Willpower vs. Symbolic Imagination

Trader Joe's French Vanilla Icecream is fantastically creamy and rich. When it's in the fridge, I eat it, even though it makes me sick. There are many things in my life like TJ's French Vanilla Icecream. I can easily determine to avoid them when I am miserable with the after affects of their poisonous intensity. But once I have recovered and my appetite returns...

I have found willpower to be of very little help in these situations. It divides me into two persons who are at war. One side has to win, and the numbers usually balance out, which, when you live in a Pastry shop/Image machine like America, means that I end up feeling miserable far too often.

Don't waste my time with plans of avoidance, resisting the Devil, accountability, etc. I have tried each approach with varying degrees of success, but each of these plans depends upon will power at a moment when my will is at its weakest.

What about a plan that makes use of the will when it is strong and eager to help? When it is experiencing the sickening consequences of indulgence? You're probably thinking, that's fantasy and you would be nearly correct. I'm thinking about the imagination. The same mental process that advertisers use to titillate the senses to create desire for their deadening products. And of course some form of this has been going on far longer than Madison Ave. 

What if the imagination is actually the field on which the battle was meant to be won. Only in this battle you are of one mind, fighting side by side with yourself and surrounded by God who speaks in image and symbol.

Perhaps the oft referred to power of prayer is found in the symbolic imagination's capacity to access our deepest desire. Rather than abandoning us to our surface capacities like the will, which is meant only to function as a steering wheel of the attention, prayer is meant to feed and activate the symbolic imagination which rules in our depths.

Perhaps, because of the milieu in which we breath, our imaginations have been overlooked and abandoned to the forces of the world. Thus co opted, we are being pushed around by what we tend to think of as our sinful desires. But
maybe those desires are not really our desires, but rather, the desires that slip in through the back door we left open to the powers and principalities that understand the power of the symbolic imagination.

If this is true, then the answer is not to continue fighting against our desires, or even the hidden and powerful forces that propagate the images that create our desires, but instead to work with God to re engage the source of God's power in our lives: the symbolic imagination.

Atrophied as our imaginative prayer muscles seem to be, it will take time and retraining to sanctify that part of our soul. In the mean time we will be left to fight with ourselves in the arena of willpower. This is an immature stage of development, but we can only move from the place where we actually live. The difference now is that we can start to work on a deeper level and we can begin to hope in God rather than our own willpower, which, if you are anything like me, has proven to be pretty mediocre.