A resolution I'm making without expectations

Looking back on 2023, there is a sense that the end credits of humanity had begun to roll. We started the year watching artificial intelligence lay the groundwork for our economic redundancy and ended it watching an ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, we continued to make our planet increasingly hostile to all forms of life.

And yet here we are, persisting like mad, using the arrival of a new year to set intentions for positive change. Is there anything more human than hope?

Lest hope be dead by Valentine’s Day. For 2024, I’m going to avoid pursuing external, observable outcomes. Instead, I’m aspiring for that which cannot be measured, compared, tracked, touched, or verified. I submit that one cannot fail at the intangible, just as one cannot be disappointed by the unknown.

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There is one thing in particular I’m after this year. It is both impossible and full of possibility. For the oblivious, there is little of it to lose. For the vigilant, there is transcendence. I’m talking about a promiscuous force, moving from body to body, soul to soul, that requires only to be noticed. Animals are said to have more of it than we do and yet it seems to redeem the human condition.

It was the deeply alluring Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector who said that, and what she said it about was grace—a state in which “everything acquires a kind of halo.” I’ve never really thought about grace, let alone resolved for it, until she put it into words. In ‘STATE OF GRACE—A FRAGMENT’, a standout passage in Lispector’s collection of newspaper columns, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, she writes:

Anyone who has experienced a state of grace will recognize what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about inspiration, which is a special grace that often comes to those engaged in art.

The state of grace I’m talking about has no practical use. As if its sole purpose was for us to know that it exists. Along with this state, in addition to the tranquil contentment given off by people and things, comes a lucidity that I only call weightless because in grace everything is utterly weightless. It’s the lucidity of someone who no longer has to guess at things, someone who effortlessly knows. That’s all: you know.

Don’t ask what, because I can only answer in the same childish way: you effortlessly know. And there’s a feeling of incomparable physical well-being. The body is transformed into a gift. And you feel it as a gift because you’re experiencing, directly, the undoubted gift of physically existing.

In a state of grace you often see the profound, but previously unfathomable beauty of another person. Indeed, everything acquires a kind of halo, which is not imaginary: it comes from the glow of the almost mathematical radiation given off by things and people. You begin to feel that everything that exists—be it person or thing—inhales and exhales a subtle glow of energy. The truth of the world is impalpable.

It is not at all what I vaguely imagine to be the state of grace of the saints. I have never known such a state and cannot even conceive of it. It is simply the state of grace of an ordinary person who suddenly becomes totally real because he or she is ordinary and human and recognizable.

The discoveries one makes in this state cannot be put into words, cannot be communicated. That is why, when I’m in that state of grace, I remain seated, still and silent. It’s like an annunciation. Although not preceded by the angels who, I suppose, precede the state of grace of the saints, it’s as if the angel of life came to me to announce the world.

Then, slowly, you emerge from that state. Not as if you had been in a trance—there is no trance—but you emerge slowly, uttering the sigh of someone who has possessed the world precisely as it is. It’s also a sigh of longing. Because having experienced gaining a body and a soul and the whole earth, one, of course, wants more and more. In vain: it comes only when it chooses to, spontaneously.

I don’t know why, but I think animals enter into that state of grace more frequently than humans. Except that, unlike us humans, they don’t know that they do. The lives of animals are uncluttered by such human obstacles as reason, logic, understanding. Animals enjoy the glory of the direct and of whatever happens directly.

God is quite right not to give us this state of grace very often. If he did, we might pass over permanently into the other side of life, which is also real, but then no one would ever understand us again. We would lose our shared language.

It’s also a good thing that it doesn’t occur as often as I would like. Because then I might grow accustomed to happiness—I forgot to mention that, in the state of grace, you feel very happy. Becoming accustomed to happiness would be dangerous. We would become more selfish, because happy people are selfish, less sensitive to human pain, we would not feel the need to help those who need help—and all because we would find in grace life’s essence and reward.

No, even if it were up to me, I wouldn’t want to experience that state of grace too frequently. It would become an addiction, it would attract me like an addiction, and I would become as absorbed in contemplation as an opium eater. And if it did appear more often, I’m sure I would abuse it: I would start wanting to living permanently in that state. And that would represent an unforgivable flight from our merely human destiny, which involves struggle and suffering and confusion and only minor joys.

It’s also a good thing that the state of grace does not last long. If it did, knowing as I do my almost childish ambitions, I would end up trying to enter into the mysteries of Nature. And if I tried to do that, I’m sure grace would vanish. Because it is a gift and, since it asks nothing of us, it would vanish at once were we to make any demands of it. We must remember that the state of grace is merely a chink through which we can peer into a land that is a kind of calm paradise, but it is not the entrance to that paradise, nor does it give us the right to eat of the fruit of its trees.

You emerge from the state of grace with your face unlined, your eyes wide and pensive, and even if you haven’t smiled, it’s as if your whole body had been gently smiling. And you emerge a better person than when you entered. You have experienced something that seems to redeem the human condition, while, at the same time, the narrow limits of that condition have become more marked. And precisely because, after grace, the human condition reveals itself in all its needy poverty, you learn to love more, to forgive more, to wait more. You feel a kind of acceptance of suffering and its often unbearable paths.

There are arid, desert days when I would give years of my life in exchange for a few minutes of grace.

PS I stand, body and soul, with the tragic fate of Brazil’s students.

More than a beautiful passage, Lispector’s portrayal of grace is an act of service. It allows readers to recognize and connect with an evanescent state that might otherwise elude us. She lends us her extraordinary sense of perception – this being her pre-eminent talent – so that we may temporarily, from time to time, come within an inch of life itself. We all need more of that. If it’s true that what you focus on expands, my resolution for 2024 is to amplify grace through the attention I give it.

Your turn:

• If you’re intrigued by Clarice Lispector's perspective on grace, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas. Don’t just take my word it: The owner of my local bookstore lit up and said it was his favourite book when I went there to ask for it recently.

• For me, grace is akin to the kind of high attainable through running or psychedelics, which I’ve always found to be a pretty reliable catalyst for experiencing the “gift of physically existing.” What does it for you? What are some signs you’ve embodied grace?