Many authors today have often contrasted the power-to do things for people with power-over 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.
Nevertheless, power-over is not in itself evil. Parents have power-over their children. This benefits the children, if such power is well used. Our political leaders (however they are selected) are granted power-over 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.
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).
Defining Power
The very word “power” includes the meaning of power-over something as well as the power to do something. The sun has gravitational power-over the Earth. The Earth has gravitational power-over our bodies. Inclusive Reality has power-over every partial reality. If we designate Inclusive Reality with a devotional terms like “God” or “Creator,” then it is clear that this Creator has power-over us and over all other creations. God is, therefore, appropriately symbolized as “Almighty.” 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 “God” that we have chosen to trust.
In Christian faith, the Almighty Power of Reality is trusted to be for us humans. That is what it means to say that “God is Love.” The Power we always face is for us. Realistic living is our best case option for the living of our lives. Making up a reality we like better is courting disaster. By “trust” 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 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.
Speaking poetically, we offer up our acts of freedom as prayers to a Power-Over us 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—both 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 “responsibility” 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.
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 us.
Using Our Power-To Serve
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 our power, being our power, and doing 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 “love,” when we are willing to expend our lives for causes other than our own status, pleasure, honor, and foolish attempts at immortality.
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is pictured as saying these last words, “Into Thy Hands I commend my spirit.” This can be interpreted to mean that the realistic person lives their whole life in the following style, “I give back all my gifts to the Giver of all my gifts—my life, my powers, my consciousness, my contributions and hopes for the future.” 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.
Such sainthood is not a stoic resignation or a fatalistic submission, but a practice of freedom—a 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.
Political Power
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.
Political power is power-over 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 us. This citizen origin of social power has the immense advantage that citizens can insist that the power-over 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.
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.
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.
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.
Building political power-over the “maladies” 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 the “wrong” directions of our societies. Rather, we must capture power-over the existing political fabrics on behalf of democracy, feminine liberation, and a long list of other malady corrections including many ecological emergencies—especially the urgent climate crisis being created by the massive burning of fossil fuels.
Building political power-over the powerful forces of reactionary revolt is the work of love. It takes love operating with power-over to create justice. We the democratically committed citizenry must hold accountable every institution of political power-over citizens—insisting 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 to build power-over these forces of injustice toward ever “more perfect” democracies on planet Earth.