Another New Year’s Day. I feel a little wistful about this one. I always tend towards New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I don’t know if I’m going into it quite as optimistically as I sometimes do.

I’ve found that my mind is on a household that we saw. Through circumstances that would take too long to relate, we ended up seeing for a brief time the very troubled household of some people we didn’t know. It’s a little hard to describe, but I don’t think word ’squalid’ would be too out of place. And I don’t mean the condition wrought by poor finances — shame on me if I were to be so amazed that poverty affects people’s lives — but by a poverty of the human spirit, the sickness and accumulation of bad habits, poor judgment, an inability to care enough to do better. It was so accidental and sudden that there was no way to prepare for the shock.
And there was this great sense of recognition. This is what I had read just hours before:

Let us try to live in such a way that all our actions, our whole life may be, not a sleepy vegetation, but a development — as strong and deep as possible — of all our potentialities; and that this may take place not some time in the future but now, immediately, at every moment. Otherwise, irresolute and slovenly living will inevitably give birth to an impotence and flabbiness of soul, an incapacity for faith or any intense feeling; life will be squandered in vain, and we shall scarcely be able to rid ourselves of the cold scum which covers us — the fire of genuine heroism alone will be all that can consume it in that case.

– Fr Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest

The cold scum that covers us. I wish I could say that I don’t know what he means by that. But I too have bad habits, I too have made bad decisions. Their attrition hangs around sometimes so much that I feel that every word, every gesture bears the extra weight. This is what it means to be sinful.Thinking of the house I saw, a certain prayer comes to mind:

O Lord, the house of my soul is narrow; enlarge it that You may enter in.

It is ruinous; O repair it!

It displeases your sight; I confess it, I know.

But who shall cleanse it, to whom shall I cry but to You?

Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord, and spare Your servant from strange sins.

– St. Augustine

I don’t mean that I don’t feel hope. I believe what Fr. Elchaninov is saying: we can change. Through Christ, through the ministrations of the Church, we can really change for the better.

Many people don’t. They may struggle with the suffocation of unrelieved guilt, oppressive self-centeredness, the choking ashes of old hatred and old lust. They may be in the deep misery of their sin and yet lash out like trapped animals.

Can I look past my own offended pride and see that they are floundering? Can I see that I am the same as they are, but that Christ loved me and so I must pass that love along if I love Him?