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For most of my adult life I wrestled with the concepts of God’s will, Divine will, and free will. Is it God’s will that people commit atrocities? Is it God’s will behind so-called “just” or even “holy” wars? Is it God’s will that nature be damaged and desecrated by human activities and industries?
As a kid, I was raised within a heavy-handed, fear-based version of Christianity that left me more confused than comforted. I’d ask adults, “OK, if God is omnipotent, all love, all good, all powerful, how can so much bad stuff happen?” All I was told was that we humans cannot know the ways of God and we just needed to follow God’s will.
I have a vivid memory from when I was nine or ten years old. My mom and I had gone to Sunday service at the tiny, all-white, steepled church way out in the country near where we lived. You entered the building through double doors in the back and walked into a rectangular room and down an aisle between about a dozen red velvet covered pews on either side. On the wall in front, behind the little stage and baptism tank, was a much larger-than-life size painting of a bleeding, thorn-crowned Jesus, nailed to a cross. I didn’t like looking at it.
This particular Sunday Mom and I were seated next to one another on a red velvet pew and the pastor was on fire preaching something I’m pretty sure was from Revelation. He was worked up, animated, spit flying, Adam’s apple jumping up and down, strings of gray hair falling into his face to be pushed back up onto his head.
At one point he said that one of the benefits to those who had followed God’s will and were chosen ones was that they would get to watch from Heaven as the others “gnashed their teeth in hell for eternity.” I looked up at my mom and whispered urgently, “Mom, mom, if that’s Heaven I don’t want to go!”
That was one of many events and experiences that sent me on an odyssey of rethinking early programming including what I believed about God/Source/Spirit and the concepts of Divine will and free will. The Odyssey has transformed my life and led to Unity and New Thought.
Unity is a New Thought, trans-denominational and trans-faith movement that’s based in spiritual Principle and has a body of core teachings about those Principles. One set of those teachings is around 12 Spiritual Powers or faculties that we can develop and hone to live more empowered lives.
"We have found that there are twelve centers or basic centers of consciousness, which are the result of the soul’s use of the God qualities of Life and Love, Wisdom and Power, and Substance."
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Myrtle Fillmore
Faith, Love, Imagination, and Release are included in the spiritual powers, as is will. Of all the 12 Powers Will may be the trickiest to gain a clear understanding and mastery of. We don’t talk about God’s wisdom and human wisdom, or God’s faith and human faith, but we do contemplate the will of God and human will.
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It is useful to consider the difference between Divine Will and will as one of the 12 spiritual powers
"Divine Will is generic, amorphous, nonspecific, and is for everyone. We are all partaking of and participating in this generic Divine Will; There is no separation from it."
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Paul Hasselbeck: Heart-Centered Metaphysics
Will as one of the 12 Powers is different from the principle of Divine will. The Fillmores taught that will is the executive power of our mind; It’s what gets things done.
Another angle on will is the philosophical concept of the Will of Nature, which refers to the natural and physical laws and processes that govern the universe. I believe all Creation, all nature – human and non-human – is sacred and divine and Divine will is in the back of all of it. And, unlike what the prevailing Western consumerist culture tells us, humans are a part of, not apart from, all the rest of nature.
The greatest urge of God / Source / Creator is to extend Creation, to express more and more of Itself. We humans, each one of us, are expressions of that Creator and therefore our unique ideas and creations can be extensions of this God / Source / Creator’s rolling extension.
Will, sort of like prayer, is directly guided by our thoughts and therefore we are using this power to carry out thoughts and actions every single moment of every day, for good or for ill results. When we are in human-only consciousness, we are often exerting willfulness rather than aligning with Divine Will and our creations often turn out to be mis-creations or messes in our lives and our world.
Willfulness is not the spiritualized power of will. Willfulness is will under the influence of ego. It is driven by a belief in separation and lack of understanding of what we truly are, and it nearly always makes messes. Damage done by misguided human willfulness is evident in the wars, wide-scale destruction of species and ecosystems, destabilization of Earth’s climate, and persistent poverty taking place in the world right now.
The antidote to destructive willfulness is to spiritualize our will by shaping it with another of 12 spiritual powers – Wisdom.
The antidote to destructive willfulness is to spiritualize our will by shaping it with another of 12 spiritual powers – Wisdom. Wisdom combined with will is how we learn to develop our ability to exercise dominion over ourselves and our world.
"When the will of man adheres to wisdom faithfully, it carries out in its work the plans that are idealized in wisdom, it creates in man a consciousness of harmony and peace. "
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Charles Filmore :Keep a True Lent
As noted above, I struggled with the concept of God’s will and free will because part of the religious teaching of my youth was that one had to sacrifice a lot to please God and follow God’s will. I now realize that is upside-down thinking. God / Source / Creator is all about creating, expressing, and extending. It would not thwart itself. And, since we are each expression or extension of that God/Source/Creator, it would not thwart us either. Rather we thwart ourselves and we sacrifice our own peace and power all the time.
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A Course in Miracles teaches that when we are unaware of what we truly are when we are at the level of human littleness consciousness, we have actually imprisoned our true, free will. When we are in a consciousness of Oneness, of remembering our connection to God/Source/Creator our will and Divine will are one. God’s will is actually pulling with us!
I do not believe it is God’s will that bad things happen in this world. I do not believe it is Divine will that humans desecrate and destroy nature and our fellow species.
At the level of true, free, and un-imprisoned, I don’t believe these dark aspects are human will either. Fortunately, it is within our power to release those bonds, reclaim our agency, and execute Will in ways that can transform our lives and our world.
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*Footnote:
Letter written to Helen Glass. July 19, 1928, as noted in The Unity Movement: It’s Evolution and Spiritual Teachings, by Neal Vahle.