{"id":228,"date":"2018-06-16T12:57:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T12:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/realisticliving.org\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2018-06-16T12:59:55","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T12:59:55","slug":"june-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realisticliving.org\/blog\/june-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many authors today have often contrasted the power-to<\/em> do things for people with power-over<\/em> other people. Indeed, there is deep contrast between the use of our power in service of others and the use of our power to gain status for our selves or as a means of oppressing others for our own benefit and sense of worth.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, power-over<\/em> is not in itself evil. Parents have power-over<\/em> their children. This benefits the children, if such power is well used. Our political leaders (however they are selected) are granted power-over<\/em> a wide scope of citizen life. Such political power can also be used in service of the citizenry, and such power can be misused very badly.<\/p>\n

Power is an important factor in all social actions. As Paul Tillich spelled out in one of his most creative books, there is no Justice without Power and there is no Justice building Power or empowered Justice without Love (Tillich, Paul; Love, Power, and Justice<\/em>).<\/p>\n

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Defining Power<\/h3>\n

The very word \u201cpower\u201d includes the meaning of power-over<\/em> something as well as the power to do something. The sun has gravitational power-over<\/em> the Earth. The Earth has gravitational power-over<\/em> our bodies. Inclusive Reality has power-over<\/em> every partial reality. If we designate Inclusive Reality with a devotional terms like \u201cGod\u201d or \u201cCreator,\u201d then it is clear that this Creator has power-over<\/em> us and over all other creations. God is, therefore, appropriately symbolized as \u201cAlmighty.\u201d Picturing this Almighty Creator as a character in a story or myth is poetic talk about Inclusive Reality. Such symbolic talk means that this Almighty Power of Inclusive Reality is the \u201cGod\u201d that we have chosen to trust.<\/p>\n

In Christian faith, the Almighty Power of Reality is trusted to be for us<\/em> humans. That is what it means to say that \u201cGod is Love.\u201d The Power we always face is for us<\/em>. Realistic living is our best case option for the living of our lives. Making up a reality we like better is courting disaster. By \u201ctrust\u201d we mean that we are willing to be submissive to being realistic rather than creating our own fabrication of Reality that we like better. Trusting in God means being realistic in our living before the All-Powerful Giver of our past, present, and future. That we humans are given a certain amount of limited power over<\/em> our future does not in the least subtract from the fact that the outcomes of our acts (freely rendered or otherwise) are ultimately out of our hands.<\/p>\n

Speaking poetically, we offer up our acts of freedom as prayers to a Power-Over u<\/em>s that will or will not answer our prayers of freedom in exactly the way we ask. All religious talk of an intimate dialogue with a trusted Inclusive Reality is poetry, but it is meaningful poetry about the essence of realistic living. Realistic living is an obedience to Realty\u2014both the realism of facing our limits and the realism of engaging in our possibilities. Obedience to Reality includes accepting the gift of freedom and using that freedom in a realistic or responsible manner. And \u201cresponsibility\u201d means something deeper than obedience to social law. It may mean creating better laws. It may mean enforcing current laws. It may mean disobeying laws when that is realistically appropriate.<\/p>\n

Such realistic living acknowledges that our freedom is a limited power provided by the Absolute Power over which we have no control other than the limited freedom being granted to us by this Absolute Power-Over<\/em> us.<\/p>\n

Using Our Power-To Serve<\/h3>\n

Our lives are a gift of power to use in many different ways. With or without our consent, our lives are being expended day by day. Conscious living means taking in the power to expend, and then intentionally expending that power. That is, consciousness includes knowing<\/em> our power, being<\/em> our power, and doing<\/em> our power. Like breathing we take in all the powers of our lives, and then we expend the powers we have taken in. Taking in our being born is the first taking in of our lives. Dying is the final expending of our lives. Taking in and expending is living in agreement with the truth of Reality. Our lives are given without our control. And our lives are expended with or without our intentions. Obedience to Reality includes expending our lives. We have named this intentional expending of our lives \u201clove,\u201d when we are willing to expend our lives for causes other than our own status, pleasure, honor, and foolish attempts at immortality.<\/p>\n

