SOUL FOOD:

A couple of days before Christmas, I stopped by Pacific Side Pharmacy inside the Hoag Health Center on Beach Boulevard to pick up some medications for my mother. As I paid, the young woman tending the register asked me if I was ready for Christmas.

“Close,” I said, then put the same question to her.

She took a deep breath, letting several seconds lapse, before she said, “I’m ready for the new year.” More than two weeks later, I still recall how her response took me aback.

The young woman standing in front of me was young and pretty. She was stylishly dressed, clearly employed, and appeared to be fit and healthy.

Considering these things, I couldn’t help but ask if she was yearning for something specific in the future. Graduating from college or graduate school came to my mind. Then homeownership.

Maybe a child, I thought. But when I noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring on her left hand, my mind toggled to the prospect of marriage.

All this before she answered, “A fresh start.” A fresh start.

She looked picture perfect. What on Earth, I wondered, fell so short or went so wrong in 2008 that her sights were now so set on a fresh start in 2009?

I can’t tell you. A sense of good manners and discretion told me not to ask.

It could be that 2008 wasn’t all that bad. It could be that she simply has higher hopes for this year.

After all, I mused, as I drove to my mother’s home, a fresh start is what the new year is all about, isn’t it? Resolutions, I guess, are meant to pave the way.

But that means not only making resolutions but also keeping them. And without fail, the latter is always tougher.

It can be so much tougher, I once gave up making resolutions altogether. Later I discovered the kinder, gentler, yet nevertheless effective Christian concept of repentance.

Hand-in-hand with confession, repentance can be, much of the time, a three-steps-forward -two-steps-backward endeavor.

As Jesus told his disciples, “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”

Yet however painstaking the progress, with repentance one does move forward. Success isn’t measured so much by speed as by steadfastness.

Some might say one’s character changes. Others may call it the soul, and still others the heart.

By any name, the reality is the same. One comes to resemble more the image of God in which, according to Judeo-Christian scripture, humankind was made.

One needn’t wait for a new year. In fact, one ought not.

When it comes to repentance, any day is as good as the next to take stock of one’s weaknesses. Then confess them; resolve to master them rather than to allow them to master you.

Should there be a day when self-satisfaction tempts one to rest on one’s present laurels, an inventory of what are commonly known as the seven deadly sins will remedy that.

If one fails to see one’s reflection in pride, anger, envy, covetousness, gluttony, lust or sloth, there are always their equally poisonous siblings and cousins to consider.

Pride, for example, is related to irreverence, which disrespects God or holy things; sentimentality, which prefers feelings of piety to obeying God; presumption, which holds oneself above others and even God; and impenitence itself, which refuses to admit one falls short in any way at all.

There is vanity, arrogance, snobbery and resentment. There is jealousy, malice, contempt and cruelty. There is laziness and indifference and many more relatives of the Deadly Seven.

The good news, from the Christian perspective, is that one doesn’t have to rely on one’s willpower alone to disengage from these noxious practices. In fact, to insist on trying to do just that is considered presumption.

Instead, one breaks free from any and all of these things by means of the grace of God. It’s been 20 years since I embraced the Christian faith, and I’ve found that to be a blessed difference.

Many if not most religions have a season that especially calls for self-examination, self-discipline and spiritual growth, whether associated with the concept of a “new year” or not. (See “New years bring more than parties for some” in the Huntington Beach Independent archives.)

Do you make new year resolutions? If so, how does that work out for you? If you don’t, is there something else you do — for religious or nonreligious reasons — instead?

in with the new

As the new year crested the horizon of time, I went looking for a perspective on “out with the old and in with the new” that had a bit more substance to it. Is dumping the old for something new necessarily always better, I wondered.

We modern, post-modern and post-post-modern creatures most often seem to think so.

Yet I have my doubts. Serious doubts.

During my search, I found a bit of philosophy attributed in some cases to Ralph Waldo Emerson and in others to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

One or the other is said to have said, “What lies before us and what lies behind us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

I’m sorry to say I have failed, thus far, to locate the original source of this quote that puts such a clever spin on the notion of history and future. I was immediately taken with its wit but, later, less so by its crux.

My experience suggests to me that what lies behind us has in its way shaped what now lies within us. While what lies before us will, in its time, do the same.

Surely we have good reason not to be reckless.

Yet what lies within us — call it our character, call it our soul or call it our heart — will no doubt have a great say in how what lies behind us and what lies before us is allowed to become part of who we are.

Dismiss the significance of any of the three as trifles compared to the others and, I dare say, we do so to our peril.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.