Willing and Willfulness

Appetites are born of lack. Natural appetites give notice that biological needs are present and require fulfilment. This is a daily, hourly, even moment by moment experience in our lives. The need to fill these biological appetites motivates biological life to seek the resources to satiate the pressing needs for biological sustainability. There is nothing very revelatory in this natural reality.

But the reality of lack is not confined to biological needs. As social creatures with self-awareness, there are aspects of our existence as social beings that are not easily fulfilled because we no longer have the instinctual guide to aid us in knowing what it is we need to fulfill these non-biological needs and desires.

The nature of creaturehood is the experience of lack. We need others in order to become a self. We need love, affirmation, a sense of belonging, etc. We cannot manufacture – self-create – these things in ourselves because we are constitutionally relational. The problem we face is the fact that every one of us depends upon an ‘other’ who also lacks. In one sense, we are like school children thrown into a courtyard of other children who are to be our teachers, our guides to filling the empty spaces of our selfhood. The blind leading the blind.

A fact of nature is the limitation of resources. Because of this, animals must seek and acquire resources that, due to their limitation, easily leads to competition. There results a habituation and orientation to conflict, a grasping of resources from the hands of others who also mimic this grasping. Battles ensue among and between different species. In like manner humans, in their struggle for the resources needed to bring about a sense of selfhood and wellbeing utilize the canalized compunction of grasping for the perceived resources that will bring about a sustainable self. The will is formed in this mold of grasping, what Gerald May calls willfulness – the imposition of one’s will onto the world. It is a demand that the world give to the self what the self believes will fill the felt lack. May writes in Will and Spirit,

…willfulness is the setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence. More simply, willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment. Willfulness is saying no, or perhaps more commonly, “Yes, but…”

Theologically, it is this willfulness that correlates to the Christian doctrine of original sin. The Edenic myth narrates this grasping for divinity in order to achieve a form of self-creation, forming a willfulness bound to frustration as humans are incapable of self-sustainability due to the lack of resources from their finite reality. Only the infinite contains such resources. But in contradistinction to the formation of human willfulness, a congenital compunction to grasp for desired resources, the infinite divine who is the source of all creation, is not structured in a willful grasping, a conflictual ontology that arises from lack. Rather, the infinite divine is constitutively loving, self-giving, gracious, and willing. This is the revelation of the God-man, whose very being is constitutionally self-giving, kenotic, having no need to act in a grasping, conflictual manner.

It is to this new ontology, this new humanity, that we are called into, a grace filled call that has no complicity with willfulness. We are free to accept a new way of being in the world, with each other, and we are free to reject it. Rejection is complicity with conflict, violence, because the old ontology, the old wineskin, is structured and grounded in the illusion of self-creation, in grasping, in willfulness, in conflict, in violence. Salvation is a call to an ontology of willingness, an openness to receive graciously, with gratitude.

It is our choice – to be willful, or to be willing.