New Year's Revolutions

It's not a typo... it's a revolution! Yes, New Year's "resolutions" are wonderful things; they're great ideas, but they seem to so often remain (for me anyway) just that - ideas. Nice thoughts, bold aspirations, but made up in the mind and after a few weeks, if that, I find they haven't trickled down to the bones and the blood.

So... desparate times call for desparate measures! If I'm ever to overcome my laziness, whining, or my malicious mediocrity, if I'm ever to escape the clammy claws of my physical and spiritual quagmires (love that word!) and for once perhaps in my life rise up, shine like silver, live clear as crystal, and become my very best self (aka "a saint"), then I need a revolution.

So here's my New Year's revolution.... here's where I plan to stir up an uprising, raise a ruckus, and build a barricade. I'll turn my gaze not to the carbs, candy or even the consumer culture first, or even to the monster of the media that eats up innocence before it can take root in the soul; no! The revolution will begin in me. In the depths of my own weakness and wounds. The way to heal the wounds in the world is to allow Grace to first heal me, to have some ground in me. To surrender and let the transformation begin; from selfishness to selflessness. Remember St. Catherine's words, "If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!"

The truth is, we are all microcosms; worlds in miniature. The seemingly small choices, for good or ill, that we make as individuals can and does effect a change in the course of the macrocosm, the big world, the universe at large! We are the building blocks of the body of humanity. If we are not at peace in our own little world, then how can we have world peace?

In his World Youth Day of last summer, Pope Benedict laid out the strategy:

"The saints... are the true reformers. Now I want to express this in an even more radical way: only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come, the definitive way to change the world."