Volition

One of my children was watching "Sabrina the Teenage witch" this morning - in typical sit-com form it is the sort of show which never strays too far from the center but tries to ask some questions about life - in this show using the medium of magic and a teeange witch (think "Bewtiched" not "Twighlight") as a sort of apparently neutral filter through which to run some fairly complex moral questions.

The episode seemed to be, from my couple of minutes in and out, about some accidental spell which Sabrina, the main character, had cast. This interested me as a concept from the writers, that a spell could be cast accidentally - without any volition. This would be a frightening world - to have magical powers but to know the accidental utterance of an unknown combination of words could plunge everything into chaos.

We, luckily,  do not live in a world where we are subject to our own stray bad magic - although we are perfectly capable of causing our own level of chaos. We are expected, by adulthood, to be responsible for our own actions (in all but a few cases) and part of growing up is to learn where to point our will, where to lay our wants and needs so that we can be the best we can be.

The latin verb which volition comes from is volo - adding an "I" makes it violo which is the verb for doing violence. There is an obvious tale here of the damage too much ego in our choices can make. But here is a bit to make it even more interesting - there are two verbs with the first person volo - the first is "to will" and it goes off into an irregular conjugation - but if you keep it as a regular verb, the meaning is "to fly" volo, volare - in Christ is where we fly, in letting go of self and self-will.

The linguists may push this further in some way or another but I like it as a little package, a window to peek through. What I want is a journey towards what God wants, there will be many imperfections along the way. Sin, not stray magic, will speckle and even crater the way at times, but I am designed both to want God and to fly in the Spirit  -without even any clever foreign language tricks.