Midweek Faith Lift
March 12, 2025
The Power of Will- Choice!
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
March 3, 2025
A man named Dave was feeling lost in life, so he decided to seek wisdom from a famous spiritual guru who lived in a quiet monastery high in the mountains. After a long journey, he finally arrived and was granted an audience. The guru sat peacefully, eyes closed, radiating pure serenity. Dave, on the other hand, was a mess. His phone kept buzzing, his mind was racing with unfinished to-do lists, and car horns from the city still echoed in his head. Desperate for clarity, he blurted out, "Master, how can I hear my intuition? My mind is so noisy, the world is so distracting - I just don’t know how to listen!" The guru smiled and said, "Come, let us meditate together. Close your eyes." Dave did as he was told, eager for enlightenment.
But just as he started to breathe deeply... Ding! His phone vibrated in his pocket with a notification. And in that moment he was taken back to his world of noise, asking himself, "What did my wife mean by 'interesting' in that last text?" And, "I wished I had downloaded that song about tranquility I heard the other day." And "I should have dressed up better to come see this guy." And "It's clear I can't quiet down enough to meditate." Frustrated, he peeked open one eye and saw the guru sitting there, completely unbothered, sitting in the Presence. Exasperated, Dave asked the guru, "How can you possibly ignore all this noise?" The guru opened his eyes, leaned in, and whispered, "Because I put my phone on airplane mode."
Affirmative Prayer for Today: Infinite Presence, quiet my mind and heart as I settle and just breathe in and out. It is when I am still that I am empowered to truly see my choices through spiritual eyes and the Divine energy that empowers me to make the choice becomes clear. Amen.
We now engage a new spiritual Power- the Light of Will, which we first experience in the fully human dimension. If you have raised children, then you had a front row seat to watch the power of two-year old willfulness in action. We call it stubbornness in our human growth process and we stand in our willfulness even as we claim our ignorance as truth, not unlike teenagers! We have the capacity to actually perceive the choices available to us and then actively choose. However, our human brain is wired for survival, so we first react and then later live to regret or justify our choices. Whether it is the choice of a mate, what to eat or whether to eat at all, this impulsive reaction has been a human pattern for eons.
“In the last few decades, research in neuroscience and behavioral economics allowed scientists to gain a much better understanding of how humans make decisions. It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Human intuition' is in reality "pattern recognition."" - Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
We do have the gift of free will, freeing our will which give us the power to choose. So often our choice is reactive and not truly free at all, just fight, flight or freeze as pattern recognition.
The question we sit with in the exercise of free will is to discern that we actually have a choice in every circumstance, and that process takes time. We want to blame God when bad things happen, as in “It must have been God’s will.” In Unity, we call it Divine Order! We take that from the statement by Jesus, who in the Scripture, concedes to God’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane. He has been praying, “Father, take this cup from me,” and continues, as recorded in the gospel of Luke by saying, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Our conclusion in Western Christianity has been that God is in charge of everything and causes everything to happen or not happen and could have stopped this for Jesus. That is much too simplistic an understanding and has resulted in a spiritually immature understanding of the Power of Will.
What is lacking is the understanding and realization that everyone, including the earth itself has free will and there is no Power “in charge” of it all. Tectonic plates slip and earthquakes happen, causing people to die. Jesus died not because God willed it but because the mob in Jerusalem turned on him. In addition, the Romans always crucified Jews during Passover week so that they would not be emboldened to revolt against Roman authority and rule. It was a cruel and inhumane time in human history; it was not God’s will as in God caused it to happen. God’s will for us is good and only good, it can’t be anything else or it is not God.
We have always had the Light of Will, the Spiritual Power of Will to exert our human will in concert with the consciousness of the One Power and One Presence that is Good and only Good. When we free our will, we are able to lift our human will to this higher Consciousness, then all things do become possible in that Divine Energy that is God. God is Consciousness, not a “doer of things.” Divine Order is the out-picturing of God consciousness, not things working out just the way I was praying they would. Which is why we recognize Divine Order in retrospect!
When I align my mind and heart with God Consciousness, and my freed will is able to will God’s will, then all things do begin to work together to serve that higher purpose that is the greater good. I may not even see what that greater good is, which is why we activate the Power of Faith as we also seek Understanding as we exercise our capacity to choose. That is the first step in grasping just how this spiritual Power of Will unfolds. Rev. Linda describes the choosing power of Will this way in Divine Audacity (p, 85) “The choosing power of will is our ability to desire one possibility among infinite possibilities and to select it.” Pause and note that this is a two part, or two step process with a whole lot of ways that it can go off the rails.
The first part is our capacity to desire one possibility among infinite possibilities. Clarity about what we really want, what we really desire is often the first obstacle in making a choice or a decision. It’s like a menu at a restaurant that has pages and pages of options, such that you could be reading it a day later and still be no closer to dinner! I don’t enjoy those places! Too many choices and I am forced to actually look within and ask myself what am I hungry for, and how hungry am I? And, more pointedly, am I even hungry at all? Maybe not!
When we tap into the energy of desire, we are into the energy of the heart, for sure. We often speak of “my heart’s desire” when we really, really want something. How do we know what that is? We have billions of neurons calculating split second probabilities in our nervous system, which seems to drive our impulsive or reactive choosing. If we want to truly cultivate the spiritual power of will, then we are going to need to slow down and really listen to what our heart is saying as well as our head. We may claim we want that kind of quiet and peace, even as we continue to revel in distraction, noise and an endless parade of “what if” scenarios.
We can’t choose our heart’s desire and still keep all our options open! At some point, we select airplane mode as our first choice saying to all the noise, “Peace, Be still!” And maybe we practice that step with small choices, daily choices that we have not EVEN realized were choices! We have a lot of patterns and ruts for sure. Have you ever stayed at someone’s home overnight and experienced how they have breakfast or dinner very differently than you? Our first inclination is to prefer how we do it without pausing to notice what the differences might offer us in the way of seeing our own pattern of choices! And these are the easy choices, right???
The power of choice is to desire one possibility among infinite possibilities and then to select it. When we decide to connect with our true heart’s desire, we often have to spend time in deep listening, in deep quiet. As our guru-seeking friend, Dave, discovered, the first step is within us, not outside of us. Airplane mode is our first choice and something we have known how to do without the aid of a guru. We just have to do it! When things get quiet enough, we can begin to listen to our hearts, not our heads. It is amazing what might be there!
Jesus also had some advice about praying and how to do it. He tells his disciples this in the Gospel of Matthew:
Matthew 6:6-7
6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 7 “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.
The fewer words the better as the opportunity for clarity increases in direct proportion to the time in quiet. Whatever we hear in the quiet of our hearts comes from the silence and comes our connection to the mystery of God, of that which we cannot see with our outer eyes or perceive with our senses. Discontent with what is gives rise to desire and our capacity to be still allows us to focus on what is there and what might be.
"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change." ~Buddha
May we cultivate the clarity that is life changing…
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb