When the Will Runs Wild

Many mornings, I sit in prayer across from a Winslow Homer print that I have loved for many years.  You probably know it — two men idle in a canoe on a cloudy day, nestled in the shallows of a river.  The man in the bow is looking out into the low meadow growth beyond; his companion trails an oar and follows his companion’s eye.  It is a moment of pure ease and unearned grace to which Homer gave the title, “The Blue Boat.”

We have all had such perfect moments.  Birds sing overhead, the sun warms us.  We have nowhere particular to go.  In such a state, we can bask in the gentle gifts with which nature delights.  In such moments, we can let go of all that muddies and besets our consciousness, almost in spite of ourselves — the mental chatter, worries, the unexamined (because so very habitual) attitudes.

I am keenly aware these days of how rare such graced moments can be.  I am aware, most specifically, of the ways in which the fears and wounds of human beings in aggregate — in factions and political cohorts and mobs — can become infected by the horrifying opposites of grace:  by the individual will run wild, such that it goes into overdrive and becomes a monstrous and destructive thing.

I see this in myself, and I have come to believe that breaking it down to the individual level is necessary if we are to understand — and, begin to break — the power and violence that inheres in this tendency in our thinking.  The story that Christians tell this week, of the mob’s betrayal of Jesus for a common criminal in the madness of political will run wild, is only too close, too pertinent, to our times today.

Here goes:  It is easy for me to rise from meditating on the two men in the blue boat and turn to my to-do list.  Isn’t this was purposeful people do?

But the list grows, almost of its own mysterious volition.  From a state of calm and centeredness, I must now shift into a “willed” inner posture in order to get everything accomplished.  Attunement slips.  I become more easily hooked by distractions, derailed by interruptions.  And before I know it, I am focused far less on my higher purposes and goals, on what I am doing for others or to express my highest aims, and am spending far more mental energy either defending my mental space, or hijacked by some minor pre-occupation that my diminished state of equipoise has allowed to run roughshod over my inner witness.

This can range from the trivial (as in, should I buy those hot pink slacks in the Talbot’s catalog?), to the negative and dangerous (obsessing about mass bombers in distant states or the undisciplined sexual lives of elected officials).

We all know where this goes.  The will has become inoculated from grace by its own unchecked operations.  This is the seedbed of a life of trivia, or, equally, a life vulnerable to political hysteria.  They aren’t that far apart.  Both are dependent on the disabled and de-centered will, to create a state of consciousness uncoupled from the healing and illuminating power of grace.

Where are you this morning, as we face into the Christian Holy Week, and Jewish Passover? And where will you be tonight?  What will you allow to take you over in the course of the day?   How will you remain close to what truly matters in what you attend to, respond to, and what you turn away from?

Yesterday, thousands of young people marched in our cities protesting exactly the madness and machinations of the will run wild — the defense of assault weapons as a right of American citizenship.

The mob power of the will is out there, and it is inside each of us.

My prayer for us today is that we set our sights on persons and icons and stories, in the days ahead, that we examine our own vulnerabilities to the disabled will, and leave ourselves open to the transforming power of grace.