This Lent: Resolving without Resolving

There, in the gate, before the bar raises to let those spiritual horses run, sits the left hemisphere: all grinning and shit, holding a pole at your horse's feet, ready to trip.

You've been there, right? The season of grace arrives. You just have to welcome it, but instead, you try to grab it.

Grace is what's given, and the left hemisphere is what sucks. It doesn't like to wait, so it jumps in. With your left hemisphere raging with good intentions, you pile on spiritual resolutions and renunciations like a little kid marking up a Christmas catalogue.

And then Lent starts and reality hits your Lenten abstraction like a car splashes muck on your sweet-ass tux as soon as you step onto the sidewalk. You've given yourself more resolutions than hours in the day; you've resolved to do weekly 48-hour fasts when you can scarcely hurdle twelve.

So you stumble. You fall. Like a good wannabe monk, you get back up and try again, but your left hemisphere is standing there with its stick, ready to trip you again.

If you're like me, you get to Good Friday, thinking, "Man, I'm a piece of shit."

Every year. Every freakin' year.

This year, I'm taking a card from the Taoist deck: I'm resolving not to resolve. If wu-wei means "trying without trying," I'm doing wu-resolutio: resolving without resolving.

Non-resolving.

But wait, you hedonist, spying an escape hatch from the ardors of Lent: "Non-resolving" is not the same thing as "no resolution."

You're still making resolutions, but just not resolving.

It breaks my brain, too. It's supposed to: it's not logical, which is the left hemisphere's main tool, wielded within our rationalist cocoon of language. It's paradox, which laughs at logic and breaks apart rationality like a sadistic boy tearing open a fetal butterfly's chrysalis.

What does non-resolving look like in application?

I'm not sure. This is the first year I'm trying it, and you never "know know" how something works until you're into it and adapt as you go along, but here's what I'm thinking:

The touchstone of the approach is non-ado (the definition of wu-wei). Our Western tradition calls it "detachment."

We resolve, yes, but we don't get attached to our resolutions.

When we stumble, we scarcely notice. When we fall, we chuckle. When the resolution turns out to have been the idea of our (always) overly-optimistic left hemisphere, we modify it or maybe even chuck it and try something else. Adapting and adjusting to the flow of reality.

Is it the heroic approach we envision for ourselves every Lent? Maybe not.

Is it better?

I think so. It's more real, anyway. It's not a dogged attachment to our left hemisphere's abstract idea of what Lent should be. That alone gives this approach a slice of merit.

Resolutions, yes. Resolving to carry them out no matter what, with all the grimness such an approach entails? No.

Again, it's a paradox. It's not supposed to "make sense."

But paradox is instilled in the foundations of the world. Paradox is evil in a world created by a good God. Paradox is almighty God becoming a helpless baby in a manger.

And paradox is the Cross, which is where the Lenten season concludes.