of human existence as something that surrounds me, as something in front of me, beside me, and behind me. There’s a selfishness inherent in the normal human perspective.
The will is also narcissistic. As C. S. Lewis observes, every second thought we have seems to be about the self. If you are not thinking about whether you are cold or hot, or hungry or stuffed, you’re rehearsing the clever thing you’re about to say, or feeling angry about the way some other person didn’t treat you right. Even when you do something really humble and good, the self turns around and admires itself for being humble and good.
The will is also voracious. Your will wants popularity and is never satisfied. The great sins come from excessive worship of self and callousness about others: covetousness, injustice, prejudice, greed, dishonesty, arrogance, and cruelty.
“The moment I begin exercising my will, I find that I have put a fox in charge of the chicken coop,” the late theologian Eugene Peterson wrote. “My will is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble.” If you make yourself, as William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” put it, “master of my fate…captain of my soul,” you are headed for the rocks.
But God doesn’t seem to want the elimination of the will; He seems to want the training and transformation of it. He doesn’t want a lack of will, but a merger between the will of the person and the will of God. Peterson described it this way: When he was a boy he was allowed to work in his father’s butcher shop. He started out sweeping the floors and then graduated to grinding hamburger. Then, when he got older, he was handed a knife. “That knife has a will of its own,” one of the other butchers told him. “Get to know your knife.”
Peterson also found that “a beef carcass has a will of its own—it’s not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone, but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.”
Hackers—bad butchers—tried to impose their will on the beef. The results were ugly and wasteful. But good butchers learned to cut in response to the beef. They worked with a humility before the materials in front of them.
A believer approaches God with a humble reverence and comes, through study and prayer and the spiritual disciplines, to get a feel for the grain of God’s love. She gradually learns to live along the grain of God’s love and not against the grain. It is not a willful attempt to dominate life, nor is it complete surrender and self-annihilation. It is an enthusiastic response. It is participation, the complex participation of a person’s will into God’s larger will.
It is, as Peterson put it, not trying to live in the active voice, which is domination, nor in the passive voice, which is submission, but in the middle voice, which is conversation and response: “We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in an ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice.”
Faith and grace are not about losing agency. They are about strengthening and empowering agency while transforming it. When grace floods in, it gives us better things to desire and more power to desire them. When people talk about dying to self, they are really talking about dying to old desires and coming alive to a new and better set of desires. When I was a boy I loved Kool-Aid, a desire that has no appeal to me now. Now I prefer coffee and wine, desires that had no appeal to me then. When I began my career I really wanted to be famous and get invited into the inner rings. Now I have more fame than I really want, and I’ve seen so much of the inner rings that they have lost their charm.
The love of God and the participation with God’s love represent an overthrow of the ego but