Virtuous reality.

New Year's resolutions may come and go, but healthy habits last a lifetime. Patrick McCormick looks at all those self-help books that promise a new you and discovers a plan you can really put your faith in.

OK, I'M A LITTLE EDGY ABOUT JANUARY 1ST THIS year, but not because of any Y2K bug. Although everyone else seems to be afraid of the onset of Armageddon or the loss of all our e-mail (I should be so lucky!), what bothers me about this particular New Year's is the sneaking suspicion that even with the hype of all those zeroes rolling over, it will still be the same old me in the mirror the next morning. Talk about your millennial-sized letdown.

After all, it's not like this is my first trip through the Dick Clark holiday. And, like a lot of other folks, I know that a couple hours after the big glowing ball has dropped I'll be feeling that annual tug to make some changes in my life.

Hey, we get new calendars and new Day-Timers in January, maybe there's hope for a new me.

But 12 months will roll by and I'll find I've fallen behind on my goals and strayed off the paths I'd set for myself. I won't be nearly as skinny, smart, successful, charming, or holy as I had planned to be by now. So, with the courage and optimism born of a fresh start, I'll decide once again to get back on my diet or start up (or restart) some exercise plan. Or I'll promise myself to really organize our finances this year and put more money into savings. I'll promise to put more time and work into various relationships with friends and family, do more for our community, or spend more time in prayer.

The problem is that I've made these promises before--most of them more than a couple of times. And the fact that I'm promising to really do them this time makes it clear how successful I've been so far in my pilgrimage to perfection.

It's not that there aren't a lot of folks out there ready and willing to come to my aid. I may not be as lucky as Dante, who had Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy, but down at the local bookstore I can plunk down my credit card and take home the wit and wisdom of the best self-help gurus in the business. For 20 to 30 bucks I can have the latest book or audio from Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, or Suze Orman--folks who definitely seem to be living on a higher plane of happiness (or at least success) than I and who seem thrilled to offer me all sorts of guidance and support in my struggle to become healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Though there's a fair amount of fluff and chicken-soup hype in these motivational books, most of them contain good advice about how to effect real change in our lives. Indeed, beneath all the bells and whistles, most of these books offer some pretty helpful suggestions about how to develop the virtues we need for personal and moral growth.

According to Covey's best selling The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Fireside, 1990), Chopra's The Seven SpirituaI Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams (AmblerAllen, 1995), Dyer's Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want (HarperCollins, 1998), and Orman's The Nine Steps to Financial Freedom (Crown, 1997), the only way to achieve success is to get rid of our bad habits vis-a-vis health, money, and relationships and replace them with virtues. We have to learn new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving toward our bodies, bank accounts, and bosses. And we have to make these changes permanent by turning these thoughts, feelings, and deeds into regular habits that become part of our daily routine--doing our homework every day, week, and month until these new responses become our default drive.

As a result of all this work, they imply, we will not only achieve our goals, we will slowly but surely be transforming ourselves into respectful, responsible, proactive, collaborative, creative, thoughtful, inventive, and even joyful and generous people. In other words, we'll be virtuous.

THE PROBLEM WITH ALL THIS VIRTUOUS self-improvement, unfortunately, is that lots of us have bought the books, made the resolutions, and then proceeded to fall flat on our faces--again and again and again. So, even if virtues are important, they're not enough. As the Beatles would say, we need a little help from our friends--and a little grace.

That seems to be the message of several recent books by contemporary Christian ethicists who are not only singing the praises of virtues, but also reminding us that the moral life is an ongoing journey we do not make alone, a personal and loving relationship into which we are invited and engraced by Jesus; and that even the good moral habits we develop along the way are received as gifts and blessings from God. In a number of recent works bringing together Christian morality and spirituality, these authors remind us that we are called to be good and holy by a God whose love and grace support and encourage us at every turn.

Mark O'Keefe's excellent little book, Becoming Good, Becoming Holy: On the Relationship of Christian Ethics and Christian Spirituality (Paulist, 1995), notes that at the heart of our intertwining spiritual and moral journeys to the holy and the good is a joyous invitation to conversion and discipleship. The process of saying yes to this sacred calling, O'Keefe says, involves not just good deeds and right choices but immersion in a community of prayerful and discerning pilgrims, a communion of saints who encourage, nurture, and support us.

Richard Gula, one of the more thoughtful Christian moralists of our day, makes a number of the same points in his recent book, The Good Life: Where Morality and Spirituality Converge (Paulist, 1999). He encourages us to envision our lives as a response to a generous and loving God who calls and empowers us to fidelity, friendship, and compassion.

So too, John W. Crossin's Walking in Virtue: Moral Decisions and Spiritual Growth in Daily Life (Paulist, 1999) offers a vision of Christian morality as a spiritual journey of disciples responding to a personal call to conversion and growth. And in James Keenan's engaging and useful little text Virtues for Ordinary Christians (Sheed & Ward, 1999), we are introduced to a series of narratives and examples illustrating the sorts of virtues all of us need to lead moral and holy lives as modern-day disciples.

Throughout all of these texts the message is clear: We are invited and engraced by one who loves us and supported by those around us.

A similar vision informs Timothy O'Connell's Making Disciples: A Handbook of Christian Moral Formation (Crossroad Herder, 1998) and William Spohn's Go and Do Likewise: Jesus & Ethics (Continuum, 1999). Mixing research from ethics, spirituality, and the social sciences, O'Connell's "handbook" offers the reader a lucid and practical pastoral guide to the process of building (or growing) disciples.

But what is particularly helpful is the attention O'Connell gives to the ways in which our virtues and values are not individual traits, but the rich heritage of the communities that hold and nurture us with their stories, rituals, and networks of mentoring relationships. Looking at how wise Christians and other folks have learned to encourage their children, students, and wards to grow into loving and compassionate adults, O'Connell describes the import and impact of community, story, liturgy, mentoring, and friendship.

Spohn's Go and Do Likewise relies on the best of contemporary biblical, moral, and spiritual scholarship. He has fashioned a book that invites readers to immerse themselves afresh in the Jesus story, hearing as if for the first time a call to discipleship and conversion that is both joyous and demanding. For Spohn (and O'Connell and all these authors) Jesus is the word of invitation, encouragement, and challenge at the heart of Christian morality, a word that unfolds in our hearts and calls us to be and behave differently. The challenge (and the hope) in this new moment in Christian morality is not Y2K, but yes to God, whose love rushes out to meet us.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.