On Power and Cosmic Companionship
Photography by Alan Briskin
Sitting in a workshop on inclusion and diversity, author Fredrick Miller commented on his forty years heralding change. “I came to see my belief in fundamental change happening during my lifetime as a form of arrogance.” His comment, almost an aside, demonstrated a different kind of faith. It recalled to mind a tenet of Martin Luther King’s essay on non-violence, “An Experiment in Love.” King’s sixth and final principle declared that “nonviolent resistance … is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future.”
To have faith in a future in which justice prevails requires either a naïve personality or something else. It is the something else that is worth exploring. When we subtract naivety from the equation – neither Miller nor King was naïve about current conditions – we are confronted with an extraordinary formulation that adds power to related ideas of love and justice.
Sadly, we are all too familiar with the tendency of power to distort into forms of domination and over-reach. How can we not see, with a helpless feeling, the rise of authoritarian regimes led by demagogues, dictators, and just plain lunatics? But King understood this from his own experience of racism and the manipulation of legal instruments to reinforce social injustice. “Power without love is reckless and abusive,” he wrote, “and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. “
The question of power should fascinate us not only for its paradoxical qualities but for its ability to express something fundamental about human existence. Power is a necessary ingredient for those who desire to rise from the bog of social conformity and express something essential about themselves. In social contexts, it is the ability to assert or resist actions that impact a sub-group of members within the larger social body. Power, as the theologian Paul Tillich stressed, is about the dynamic self-affirmation of life. There is a drive in each of us to realize our own essential being and to resist forces that would rip it from us or crush us under social, political, or psychological weight. Power need not be a force of domination when we understand it as an evolutionary energy helping us affirm all life.
So it is with great appreciation that Frederick Miller’s words rose up in my memory when considering the dynamics of power. The pursuit of justice, love, and power are not short-term goals or the work of the timid. We are standing for something which unites what has become estranged; love, power, and justice. It is when we recognize these essential forces as one that we become aligned with an even greater power. King ends his essay by noting that the faith he speaks of allows for a future in which no one is dominated and one can even accept suffering without retaliation. “For he knows,” King writes, “that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship.”
Further reading –
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Edited by James M. Washington
Love, Power and Justice by Paul Tillich
Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change by Adam Kahane
The Power of Collective Wisdom by Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, John Ott, Tom Callanan