New Year's Un-Resolution

One of the reasons I converted from my very non-liturgical denomination to High Church Anglicanism was that I loved the tradition, the drama, the sheer glorious spectacle. And oooh, did I love the liturgy, the plainchant, especially in an elderly priest's voice that trembled on the threshold between speech and song.

But I just couldn't take the Dismissal. You know, what in the Roman Catholic Mass would be "Ite, missa est." Where the priest (or deacon) chants "Let go forth in the name of Christ," and the congregation responds, "Thanks be to God."
I couldn't stand it because liturgical plainchant is often in a minor key (actually, I think that it's the mode, but it sounds like a minor key) and that means the whole service ends on an unresolved chord. I had a friend -- a musicologist with a lovely tenor - who used to sit beside me and sing softly in my ear as we left, just to resolve that chord. Then I could get on with my day.

Well, I'm a lot older now, and have been listening to plainchant for [censored] decades, and I don't need that anymore. In fact, I've grown to love the open chord. It somehow seems to send me off, out into the world, to listen and seek that resolution in the voice of Creation around me.

So why do I still want resolution on January 1st?

One of the most influential texts in my own journey to thinking about religion is Mary Douglas's PURITY AND DANGER. Although she later retracted much of her own argument, I am still fascinated by her observations about the hard-wired human tendency to categorize. Pattern-making, as I understand current arguments, is one of the distinctive traits of the human brain. We (the general human "we", not necessarily every individual) are evolutionarily designed to keep dividing things up into pigeonholes (although we all create our own unique set), just as we are designed to walk upright, to privilege sensory information brought by sight, to form social bonds, to manipulate objects, heckopete, to eat and sleep and stimulate our genitals.

We get satisfaction out of it. We can't help but do it.

So (argued Douglas), when something won't fit in our categories, when it transcends boundaries, when it remains unresolved, it becomes a Thing Of Power. Sacred. It might be a GOOD power: beneficial, opening doors, creating possibilities. It might be a BAD power: destructive, tearing down protections, cutting off the future. But Good or Bad, it's always SCARY. Threatening. Dangerous.

So at this liminal time of the year, as I teeter on the cusp between winter and spring, darkness and light, death and rebirth, what is more natural than to grab the uncertainties and uncategorizables in my life and try to shove them firmly back within their designated boundaries?

I am no longer young, but I don't feel old. I am certainly not sick, but I don't feel well. I'm not financially threatened, but I don't feel secure. I'm hardly glamorous or gorgeous, but I don't frighten strangers in the streets. My daughter and son aren't really children any more, but not quite yet independent adults.

I am so much more than I was, but I'm nothing like I hoped I might be.

So enough of these uncertainties! It's time to FIX things! Trot out those New Year Resolutions: lose some weight, get more exercise, get more publications, fix the plumbing, clean up the yard, spend more time with the kids, and for heaven's sake, do SOMETHING about my clothes and hair!

But doorways and transitions and open chords, as Douglas (and Literata in her moving Wheel of the Year posts^[1]) remind me, are sacred precisely because they can't be nailed down that way. Their power lies in that very state of being slippery and elusive.

So this year, perhaps, it's time finally to let go of my need to resolve that chord and to resolve my life. Time to choose not to choose; time to decide not to decide; time to manage not to manage; time to do a little less and just be.

Time to look and to listen and to feel, to allow resolutions to come (or not) as they will.

Time to go forth and give thanks.

--hapax

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^[1] Beltane - In My Hands, Lughnasadh - John Barleycorn, Mabon - the myth of progress, Samhain - Listening at the Doorway of Winter and Yule - Sustaining Rebirth↩.

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Comments

[Laiima]

Lovely post, hapax.

I myself am starting to realize how so much of what I'm good at is dealing with UNcertainty -- things that *can't be* known. Liminality means, in a certain sense, that anything is possible. Lots of wiggle room, and ways to surprise myself and others.

So many things I've tried to learn from other people -- for instance, not just how to make plans, but why plans are desirable -- when it feels better for me now to make use of what I understand instinctively (that planners don't seem to).

I haven't come up with good words for any of this stuff yet.

[Lonespark]

Liminality FTW.

Great post.

[Amaryllis]

Dear hapax, are you me?

No, I know you're not: you're a bit younger, and a lot smarter. But what you have written, I would have written if I could have written it.

Are we already looking forward to Ash Wednesday? (Never tell me again that you don't speak poetry.)

[Michael Mock]

Beautifully said, Hapax.

[sarah]

That was lovely, hapax.

@Amaryllis: I, for one, always look forward to Ash Wednesday, simply because I do not hope to turn again. :)

To bed I go.

[Kit Whitfield]

I love this. I'm adding to Literata's Yule post in the 'coping' section of my brain.

[Literata]

Thank you, hapax. I'm very, very honored by your mention, and I love to see your reflections on liminality and the human condition. You are indeed a poet.

[J. Random Scribbler]

Amen. Thank you for such a powerful antidote to the "Fix your whole life right now!" pressures of the New Year.

[MercuryBlue]

I don't know, the "fix your whole life right now" pressures seem to be working for me. Admittedly it's only the third.

[storiteller]

Thank you for this. It took a lot of what I was thinking and linked it to theology. I don't think I'm ever going to "do" less (it's just not in my nature), but I'm definitely trying to work on "being" more often. Even today in the brutal cold walking to the train for work, I managed to take some true appreciation in the pink clouds of the sunrise. And it both got me to smile and cut the cold just a little bit.

[Lonespark]

That's good, MB...wait, is it good? It sounded good, but sometimes I miss tone over the net. If it's good, or at least progress of a sort, I hope it continues for you.

(This is where I tell my joke about "progress." I really needed a job. A lit a candle for "needed change." And now I'm getting a divorce*. Yay?)

*Not actually right now.

[MercuryBlue at work]

Lonespark: Good with the qualification that it is still only the fourth day of the year.