Power and Love
October 16th, 2009
It is the responsibility of power to love.
Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.
Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.
This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.
This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.
9 Responses to “Power and Love”
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From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
So then is love “weak power”? Or does power which chooses weakness become the greatest strength of all?
October 16th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Love is not only weakness. There are times, seldom, when love is an expression of power, like when I forcibly remove my son from the road so that he is not struck by a car.
When love must choose to be weak, however, it must truly become weak. It may gain a kind of strength or power through this weakness, but this power is not its purpose. Love is its purpose, and any power that it gains through its weakness may well have to be renounced in turn so that the purpose of love may be accomplished.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
If power is responsible to love, what is the power that demands it?
What is the choice to self-love? Is the withholding of love oppression?
I’m not sure that loving is choosing to be weak. I think there is no power greater than the power that tempers itself, denies itself.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Love is never demanded. It is called, and it is called by love itself. This tautology, in one form or another, lies irremovably at the heart of ethics.
This is why it is not always oppression to withhold love, but it is always oppression to withhold love when love calls to love.
There is certainly power here, when love calls power into weakness, perhaps even the greatest power, but it is a power that is not concerned with its own power, a power that is concerned only with love, a power that is willing always to lay itself aside again, deny itself again, throw itself into weakness again. It may gain a certain power by choosing weakness, but it is continually laying aside this and every power in order that it might love.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
So love is most powerful when it reveals our weakness – simply through the strength of faith and trust?
October 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Love does not reveal our weakness. It causes us to choose weakness over power when love calls us to do so, as it most often does.
To make this choice does require a certain faith and a certain trust, but it is not a faith in either power or weakness themselves, nor a faith in whatever power that weakness might have, nor even a faith in the choice of one over the other. It is a faith only in love itself and in what love calls to us.
October 17th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Your thoughts remind me of ‘The Heart of the World’ by Balthasar.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Margot,
I have never heard of Balthazar, but a quick google search tells me that I might want to read him. Thanks for the recommendation.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:06 am
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
- Niel Gaiman.