BBC Radio 4 2016-01-05

Good morning. We’re five days into the New Year. How’s that New Year’s resolution working out for you? Half of us make New Year’s resolutions, but apparently only a fraction keep them.

Why is that? Take the most popular resolution, losing a few pounds. What’s the problem with being overweight, besides not looking our best? After all, we can’t all spend our life in the gym.

It matters because rightly or wrongly it can project an image that there’s nothing in life we need to be in shape for, that’s there’s no urgent job to do that requires us to be on our toes. I’m talking about a purpose in life more fundamental than comfort and pleasure and consumption.
We evaluate public services by whether they equip us for maximum choice. The visible evidence of choice is money. Money has no meaning in itself: it’s simply how we park our choices until we’ve decided what we really want to do. But our society finds it hard to talk about lasting values, so public conversations are about money and choice, even as we can’t describe what might be good choices to make.

How do we break out of this hamster-wheel of money and choice? We need the language of goal, of purpose, of what the Greeks called telos, or ultimate direction. We need to have a sense of how our lives are part of a greater story. The reason we find New Year’s resolutions hard to keep is that they’re seldom part of such a larger narrative. Such a vision of the good, the true or the beautiful inspires us to undergo conflict, sacrifice, hardship, and suffering, because we realise the path to our goal may go through some pretty agonising territory, but those setbacks put us more in touch with what we really want.

The real challenge fanatical extremists pose to our culture is whether we have a final goal more profound, more worthy, and more compelling than theirs. A culture that’s lost the ability to articulate a greater vision is bewildered in the face of people who have no second thought about undergoing sacrifice and suffering to achieve theirs.

The Christian message is that God made a resolution, before the dawn of time, to get into shape to be with us. Being in relationship with us was the big story, worth sacrifice, rejection and suffering. You look at God’s life, and it’s pretty easy to know what God wants. God wants us. The cross is the shape God gets into because of how much God wants us.

When we look at our own lives, and the shape they’re in, is it easy to see what we want? What do we really want?