We need to start 2011 by imitating both John the Baptist, and the Roman God Janus who looked both forward and back simultaneously

Many of us make our new year’s resolutions in the aftermath of an overly indulgent Christmas or New Year’s Eve. We want to eat more healthily, go to the gym more often, drink less and spend less, but the evidence is that 80 per cent of us give up on those resolutions within two months. We quickly bemoan our lack of willpower, and then lapse, with relief, into old habits.

The practice of making new year’s resolutions goes back at least to the Romans. When Julius Caesar changed the Roman calendar so that the new year began on January 1, rather than March 1, the

Roman god Janus became associated with the beginning of the calendar year. Two-faced Janus — after whom January is named — could simultaneously see back into the past and look into the future. Romans therefore offered their new year’s resolutions to him.

However, for Christians the new year begins not on January 1 but at the end of November, with the season of Advent, a time of waiting, reflection and repentance. The dark days of Advent are illuminated by the rather crazed figure of John the Baptist, with his tattered clothes and disgusting diet, who baptised all comers into the muddy waters of the Jordan and called on them to repent.

In the Christian context, repentance has often been understood as confessing sins, feeling contrition, and perhaps doing penance. But really repentance is about change. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, its meaning is shaped by the Jewish experience of exile: to repent and turn or return to God, as the prophets exhorted the Jewish people, was to call them out of exile.

When John the Baptist shouts, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he means this: come back to the path of the Lord, reconnect with the divine, change.

The very word “repentance” comes from the Greek “metanoia” and roughly means “go beyond your mind” — in other words, enter into a new way of seeing things, and change.

To move forward in that way, we all have to be Janus-like: looking back to forge ahead. And we also have to be John-the-Baptist-like: looking honestly at what we have done right and wrong; examining what of our individual and communal behaviour holds us back from good relationships with one another and with God.

New year’s resolutions necessarily require reflection on the old so that we can witness and embrace the new. But new year’s resolutions also require imagination: change does not occur simply through facts and logic. We have to be able to conceive of a different future.

That means looking at the whole world differently — going beyond our minds. If we want to have better relationships with others, we need to empathise with them, imagine ourselves in their lives. If we want to see things differently, we have to give up our ingrained habits of allegiance.

In religious traditions, it is prophets who call us to imagine that new future. But emotional sympathy for the other is also cultivated through the humanities — art, dance, opera, poetry, novels and music.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes in her book Not for Profit of the ways in which attacks on the humanities corrode society. “We seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle and complicated manner.” “Opening out of the soul” is what John the Baptist saw as the work of every human being. He baptised men and women, Jews and Gentiles, foreigners and Jesus himself in the same dirty river, asking only that those who waded into the common waters would keep their eyes open to the possibility of repentance and change, as they stood there shivering in the company of strangers, being made into new people. Resolutions are, after all, not really private events, or narrow attempts at self improvement. They are commitments to seeing the world anew — and to seeing ourselves and others as changing to accommodate that newness. Some of us, discouraged, may start this new year unable to write, paint, pray or imagine. Others of us, angry, may blame strangers for our stuckness and our pain. But if we engage with the work of what Nussbaum calls “connecting person to world in a subtle, rich and complicated manner”, what John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, calls “preparing the way” and what secular society calls new year’s resolutions, then we will find hope, in this new year, and in every new moment to come. The Very Rev Dr Jane Shaw is the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco