No Longer Creatures of Habit
The un-education of our wills
Praise be to God who answers the questions and prayers we can’t quite articulate and struggle to form. He knows our hearts and sees the thoughts forming in our minds like clouds constantly coalescing and rearranging themselves until they reach critical mass.
Throughout our life we use our will at our discretion. Like a line of credit, we spend it freely on ourselves—and sometimes on others—to satisfy our wants and desires.
Repetition becomes habit
Our wills commit us to action or non-action. Over time, we tend to will or choose the same things over and over until they become habits.
We eat the same foods, watch the same TV programs, hang out with the same type people, and satisfy our various appetites in life the same way. Through repetition, we reinforce these acts of will to the point of forming a life style, a pattern or mode of thinking and acting.
In short, we tend to become creatures of habit.
Some habits we call virtues and some (usually too many) we call vices. Vices left unchecked can become addictions. “Virtues” done for the sake of being seen or known as virtuous are dead works. Ideally our virtuous acts are done consciously out of love for God and neighbor, bringing us closer to the Originator of all good.
Born to be free
God endowed each soul with a free will. Without it our lives would have no merit.
He gave us a free will to choose deliberately in all our thinking and acting. He gave it to us to be fresh, bright and alive—fully present to Him and one another. He gave it to us so we could always be living and working in the here-and-now of his Divine Will.
When our first parents chose to strike out on their own—apart from our Creator—man lost that original freedom he enjoyed as a result of always living in God’s will.
While we today have the tremendous handicap of not beginning our lives in the Divine Will—in a constant communion with God—we nevertheless still have the option to freely exercise our wills.
But the story of Adam and Eve repeats itself with each of us, as we take matters into our own hands without reference to God’s Divine Design, Plan and Will.
The more we use our will in service of self-interests, the more we lose our original agility and freedom. Serving self is a dead-end street. Our selfish acts quickly come to nothing. Whereas acts done in the Divine Will become part of the expansiveness of God’s Eternal Act, which is not bound by any human limitation or by time and space.
If we want to learn to live in the all-creative, eternal act of God’s will, we as creatures of habit must un-educate ourselves in the ways of our wills. That is, we must become aware of all those habits and patterns of choice that form our personal world and daily life. And then challenge each one in the light of God’s Will.
“Not Now.”
Anyone who has ever overcome a bad habit, like cigarette smoking, has probably learned the art and science of “not now.” It’s a simple technique of repeatedly postponing the satisfaction of an urge. You’re not saying you won’t ever do it again—just not now.
Eventually, all your “not nows” become a new healthy habit. Continually ignored, the old annoying urge and habit dies off.
Likewise, if we don’t feed that self-serving inclination of our will, it loses its power to enslave us in all the miseries, weaknesses, passions and broken relationships of our lives—and we regain freedom to live in the order, strength, harmony and peace of God’s will.
Why all the dysfunction?
If you look carefully at the problems you face on a daily basis, you will find the antagonist or provocateur behind them all is someone insisting on his or her own way or interests. “We’re going to do it my way.” Or, “I’m going to do what I want to do.” That’s self-will making its entrance. And we all turn it on.
This impulsive, self-serving manner that wreaks havoc comes to us so naturally, so second nature that we have to wonder or at least consider if it’s linked to the original fall from God’s grace. It is.
Every day, hundreds of times a day, I face a fundamental choice: living by my will or living in God’s will.
You might ask what’s the point of having my own will if it’s all about God’s?
One quick but incomplete answer for now. Consider that since God created you, He knows best what will make you happy in the long run and what will give you joy and purpose in the deepest sense right here and now. All that is to be found in his will. Your will is needed to second His and satisfy the deepest longings of your soul.
Putting “not now” into practice
So, in our conversations with others, for example, when we are so quickly inclined to say something negative or insist on our own way or point of view, we can instead say to ourselves, “not now.”
Or, instead of communicating something in a negative or unloving tone, we can say “not now, not this way.”
We can do the same with every bad habit or urge in our lives. Little by little, we can vanquish them by saying: “Not now, not my will, but God’s will be done.” And one day, when we’ve reached that full level of generosity, we’ll be able to say, “Not now, not ever.”
And when it comes to good habits or virtues, we can say “not out of habit or without thinking do I enter into this ‘good’ work. Rather, I do it in the perfect will of God so He may watch over it and bring it to its divine conclusion.”
This approach prevents pride and vain glory, and allows God to divinize our acts so that they echo for all eternity instead of falling off like a musical tone produced in a vacuum that dies as soon as it’s created. Acts done in our own will are sealed off in a vacuum. They do not resonate as God intended them to in the vault and heaven of His Will.
Not only that, but God takes the act done in His Will and weaves it into an eternal symphony of his that is ever new.