Growth, Change, and the Law of Gradualness

January 1, 2025 is just a few days away and we are now deep into that time of year we call “The Holidays.” The mad dash that began with Halloween, accelerated through Thanksgiving, and blurred through Christmas, now culminates in the artificial end and beginning point we call New Year’s Eve. The end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. Over the course of 60 days, we have eaten, drank, celebrated, spent, given, and gathered, possibly more than the entire rest of the year. For Christmas alone, many will have gathered to celebrate multiple times with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, clients, and even strangers.

Now, many of our eyes turn toward the ascetic purging and reordering of our lives in the hopeful vision of who and what we’ll become in the new year. What a wondrously exhausting, exhilarating, and enlightening time of year! From the religious to the secular, we have gone the distance, saint and sinner uniting within and among to endure and engage the varied faculties necessary to thrive and survive such a focused set of moments.

Watching the chaos of my extended family last night, I was struck by an immense sense of time as four generations gathered for a few hours of revelry marking the end of our formal Christmas gatherings and the distinct turning toward the new year. How appropriate that today, Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. Feast indeed! The Church calendar frames time in the form of seasons with titles like “Ordinary,” “Advent,” “Christmas,” and “Easter” with days like today described as a “Solemnity” marking the moments for appropriate feasting, fasting, and the beautiful ordinary that lies between. Time in these seasons takes on special dimension and meaning, much of which spills over into our secular world in various forms.

Time, both a description of distance and duration, takes on special meaning in the context of family. Family – that beautiful institution. The binding unit of society. It’s an unwritten tie, woven in genetics, the blood that connects us physically, underpinning the relational aspects that connect us emotionally and filially. We have the immediate family and extended family. Generations mark time in the humanity of family’s passing, holding the fabric together in a most unique form, as it measures the distance and duration of blood that groups us in such an unseen way.

An interesting thing about family, and the time it marks, is that we experience relationships that span our lives. In family, we literally see the beginning and end, mirrored in the longest enduring relationships most of us will ever know. Over such spans, we get to glimpse the changes that occur to individuals and the relationships that surround them, (perhaps more closely than we might like), as they, and we, come together in the great dance of existence. Looking at that great span of individuals last night, my mind wandered to the new year, the changes that would occur for this group (desired and undesired), and the growth that such changes would produce.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II published Familiaris Consortio, and in it described the “Law of Gradualness” as a way of characterizing the journey of ongoing conversion toward goodness in which mankind “day by day builds himself up through his many free decisions; and so he knows, loves and accomplishes moral good by stages of growth.” In other words, we are all on a journey and change in stages. This is both a obvious and profound way to see ourselves, but even more importantly, to see others, seeking to meet them where they are on that journey.

Relationships often come and go, but family stays…even when we try to get away from it. The deeper ties of family force us to experience one another on voyage of gradualness, our slow evolution to self that morphs over the years. We are all changing, even if slowly, it is happening. We know this by what we see and we intuit it even as it occurs slow enough to be unseen. Yet, we maintain a tendency to see others as fixed, static points marked on cosmic map of stars that revolve our center. Just as we look out upon a universe that seems unchanging to our naked eye, we often see the other person as stuck in the mistakes, ignorance, selfishness, mood, or narrow corner of that place we once or twice saw them inhabit. Our foibles, immaturity, and error, can have an incredibly long shelf life.

The sheer timespan of family helps us see the truth of the law of gradualness as we watch infants become toddlers become little boys become adolescent girls, on to young women, and adult men. Looking across generations, we can see it and its great arc across time. Perhaps we missed it while it was happening but comparing then and now, it is as clear as day. Growth came and the little boy or girl changed. And now, continues to change.

We are becoming. Each of us. That becoming is born of our choices, our reactions to what life, and others, throw at us, as well as what we choose to throw into the mix. We often get impatient for the changes we want; changing that bad habit, changing our situation, changing the relationship, the job, the geography, etc. Slow change is difficult so we look for quick hits for the changes we want. Like jerky lane changes on the highway, we swerve to get around the obstacle or race around the irritant holding us back.

Or, we become impatient for the change in the other. He isn’t getting it. She won’t listen. He’s a selfish jerk. She’s a gossipy mean girl. Faced with such slow change, it’s easier to change lanes, leave the highway, jettison the irritant. We are impatient even as we know that growth and change toward the more of our own possibility can be painfully slow…sometimes taking a lifetime. This is true for others. This is true for ourselves.

This week, we’ll race to 1/1/25. It’s coming. With all of it’s promise of possibility and of pain. Much of which will center on those relationships we find ourselves within. The law of gradualness seems a useful reference point as we plot our own journey into January and beyond. Lasting change is born of a slow conforming to a way of living. A way of being. The small choices, the little steps, the slight redirects, all add up over time and distance. This kind of change is a conversion, a reordering of self toward something more, something greater, than that which centered us before. Growth is the water flowing over stone, forming it in the steadiness of its being.

Perhaps a better way to see the new year is in the context of the long game. The slow path to that greater future. By all means, let go of bad habits. Aim for better choices. See a bigger, better, place for you and yours in the turn of the calendar. Just know that today is just one point on the great journey. For you and the person standing next to you. It is a great beauty of our human experience. Change will happen if we let it. We are not fixed to the place that was. Neither is the person standing in front of us.