This morning's gospel and the homily I heard on it helped turn on some lights for me to see and name a problem I have danced with for most of my life. The passage at issue was Jesus saying, "I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me" (John 8:28).
The homily's emphasis was on how Jesus models for us -- even though He is the incarnate Son of God -- submission to and union with the Father's will, as opposed to Him just doing what was right in his own eyes, the way humans tend to do (Judges 21:25).
The lights that turned on showed me this: For decades, when I have heard exhortations to do "not your own will, but God's," or even when I have exhorted myself, there was a piece missing, and a wrong piece present. I generally heard it this way.
Random Person: You should not choose your way; you should choose God's will.
Me: Ok, that's right.
Random Person: And now I'm going to tell you what God's will is.
Me: Ok, I'm sure you're right
The direction that followed was a flood of all sorts of things: Unmarried women should live at home under their parents' authority until they are married. You should never complain about any injustice done to yourself. Your husband is always going to be right, and even if he isn't, it is your Christian responsibility to be on his side. Woman, you shouldn't pursue serving in the church or community. If you become Catholic you are worthy of rejection. Pleasure is wrong. The teachings of the Church need to be re-written by people who use their imagination in prayer. You need to be on hand whenever I need you to feel better about myself. You must never step out with initiative. All you really need to do is keep going to church on Sunday, and don't become an atheist. It doesn't matter. Here's my dress code and rules of conduct that shows that you really love God. Here are the rules to being a good person.
And on. And on. And on.
Whether these were significant relationships with lots of strings attached or teaching purported to be infallible truth, I have unwittingly collected a swarming brood of voices telling me what God's will is.
The missing piece absent was the agency of my own will to choose a course of action and to have my own relationship with God in prayer. That wrong piece present made it clear I was to be directed by someone who was going to inform me. Lo and behold, whatever I was given to drink tasted an awful lot like the vessel and not the Water of Life.
But what Jesus was talking about was union with the Father. What St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross point me to is union with the Father. What my Carmelite practice trains me toward is union with the Father. What God Himself has been calling me to, woven in between all of these distorted messages that I then believed I needed and sought out, was a partnership of union of wills with Him.
So along my path towards union with God, I have needed to learn how to identify and exercise myself in what I actually want. And I mean, on the level of acknowledging my needs on every level -- food and water, for example! It means giving up the violence I've done to myself by handing over my will to others. It means feeling, as an adult, the very real pain of wanting formation and direction as a young child, but having the Gen-X experience of raising myself.
It now makes sense to me that for years and years, when I have prayed, what God impressed upon me was "to serve me, simply be yourself." When I first heard this, frankly it terrified me because I had no idea how to do it. I didn't know that I had a self, with whom God wished to engage, by which I would excerise self-mastery. To be fully a human being is to bring our wills into union with His, not to crush and destroy our own identity and call that service to God.
This is big. I linked to just a few of the blog posts above where I see I have been grappling with this for decades. Thanks be to God.
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