What do we ordinary people do when the “bad guys” have the power? We can’t overthrow them. We must undermine them.
Those with wealth and organization can use the courts and political system to stop any abuse of power, and must if our communities are going to have stability and the social support that so many of us need in order to raise our children well.
The rest of us have only our voice and our relationships to address the abuse of power and that can work in ways we seldom imagine when we use them together. Idle No More and water protectors are inspirations to us who need to hear truth spoken to power. Thank you to everyone who walks and prays with them. These are movements capable of crossing cultural, religious, political and racial divides. Our world needs them and the visionary people who have had enough of being ignored and exploited. When we have nothing to lose we are the most powerful people possible, we can speak and act in freedom, for justice.
Movements such as these that speak up for honesty, decency, justice, compassion, respect for the earth, for all our relations, and mutual decision making when the decisions will affect more than the person making the decision, are in my opinion all fundamentally spiritual movements because they are fired up by a passion for life. Spirituality does have a very practical down-to-earth side, otherwise it is simply dreaming escapism. We read the stories of creation in the Bible, (there are many of them) and are told that “God saw that it was good.” The kind of Christianity that declares the physical world to be an evil thing has fallen into the heresy (from a Christian point of view) of the Gnostic beliefs which held that the physical world was created by a demiurge and not by God.
Down-to-earth spirituality also develops a political side to it, which can be risky because it can lead us into the very kinds of organizations and actions that may entangle us in the all-consuming accumulation of power. More about that later. But we do need to be very aware that any action that speaks up for mutually supportive communities does have a political side to it. Politics is the process by which people come to agreement about how to live together. We usually think of it in terms of political parties but that is only one aspect of this process and it has become, in our communities, the focus of power struggles. Spirituality needs to address those power struggles without becoming part of them.
The starting point for using our voices, for those who choose to use it, is the example of Jesus who showed us how to live with kindness, compassion, mercy and the unity of life in which we dwell in God and God dwells in us. As we experience this way of living we turn more to the Holy Spirit for strength and guidance. Over time we develop more authenticity, honesty and solidarity with those who are also committed to life as we know it through the example of Jesus and who believe it to be how God wants us to live.
When we discover how God changes our daily lives we expand our vision of our relationships with all life around us and with God. Then we are able to experience a reconciliation with our Maker and begin to mingle our lives with Jesus’ life. We live in Jesus. Jesus lives in us. (John 14:20) and since Jesus and our Creator are one, perfectly united, we too live in God and God lives in us. So we move from the outside and following the rules for living, to knowing we live within the eternal life of God. This changes the world.
It changes our relationship to the people who have the power (political, economic, military). They still affect our lives of course but it’s only external power. They have no power over our thoughts, heart, spirit or relationships. Within ourselves we are free of them. This is the only true freedom.
It’s tempting to want to use their power against them. Jesus faced that temptation after he was baptized when he spent 40 days and nights in the wilderness confronting the temptations of selling out for power by using the methods of political and economic power to gain good results (Matthew 4:1-11). He refused to do that and if we try to do it, those “bad guys,” those who abuse power, win. If “we” are successful and overthrow “them” they win because to do that we have to use power as they do and that makes us the same as them. So like Jesus we say, “Away from me Satan.”
We can’t overthrow them. We must not overthrow them. We can and we must undermine them by building relationships that shape communities that are caring, respectful, honouring the dignity of all people and nurturing life. This is spiritual work we can all do. Thanks be to God.
Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King is the retired minister of the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson.
