What Do You Want?
Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Collect for Proper 14
I went to a college that was all about forming a Christian worldview in the life of its students. I learned what I believed and why I believed it. I was also taught about “the universe next door,” or how people of other faiths and none at all would answer life’s biggest questions: Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? Is consciousness real? etc.
You’ve probably heard of the head-heart dichotomy. There are those who live in the realm of ideas, and others with an orientation toward life that is beyond proposition. While I’m grateful that I was gifted an intellectual anchor in the quicksand of pluralism, my education didn’t fully translate into formation. I often assented to creeds but wasn’t captivated by them.
The head-heart distinction is a contemporary phenomenon. The notion of our brains being divorced from our affections is alien to the Bible and the Christian tradition. This is true for today’s collect, too. We pray that we might have “the spirit to think and do always those things that are right,” so that we might “live according to God’s will.” In this prayer, thinking and doing are brought together. We’re not to be brains-on-sticks, but neither is the stress on becoming doers devoid of creeds. The collect’s insistence is on the whole person. The emphasis is on the affections.
But what are our affections? In other words, how do we really know ourselves? A friend of mine once gave me this scenario: You’re alone at a cocktail party, how do you get to know people? If you’re in the US, you might ask, “what do you do?” If you want to make it more interesting and get to know someone a little better you could ask, “what do you think…?” But if you really want to know someone you’d ask, “what do you want?”
What do you want? Freedom, success, security, love? The answer is your affection.
I’d love for my answer to be “to live according to God’s will.” In short, it’s not. But that’s why I’m praying this prayer. Our ask assumes we cannot conjure this on our own. We, who “cannot exist without God,” need the Lord to “enable,” to enliven, to orient our affections toward “the things that are right.”
And the good news is that the living God can do this. What’s more, he will do this! Because the God who makes a way out of no way is at that cocktail party too, and all he wants is you.
(Or, “and he says, ‘I want you.’”)
Grace and Peace,
Ben