In Luke\u2019s Gospel Jesus is pictured as saying these last words, \u201cInto Thy Hands I commend my spirit.\u201d This can be interpreted to mean that the realistic person lives their whole life in the following style, \u201cI give back all my gifts to the Giver of all my gifts\u2014my life, my powers, my consciousness, my contributions and hopes for the future.\u201d This giving back to the Giver of my gifts from the Giver can be seen as the basic essence of agape love, of Christian sainthood, of servant leadership in the use of my powers of life.<\/p>\n

Such sainthood is not a stoic resignation or a fatalistic submission, but a practice of freedom\u2014a creative, intelligent, freely selected life of service to whatever I choose to serve with my gifts in my personal, social, and historical situations of living. We can speak of being called, and we need to notice that we have always chosen our callings.<\/p>\n

Political Power<\/h3>\n

Political power is often sought as an indulgence in pleasure, as a trophy of status, as a hope for unlimited control, as an opportunity to promote bigotry, or even as an excuse for debauchery. But it is equally possible for political power to be sought as a means of service, as a hope for having influence for good to the causes that call us. We see both of these political styles in the history of the world, often in the same person.<\/p>\n

Political power is power-over<\/em> other people and over institutions of governing, systems of economics, and modes of culture. One of the key issues that humans now face is about using well the political power that is granted to the citizenry and about granting adequate power to each and every citizen. Democracy means that political power is granted to representatives by the consent of the governed, rather than bought with money, inherited from a family, rewarded by an oligarchy, or conquered by violence? Democracy is a social process that favors consent of the governed. If democracy is truly practiced, then power is being delegated to power figures by the people who are then governed by that delegated power-over<\/em> us. This citizen origin of social power has the immense advantage that citizens can insist that the power-over<\/em> us is in the hands of servant leaders who serve the people who bestow upon them their political power. When these conditions are adequately met, leaders can be held accountable. If leaders fail to serve us, we replace them. And if it is big money rather than the citizens that is making the leadership choices, then we do not have democracy.<\/p>\n

This democratic ideal is open to becoming a mere veneer on the surface of an undemocratic mode of governing. For example a particular so-called democracy can be limited to white-skinned property owners. Wars have been fought and power movements waged to extend in the U.S. political participation to people of color, women, and others. This means that democracy is always a work in process. Full democracy is always a future state. And the democracy we already have is always a fragile reality that the citizens of that democracy need to continually defend from the forces of tyranny that are constantly working to undo the democratic gains already established.<\/p>\n

The deep reason why a fuller democracy is so threatening to some people, is that democracy means an undoing of at least 5000 years of kingly developments and practices. Similarly, fully honoring women and the feminine aspects of human consciousness is undoing at least 5000 years of patriarchal lordship over our feminine aspects. Democracy and feminism are two entangled revolutions in social practice that will not be completed in the lifetimes of anyone now living.<\/p>\n

Sorting out the good from the tyrannical in our currently existing civilizations is a critical part of the complex social revolution that agape-care is calling upon us to support, invent, create, and finish.<\/p>\n

Building political power-over<\/em> the \u201cmaladies\u201d of our continuing civilizations is a central factor in this planetary revolution. If we love this planet and its humans, we cannot reject embracing power-over<\/em> the \u201cwrong\u201d directions of our societies. Rather, we must capture power-over<\/em> the existing political fabrics on behalf of democracy, feminine liberation, and a long list of other malady corrections including many ecological emergencies\u2014especially the urgent climate crisis being created by the massive burning of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

Building political power-over<\/em> the powerful forces of reactionary revolt is the work of love. It takes love operating with power-over<\/em> to create justice. We the democratically committed citizenry must hold accountable every institution of political power-over<\/em> citizens\u2014insisting upon servant leadership that serves the citizenry. Surely by now, our awakening citizens are fed up with hypocritical political non-servants who care only for their own egos and the wealth that public office can channel. We the citizens of our emerging democracies are being called to use our power-to-serve<\/em> to build power-over<\/em> these forces of injustice toward ever \u201cmore perfect\u201d democracies on planet Earth.<\/p>\n