Will?

Will comes up a lot, in Catholic liturgy, devotions, formation. My dad, who converted from a Holiness tradition a couple years after I was born, always said that what he liked best about Catholicism was that it wasn’t about feelings: it was about what you thought, what you decided, what you willed, how you acted. Your inferred status as saint or sinner didn’t depend on how you felt, and there was no pressure to feel a certain way in order to avoid Doing It Wrong, as in his childhood experience. It was intellectual, rather than emotional.

I generally associated “will” with something I was supposed to stomp out in favor of *God’s* will. Especially as a young woman who was constantly pointed at Mary as a role model: you know, obedient, meek and mild, pondered all these things in her heart? (Not really, but that’s what I got growing up.)

“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will” — there was a song in our hymnal with those words, when I was in college. Again, as a young woman, coming of age during Second Wave feminism, it sounded far too much like patriarchal submission to me. It creeped me out, honestly, but it was held up to us as something to which we should aspire.

I remember vividly when I started to wonder about that. It was Holy Thursday, praying before the Altar of Repose where the blessed sacrament was placed after the service.

This is a Holy Thursday practice that I adore, by the way! (heh, see what I did there?) It’s the only time that eucharistic adoration actually makes sense to me. We’ve just liturgically re-enacted Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, and instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper; then, like the disciples, we go out with Jesus to a secluded place, where he asks his best friends to keep watch with him while he prays, and suffers the agony in the garden… and they fall asleep. So we, we keep watch with him on this night, and don’t fall asleep like the disciples did.

Anyway, so I was praying before the blessed sacrament, meditating on Jesus’ experience in the garden, and I had this thought:

….but Jesus had to have a strong will, right? because he was so afraid that he was sweating blood, but he didn’t run away. Having a strong will must be *important*. And how do you get a strong will if you don’t ever *practice*? Your will must be a tool, like a hoe, or a bow and arrow; and if you don’t keep in practice with it, then it won’t do you any good when you really need it.”

It seems to me that “will” has at least three distinct connotations in Catholic Christian thought:

• what we want, which we’re supposed to suppress in favor of what God wants: “Not my will, but thine be done.”
• willpower, which we’re supposed to use to do the good we do not want, and avoid the evil we do want
• volition: the capacity to want, and to choose

I find it very unhelpful that we use the same word for these related but distinct concepts!

I’d love to hear from my readers about your religious associations with “will”, especially from men who were raised Catholic, and non-Catholic Christians.