Failing at Our New Year’s Resolutions

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I hope that you fail at your New Year’s resolutions.new-years-eve-114011__180

Admittedly, I have never been much of one for New Year’s resolutions. I suspect, if I am being honest with myself, that one of the reasons for my avoidance is the security of knowing that if I don’t make a resolution I don’t have to fail at a resolution (or experience the unpleasant feelings of guilt and defeat that accompany repeatedly forgoing exercise for a Netflix binge). Now, I do appreciate and even envy folks that devise thoughtful and creative goals for the New Year. A fella over at Verily has written about some of his previous resolutions and they are both fun and creative. Anyway, I have been inspired to try resolutions this year. They are simple: exercise five days a week for at least 45 minutes, silent prayer for 30 minutes a day, and read one new non-school related book each month.

I hope that I fail at my New Year’s resolutions.

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SMARTER Goals for the New Year

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new-year-2015New Year’s resolutions are common, but even more ubiquitous are jokes about the failure of those resolutions.   Nevertheless, we all know that some changes are important, so how can you defy the stereotype and make a successful resolution this year? Help is here in the form of some common wisdom (SMART goals), uncommon research (from John Norcross) and some personal additions on the process of setting goals.

To set the stage, here are some insights from research on New Year’s resolutions by John Norcross and colleagues (found here).

First:  Setting goals (or making resolutions) is important.  This study found that 46% of those who made a resolution were successful with that change six months later, compared to only 4% of those who did not resolve.
Second: The first few weeks are critical.  More than half of those who reported being unsuccessful at six months reported they were already unsuccessful in the first two weeks.  Over 70% of those who made it to four weeks also made it to six months successfully.

So what can we offer you to help you make good resolutions and get started successfully?

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Rejoice, Rejoice: Being Grateful This Christmas Season

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“Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”

Gerard_van_Honthorst_001 (1)

Theology of gratitude. Yesterday, on the last day of the “O Antiphons,” the beautiful and ancient recitations made the week before Christmas during Evening Prayer, we implored the Lord, “O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, desire of the nations, Savior of all people: Come and set us free, Lord our God.” Well, our prayer has been heard. The Christ has come. The chorus of the popular Advent hymn enjoins us to rejoice because Emmanuel, the Savior of all people, has come and set us free. Our joy and exultation arises from this pure gratia (grace)—this undeserved gift. Derived from this notion of gratia is the word gratitude. We rejoice because we are grateful for the gift of Emmanuel, God with us—born to save us. Gratitude is the recognition of grace; it is the acknowledgment of those free and undeserving gifts that we have not earned or merited, but enjoy in our lives. Without this recognition we cannot be grateful this Christmas season, and without gratitude we cannot rejoice.  Read More →

To Heal, Activate the Relationship!

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family prayerIn our culture, we sometimes think of physical healing as near magic.  Take this potion, that magic pill, wave the x-ray wand, blast it with invisible radiation.  Voila!  You’re better.  Our medical treatments are certainly advanced, but such a degree of technical progress can reduce our sense of agency in the process.  Participating in treatment can feel analogous to taking the car into the shop for an adjustment.

We would often like personal, mental and spiritual healing to work that way.  But, as John Donne said, “no man is an island”; we are intimately connected to others and healing is a relational endeavor.  “Ok, that sounds great”, you say, “but what does it really mean?”  What do we know about mental development that can help us understand healing?

For a moment, let’s put on our neuroscience lenses (realizing that this information is a generalization; the raw science – well there are whole other books for that!).  The way that our brains develop, the very way in which our genes express themselves, is dependent on the type of interactions that we have with others. Read More →

On the Coming Messiah and Marshmallows

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Past-Present-FutureThere is a threefold dimension to the Advent season–past, present and future. Sometimes we forget that Advent is not simply a memory exercise of the Church contemplating the Christ event some 2000 years ago. Advent is also a time in which we prepare our hearts in expectation for Christ’s second coming. But, as then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted, there is also a current reality to Advent, a realization in the midst of our own sin and darkness (and that of the whole world) of the extent to which we still are unredeemed and desperately in need of taking into our lives daily Jesus’s grace and love.

It’s hard to wait well. Waiting for this daily deepening of Christ’s redemption and for His second coming can so often become a hindrance rather than an aid to our spiritual growth.  Sometimes thinking about how wonderful a future gift will be makes the current reality all the more bleak. We hesitate to contemplate the glory and love of Christ that we shall experience when He comes again because it makes us painfully aware of how sorrowful and disastrous this world is. Yes, we know that Christ is with us and that He will come again, but what we seem to know more intimately is how sad, selfish, lonely, empty, and sinful we are.  In this waiting we often try either to distract ourselves from the good for which we wait or we succumb to the temptation of trying to gratify and fill ourselves with lesser goods.

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Why Write about Catholicism and Psychology?

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Gloria Dei est vivens homo !Matt bio

The glory of God is living man. The first reason that I am writing for Psyched Catholic is because I realize just how much the full weight of this quote by St. Irenaeus (also commonly translated “The glory of God is man fully alive”) eludes me. Irenaeus goes on to note that man is most alive in Heaven. That is, we will be most fully alive, living in the truest and fullest sense, when we see God face to face in the Beatific Vision. It seems, however, that by virtue ofIrenaus the fact that we share in the Divine Life by grace this phrase must have some relevance and meaning to those of us who do not yet have the Beatific Vision. So, Psyched Catholic is my chance to think deeply about God’s glory and living man. In this space I want to contemplate and explore lines given to us by the Church like “man cannot find himself, except through a sincere gift of self,” and “Christ…fully reveals man to man himself.” The wisdom of the Church and of her Saints has much to teach me about how to live the life of grace well. I have come to believe that solid psychology can assist in this venture as well. With Psyched Catholic I want to plunder Egypt’s gold and take what is true, good, and beautiful from psychology and  explore how it can benefit our spiritual lives. From my own experiences and those of intimate friends and family I know that barriers to psychological and emotional health, whether they be traumas from the past, addictions, or mental disorders can often impeded our spiritual growth and relationship with God. Psychology can be used to help clear away the rubble that may be impeding grace, freeing us to flourish. Read More →