Paul Graves: Change what’s in your heart when you change calendar

So do you look forward to Tuesday, the first day of 2008?

If you use the replacing of an old calendar with a new one as a reason to “turn a new page” in your life, then perhaps Jan. 1 is important to you at numerous levels.

Personally, I think it will take more than a new calendar to heal what is wounded in most of us as people.

Likewise, the change of calendar or dropping of the ball in Times Square does virtually nothing to heal the spiritual wounds of our culture. We need a far better metaphor.

How about this one? “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord; remove the foreskin of your hearts …”

Ouch, and ouch again! Even the visual picture prompts me to cringe. But there it is, in Jeremiah 4:4.

Early in his book, the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s anger toward the stubborn and hard-hearted people of Judah. Only in the 31st chapter does God’s power of transforming love get its due. The covenant symbolized by circumcision will now be written on the hearts of the “stiff-necked people.”

They will return to being God’s people. But it won’t happen with a change of calendars. It will happen only after a change of heart.

Removing the foreskin of the heart will release the impurities of Judah’s collective life so they can embrace God’s second chance.

So what do you need for a radical change to happen in your life? Oops, that sounds like I know you need a radical change to happen. Perhaps I’m just projecting onto you what I see in my bathroom mirror.

I don’t mean to put you down. I don’t even mean to put myself down. In fact, I invite each of us to make 2008 a year not of “put downs,” but of putting down those attitudes and actions that diminish each of us as God’s children.

It certainly seems like we don’t often play well with each other. We find it too easy to put others down in thought, if not in verbal assaults.

The presidential campaign gives us obvious examples of how easy it is to put others down. And various media fan the put-down flames in so many irresponsible ways.

But these are easy, convenient targets. They are removed from our daily lives when we want them to be. It is too easy for us to point fingers: “They’d better circumcise their hearts.”

So I invite each of us to step in front of our own bathroom mirrors and ask ourselves: What do we need to put down in our own lives so we can stop putting other people down in ways we glibly take for granted?

Where do we get what we need as people – and as a culture – to temper our runaway impulse for the gratification of putting others down?

There are also other mirror-questions we should ask. If we put down our anger, or fear, or impatience – or whatever – what will our newly circumcised hearts move us to pick up?

To change metaphors, how deep into our spiritual well must we dip before we can we lift up that which calls us to be people of positive strength, of graciousness, of just attitude toward and treatment of others?

As was true with Jeremiah’s people, Judah, the answers lie within us. We know what we must do as individuals and as a collective people to bring us into a healthy balance.

Choosing to tone down our personal put-down rhetoric and lift up the worth of other people is one place to start. It’s critical if we want to make our 2008 calendar change more than a hollow ritual.