May 27, 2005
Will
Subtle, maybe not so subtle, are the liturgy’s proposed responses where commitments are involved.
One of the most glaring signs of this is in the marriage vows. Society’s “I do” is the prayer book’s “I will.” Everybody knows you do or you wouldn’t be standing there nervous and uncomfortable and having spent all that money to get there. It’s whether you will or not, whether you will take it from here to eternity that matters. This is what all human commitment is about.
And so with the Baptismal Covenant, with ordinations, graduations, and with anything else worth writing home about. Faith, commitment, intention, even love, especially love, are acts of the will. They are choices, not submissions, they are proactive, not reactive. Ironically, truly to give one’s word is to keep one’s word.
In the gospel for today, hear Jesus, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 7.21).
“Hey, you over there in Amen Corner, Listen up, whatever holiness you think you’re up to is pointless until you walk the talk.” To do the will of the Father is first to will the will of the Father. The will, the human will, is the passport at the Pearly Gates. For just as the will is the key to kingdom, so is the will the key to being human. “What does it mean to be created in the image of God?” asks the catechism. “It means that we are free to make choices,” free to will, it may well have said. And if we are truly free, we are free either to be willing — or to be wilful, and there’s the catch.
Will, like spirit, is one of those neutral words. Our will may be that about us that is most God-like or it may, as well, be that about us that is most daemonic. We may be willing, or we may be wilful. It is not only true of us, but true of the nations, as well. By virtue of the way God imagined us, we are free to be either. Otherwise, our freedom to choose, which is the mark of God’s image in us, means nothing. [An interesting aside: The very word Islam means surrendering to the will of God.]
The fundamental problem with the act of surrender is not knowing how the individual will relates to the will of God, the mysterious “Someone” or “Something” to which one might be fortunate enough to have an opportunity to say Yes. So what is “the will of the Father”?
Once in my earlier and even-more-pretentious-if-you-can-believe-it years as a priest, I asked one of our church’s outstanding theologians, “How does one know God’s will?” Without hesitation or any of the pontifical pondering I might have expected, he said, simply, “Trust your hunches.”
Trust my hunches. That was hardly the answer I expected — or wanted. But the years have seasoned its meaning. If, indeed, I am one whom God imagined into being, where else might I look but inwardly into my own intuition, into my own imagination, into my own creativity? And if I have been to any degree stewardly with this freedom, with these gifts, with whatever it is that I might believe that God would want me to choose, how even better prepared might be my intuition — having already been there and done that?
So how do we know God’s will? Trust your hunches. But maybe we’re not so intuitive and maybe we’re more needful of external rather than internal evidence. Maybe it’s harder for us to imagine. Maybe my imagination and I are not all that compatible. Maybe I somehow got the crazy idea along the way that imagination and fantasy and myth are not to be trusted at all, but are simply phony. Too bad, but it happens.
Well, then, just look around. There’s a lot of evidence. Look at the way creation works best — connected. Look at the way people work best — connected. Look at the way your body functions best — connected. And look at the way it all works worst — disconnected.
Look at what might be God’s will — that we not only see how intimately involved we all are in God’s world, but that we act accordingly. If all this around us is God’s will, then we can be willing not only to share in it and enjoy it, but to be stewardly about it, to enable it, to join in harmony with God in the management of it all and of ourselves. Maybe Eden is a myth, a story, maybe so. But whatever, Eden is yet the story of our lives. Surely after all these centuries we’ve gotten a leg up on Eve and Adam? But then, maybe we haven’t.