New Years Resolution: Be More Free (and maybe learn to dance)

I’ve been thinking about New Years Resolutions (as I suppose most of us do every year) and I reckon they’re quite a strange thing.

It seems to me that normally, in our (Western, consumerist, post-modern) culture, we hold – consciously or not – to a basic assumption about happiness, and more specifically about freedom. We’re big on freedom, we love it – and I’m all for this, I think freedom is great. But we tend to think of freedom pretty much as being able to do what we desire to do. In its most obvious form this is your classic getting-the-day-off-school freedom, or the its-fresher’s-week-and-my-parents-are-a-hundred-miles-away freedom. We think being free is just when there are no restrictions stopping us doing what we want. Of course, we realise it’s not always that simple – and plenty of people have learnt to wait for the second marshmallow (if you don’t know what on earth I’m talking about, watch this delightful video). So sometimes this kind of freedom means putting work in now, perhaps not having as much of what we want, so that we can earn more of what we want later on. Maybe there were some days growing up when Jonny Wilkinson didn’t really want to kick a rugby ball for some more hours, but he knew that one day, he wanted to be the best, so he went and kicked it anyway.

And this understanding of freedom, on the face of it, makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense especially to us in a Western setting (with its emphasis on the individual over the group), and in our consumerist setting (where businesses succeed by arousing our desires and convincing us to spend money on them). It also makes sense in the post-modern mindset, which doesn’t really include the idea of choosing our worldview by trying to work out what corresponds to reality, but encourages us to find a belief system that ‘works for us’, which usually means, one that satisfies, or allows us to satisfy, our desires.

What surprises me about New Years Resolutions then, is that sometimes they seem to be a little crack in that understanding of happiness – a flicker of a different way of thinking about freedom. Of course some of them are just second marshmallow things: we resolve to go to the gym more so we’ll be healthier and more attractive, or we want to put more time into that project because we think might be our big break. But some New Years Resolutions look a bit like we’ve got hold of a different understanding of what it actually is to be free. We realise that even though most of the time we don’t really desire to turn our phone off when we get to the pub and not touch it all night, if we could just make the effort we would enjoy our friends much more. We realise that even though we never feel like getting up for it, when we actually can get ourselves to go for that cycle as the sun rises, it’s the most beautiful thing.

I'll get to the dancing thing in a minute...

When I’m really busy in the middle of term, I never really want to take an hour to chat to my big brother, but if I ever do, it turns out that I love him, and he is wise, and I end up much more than an hour’s-worth better off for having talked stuff through with him. Actually I have exactly the same thing with talking to God and reading the Bible! I barely ever feel like doing it, but then when I actually do, some days I find myself literally weeping with joy at the glorious reality of it. Or take wasting time on the internet. This is one of my big struggles at the moment. The thing is, when I waste time on the internet its never because something is forcing me to do it – no one is tying my wrists to the keyboard or doing the whole Clockwork Orange thing pinning my eyes open as I scroll through the newsfeed. I am perfectly free in the normal western sense. I do it because at that moment what I want to do is scroll down; I want to click on that article and read about ‘Twenty Three and a Half Hilarious Reasons Why You Should Never Send Pictures To Your Ex’. But when I think about it I realise that it doesn’t satisfy me, it doesn’t fulfil me, it doesn’t make me feel alive. What I want is not a very good guide to what I ought to want, the thing I’ll wish I’d done in retrospect. I don’t want what I want to want. And I think if we’re honest, this is what its’ like for all of us: our desires aren’t actually very good at leading us to what we really need.

And this makes a lot of sense in a biblical worldview. The bible talks about God as our father, or sometimes it imagines him like our mother, and so – obviously – it talks about us as kids. But not just kids – if we don’t know God then we’re like kids who don’t listen to their parents. Now so far, this might not be the most attractive illustration you’ve ever come across – you’re sympathising with the kid here and you don’t like the sound of this parental authority very much, certainly not as a description of God – some giant Dad nagging us about tidying our rooms. But just come with me a second, and imagine a kid who starts learning ballet. I’m getting the urge to call him Billy but that would become confusing so we’ll go with Matt.

When Matt’s four, his parents take him along to a little children’s dancing group and he enjoys it, and they take him back every week. Usually they have to tear him away from his lego to get him out of the door but once he’s there he has a good time. And then when he gets to be about 7 or 8 the training starts to get a little bit more serious. They do a long physical warm up every week, with lots of stretches that are actually quite painful. And not just that but they do strength and fitness exercises that leave him exhausted. Every week he gets into the car after dancing and complains that it hurts, and it’s too hard, and he doesn’t want to do it anymore. But because he’s only 7, his mum and dad are in charge and they tell him that he can’t quit now because he’ll regret it later, so he keeps coming back reluctantly every week. Matt starts secondary school and he’s getting a bit more into the training – still hates the stretches but he’s actually quite enjoying the strength stuff – but now he’s got another problem because people are laughing at him for doing ballet. He’s getting picked on and people are calling him names, usually it’s just ‘banter’ but he feels really humiliated. And he wants to quit. He wants to stop dancing and just switch to something more acceptable – maybe basketball, he doesn’t mind basketball. But his Dad sits him down and says he won’t sit by and see his own son get put off doing something brilliant because some other kids were laughing at him. And Matt keeps going.

All the way through his childhood Matt is restricted. He doesn’t get to do what he wants to do. But on the day that he comes home from his grade eight ballet exam he sits down and he looks back. And he realises that to be fair, a bit of him has always loved it. Ever since he started, there’ve been those moments, those tiny glimpses, where he felt like his body was doing what it was made for. And he realises that now, when he moves, he is wonderfully free. He is elegant, and powerful, and athletic. He can lift another person over his head and spin them round and put them back down and make it all look and feel as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He is ridiculously free. He can dance.

Jesus said that even when we aren’t restricted from doing whatever we want, that doesn’t mean we’re free.* He said we’re still slaves to our own desires, because we can’t control them. We can’t decide what we want to want. And they are not good masters – of course sometimes they lead us to satisfying, fulfilling things, but loads of the time they take us down a dead-end, and hold us back from the things that would make us really alive. But he says if we let him set us free, then we will be free indeed. Really free. He says that right now we’re kids who’ve run away from home and won’t listen to our mum and dad – and it means we’re getting controlled by all those desires that we don’t realise yet are actually leading us in the wrong directions. Away from who we could be, away from what and who would really bring us to life. And occasionally, when we make a New Years Resolution, or maybe when something that we’d really desired lets us down, we get a glimpse of that. But Jesus said it doesn’t have to be like that because he wasn’t a runaway – he was a true son. And he promises that if we’ll be united with him, if we’ll come be with him and identify ourselves with him, then we can be true sons and daughters too. That God wants to adopt us back, and take us in, and nurture us, and grow us, and give us more and more moments of real freedom – so that even though he might lead us through bits where it feels like serious effort, where he’s asking us to do what we don’t desire, one day not so far away we will look back and a smile will creep across our faces and we’ll whisper, ‘Thank you’. Because we’ll realise that now, after all that, we can dance.

*I’m getting this stuff from his conversation in John chapter 8, verses 31 to 36.