One of the questions I’ve been asking myself is how we live ‘the now’ at this liminal period of the New Year when we’re spending so much time looking both forwards and backwards. What spiritual work keeps us in the present, in the now, at a time when so much around us propels us forward, or backward, but away from the now?
Moving into a new year comes with a flurry of forecasts, predictions, and individual resolutions---ways of looking into the future, mapping out desired changes as well as plotting future developments we fear or seek to forestall. Like many of us, in my own life, the New Year marks the moment when I commit myself to forms of renunciation, reform, rebuilding, and iron-clad resolve to become my best self. Fewer cheese straws, more frequent communication with distant friends, less worrying about things out of my control, more action on aspects of life within my control . . .and all the future-oriented thinking that’s prompted by the New Year is crucial if we are going to scaffold a life that’s purposeful and deliberate.
At the same time, the turn from one year to the next plunges us into all manner of retrospectives: critical examinations of the year that’s passed. From media inventories of most notable album releases to the recapitulation and memorializing of landmark socio-political events of the year. The New Year engages us in taking stock of the past, drawing on explicit or implicit criteria to determine the best and the worst, the commendable and the regrettable across the range of cultural production and social and political change. Once again, the past-oriented process is crucial to understanding how we have become what we are now, as individuals, and collectivities. In the listing and ranking, we also self-define. And it’s equally important to the first activity of engaging seriously with the future-oriented activity of asking where it is we want to go, and what it is that we want to become over the coming 12 months.
That the New Year catalyzes this dual movement in our thinking, backwards and forwards in time, and that the two are interdependent, isn’t stating anything new. However, I want to come back to the spiritual work of living the NOW of the New Year while we’re also invariably rather preoccupied with future projections and sorting through past memories. Do we miss out on being present to the now of New Year in some respect?
Over recent days, I’ve been reading short essays from Richard Holloway’s recently published collection, The Heart of Things: An Anthology of Memory and Lament (2021). Former Bishop of Edinburgh, former Head of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he’s been publishing since the 1970s and is a very prolific writer on ethical questions in sexuality and bioethics for example. Just as significant, he has championed progressive social movements, campaigned for human rights for gays and lesbians, and describes himself as an ‘after-religionist’ with a strong faith in humanity. In my reading, I found his essay entitled ‘Forgiving’ spoke to my question. Holloway explores the struggles implicit in living an ethical life, the self-questioning about how we ought to live, and the ways we tie ourselves in knots trying to figure out how we should understand the ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in. He contrasts this with our human perceptions of other animals who seem to live with an un self-conscious immediacy that enables them to stay tuned to nature and its demands without guilt or hesitation. ‘We never seem able to get out of our own way,’ he writes. And of course, Holloway isn’t proposing that we can live as other animals do; rather, he is examining the obstacles that get in the way of living fully in the present as an ethical being.
He focuses on a line in a poem by Scottish poet, Ian Crichton Smith that reads, ‘From our own weakness only are we kind,’ and he elaborates by commenting that it is only through learning how to admit our own weaknesses that we can identify with others of our kind and act as kin to kin. ‘It’s a hard one to pull off,’ he writes. He points to forgiveness as Jesus understood it as a ‘revolutionary act,’ one that etymologically stems from two different verbs (aphiemi meaning to let somebody off a debt, and apoluo meaning to liberate or release somebody from jail or slavery). Forgiving oneself for the debts and imprisonments we have unwittingly accumulated to people we’ve hurt isn’t easy; however, Holloway proposes forgiveness of the self and of others as part of the work that will free us to live fully in the present. He writes,
‘Jesus thought the unforgiven and unforgiving life were not worth living. It was up to us, of course, but if we chose forgiveness it had to be habitual. Not seven times, but seventy times seven---always! It had to be a habitual way of being towards others and towards ourselves. It is a way of paradox, of course. We have to forgive those who cannot forgive us---and understand why. The forgiven and forgiving person has a certain lightness of being, in spite of the crushing weight of all that history pushing into and through us. Transcendence is the word. Getting above it or over it, including getting over ourselves. A refusal to let heaviness and grievance and hate be the only or the dominant game. All that locking up, that banging away, that resentment, those fists in the face! Lighten up, forgiveness smiles. Yes, forgiveness smiles. Forgiveness is a lightsome thing. Come on, it cries, lighten up. The other great thing about forgiveness is that it gives NOW back to us, the present moment, the only moment we are ever in.’
Forgiveness of the self, and forgiveness of others: Holloway’s proposal seems particularly apt as a way to ensure that we fully inhabit the now of the New Year; a way that we can build a fresh bedrock for our future projections (our resolutions) and that integrates learning from our reflections on the past. His perspective also finds a voice in a familiar Buddhist prayer:
‘If I have harmed anyone in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, through my own confusions, I ask their forgiveness.
If anyone has harmed me in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, through their own confusions, I forgive them.
And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive, I forgive myself for that.
For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions, I forgive myself.’