Joseph Sabino Mistick: Resolutions big and small

On New Year’s Day in 1773, Anglican priest John Newton used one of his poems to illustrate a point in his sermon, and when those words were later set to music by American composer William Walker in 1835, it became the hymn that we now know as “Amazing Grace.”

Newton’s words were a promise that we all can make big changes in our lives for the better with the help of grace, which is unmerited divine assistance. We can only imagine how this affected his Buckinghamshire parishioners that day who were considering their own New Year’s resolutions, big and small.

Newton knew more than a little about making big changes because none of them came to him easily or quickly. As a young man, he worked on merchant vessels until he was forced into the British navy, where he was lashed for trying to escape and later abandoned in West Africa.

He eventually became a slave trader, describing himself as a heartless businessman with no feelings for the human beings who were being bought and sold. It was only after he barely survived a shipwreck off the coast of Donegal County, Ireland, that he began to examine and question his life.

It took years, but Newton eventually quit the slave trade. Years after that, he became a priest in the Church of England and finally an abolitionist who joined the successful campaign to repeal the Slave Trade Act in England, which happened as he lay dying in 1807.

Newton gave credit for all these changes to the appearance of grace in his life — amazing grace. As he said, “I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world. But still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.”

“Amazing Grace” is not reserved for just the big things in life, even though it is commonly sung at rallies for civil rights and social justice. It is so often sung at public events here that it is practically the spiritual anthem of the United States.

But Newton’s words are also there for everyday struggles. In my family, we bury our loved ones with a graveside bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace,” a practice that began on the Welsh side and quickly spread to the Italians.

For most of us, New Year’s resolutions are about eating better or joining a gym. Marco Machi of the Exercise Warehouse in Bloomfield calls these folks “the resolutioners,” and the healthier daily habits that they seek are worthy and attainable goals for all of us, even without divine help.

But if you are thinking about bigger changes this year, and you are looking for some assurance that all things are possible with grace, remember John Newton and his journey. And remember the words of his New Year’s Day sermon nearly 250 years ago:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.