?There are good New Year’s resolutions, including getting healthy/whole/holy, that is, being fit and praying always. Personally I recently vowed to say “thank you” as often as possible and “I love you” as often as is appropriate.

The discipline of principles such as those of the 12-step program seem to me more likely to last, and have long-range results, than resolutions to eat right and lose weight or even pray and laugh more often. So in recent years, I have done my best to take (only) six steps to “recovery”: recovery of the life of the mind, recovery of the life of free movement of the heart, and recovery of the ability to act with intelligence and compassion.

1. I admit I am not powerful enough to manage my life.

2. I believe that God, with power greater than myself, can bring me to my senses and home to myself.

3. I choose to turn my will and my life over to the care of God.

4. I make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.

5. I admit to myself, to those I have hurt, and to God that I have erred.

6. I ready myself to surrender to the healing forgiveness of God and others.

I find myself wishing that our whole nation would sweat through such a process. I trust that if we could surrender to such steps we would discover that this is truly a wonderful life and, with a great smile, pray: “Oh, my God, our God, how glorious it is to be alive! As we begin 2006 together, I say ‘Thank you!’ ” (In words from our Book of Common Prayer, page 836).

” Thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side. Thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us. Thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.”

By thanking God for God’s greatest gift, the presence in this life of God’s own self, we can learn and act and believe and love together.

(THE VERY REV’D CANON)

PETER D. HAYNES