The
Power of Will
“Not
only do we need a kitchen to bake bread, we need the will to be engaged in the
process. This is true of loving also. Without the will to love, we cannot be
consistent.”
Gunilla
Norris (Becoming Bread: Meditations on Loving and Transformation, p.17; Bell
Tower, 1993)
Will
plays a large role in the way we choose to live our lives. Simone Weil said, “Love
is a direction and not a state of the soul.” In other words, we must follow
where it leads, or lose our way entirely. Will is the root word for both
willing and willful and between the two lies a vast prairie fire. Willful is a
state of mind in which we attempt to push the river, never accepting its
natural flow. We want life to be as we wish it to be, and we are willing to
abandon ethics and sometimes even common sense to force it to be. Willing is
more like swimming in the river, going with its flow while avoiding rocks and
low hanging branches. We accept life on its own terms and learn to enjoy its
twists and turns.
We are
taught in church that God gave humanity free will to choose in every
circumstance which direction to go. There are days when I think the Creator
must regret that decision, for there are always people for whom willful seems
the best choice in all situations. I am not pointing fingers here, for in my
own life I have chosen willful more than I care to admit. I did not find it to
be terribly rewarding. Being willful—trying hard to force others in the desired
direction—is based upon fear and lack of trust. We tell ourselves, “If I don’t make
this happen, who knows where I’ll end up.” Or we seize upon the old cliché: “My
way or the highway.” We cannot imagine that life itself will take us where we
need to go, or that we might be led to a destination that is more perfect for
us than the one we believe we want. Willingness is allowing life to flow.
If you
have ever made bread, you know that there is a difference between kneading and
beating. The dough must be massaged, folded, pressed, but if you are rough in
your handling of it, the bread comes out tough and hard. It doesn’t rise
properly, and all your work is for nothing. It is the same with love—you can’t
beat it into submission, and you cannot regulate the way it is expressed. Love
must be allowed to come to you in its own good time and in its own way. We must
be willing, not willful.
We will never know what
good things may come our way until we stop trying to turn the tide, and simply
allow it to rise and fall according to its own nature. We can trust that life
knows the right direction.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment