Prospects?

"Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?"

Augustine.

It's almost here once again - that moment when people rush into the mode of thinking in which they resolve all will be improved in the next 12 months if they fervently keep to their decision to (insert your resolution here).

I don't make such promises.
Ambrose Pierce defined heathenism as the notion that we benighted creatures worship what we see and feel - but the problem is what that veneration denies us from seeing about the violence we thereby do to ourselves.

We can rise or fall, get by or make it, but there are two irrevocable truths that tether us however we choose to twist and turn.

The first power is the violence we all carry. Paul outlines this so well in respect to the 'norms' of human life in his letter to the Romans (chapters 1-3) and in respect to the Christian in Romans 7. We never have the natural resources to change this, because this is the cancer that now defines human nature, and it leads directly to our second manacle - death. Whatever we busy ourselves with now, this tyranny is close to us, and there is, again, no way in which we can escape our inevitable final moment.

We live in the shadow of this twin volcano, but we cannot often bear to look upon the truth of its hold, because when we do, we see all that we are melt before its hold and rule - there is no strength in us against this.

Christ alone can end our delusion that the powers arrayed against us from within and outside will not erupt. He alone can extinguish the power of these evils by drawing their sting into His own death and resurrection and ending their strength in His triumph for us.

In Christ, both sin and death are trumped by a far greater power - of unceasing, unrelenting love, that will have us overwhelmed by an exquisite mercy that heals and will finally make us whole, come the day of resurrection.
In Christ, life now becomes more than a pretence or a struggle with our futile realities - we can begin to see and live anew.

The options are there.
We continue, as we have always done, stumbling around until sin and death overwhelm and drown us out, or we trust in the one who gives Himself as our remedy, and begin to discover a life that far exceeds our troubles.

That is the possibility this New Year.