Resolution

It's okay to start over. Lazarus did.

Hello, Beloveds. I hope you’re continuing to enjoy celebrating my birthday! According to the liturgical calendar, I’ve got several days of cupcakes left.

If it ain’t buttercream, it ain’t a cupcake. That verse appears in an earlier version of the Bible. Image by Fred Burg from Pixabay

Calendars can be weird. For example, everyone knows I wasn’t really born on December 25. When’s my actual birthday? I’ll never tell this side of heaven. It would cause too much chaos.

New Year’s resolutions can also feel arbitrary. Why not make the changes you want on, say, April 23? You can, of course. My holy ghostwriter Tania likes to set goals at the start of the school year rather than the calendar year. But a new year does inspire many of you to think about the life you want and the life you’d like to leave behind. I totally get that.

Here’s what’s most important: Whenever or however you want a fresh start, I am with you.

Image by Lumpi from Pixabay

Enjoy this rondeau inspired by my buddy Lazarus.

Resolution

In the new year, like Lazarus
you can throw off the detritus
of grief and suffocated dreams,
leave the winding sheets to teem 
with their own sac spiders and dust.

When December sweeps up and shuts
down without your superfluous
misery, you might as well scream
in the new year

with a noisemaker’s jagged twist.
Spray cheap champagne with the guts 
of a brazen prayer livestreamed 
straight to my reckless heart’s regime. 
Rise up. Alarm the living. Trust 	
in my new year.

The Raising of Lazarus by Caravaggio. I think he nailed it.