Secondly, I would like you to think of the word embracing as the adjective modifying power, because I think we need not just power, but a very special kind of power -- one that is minimized in our society: the power to include, and to accept. I will call this power the power to embrace.
I.
When we think about power, we usually think about the ability to control, resist, attack, to get what we want. This habit of thinking is built into our culture and into our mythology. Prime characteristics of God are omnipotence and omniscience.
We tend to view society hierarchically, in levels of who is over whom. Owners are free to direct workers, until recently men were expected to dominate women, and heterosexuals to have rights over homosexuals. We still place humans over the animal world, and the chain continues all the way down: Plants have it over minerals and so on to the smallest molecule.
More individually speaking, our head is promoted to rule our heart, and our mind is supposed to control our body, and yes, the spirit is supposed to transcend the flesh.
Power in the sense of the ability to rule and control has virtues. The power of acquisition drives our economy (though this is perhaps a mixed virtue), the power of knowledge brings us the satisfaction of understanding, and the technological application of knowledge is responsible for most of our material gains. And of course, power to assert our independence is supremely valuable to each of us.
II.
But this power to rule and control is only half of the picture of our human nature, and it needs its companion, the power to accept and include.
These two views of power -- power over and against, which is founded on a view of separation and the need to control, and the power to include, which grows from a sense that in some deep way we are one -- are not only correlated with our mythology; they are also related to gender differences. These have been carefully documented by Carol Gilligan, professor of human development at Harvard.
Gilligan's working theory is that as men grow up, we learn to disconnect from women and from others, and arrive to experience ourselves living in a Newtonian, separated world. Thus men feel a need to order and to protect. On the other hand, as women grow up, they learn in order to relate and to connect, to dissociate from aspects of themselves, to divorce themselves from part of their own reality, and even the voice that might protest.
These male and female views of power form early in our development. They can be clearly seen in the following interview taken by Gilligan with two 8-year-olds, one named Jeffrey and the other Karen. These children both describe a situation in which they are not sure what is right to do, whether they should clean the cellar or play with friends. I invite you to listen, not to their decision, but to the grounds upon which they make it.
Jeffrey: "When I really want to go to my friends and my mother is cleaning the cellar, I think about my friends, and then I think mother, and then I think about the right thing to do."
"But how do you know it is the right thing to do?" asks Gilligan.
"Because some things go before other things."
Jeffrey, you see, sets up a hierarchical ordering system of principles, in which hierarchical duty outranks affinity for relationship. This is an abstract system for governing behavior. Now let's turn to Karen:
Karen: "I have a lot of friends, and I can't always play with all of them, so everybody's going to have to take a turn, because they're all my friends. But like if someone's all alone, I'll play with them."
Gilligan asks: "What kinds of thing do you think about when you are trying to make that decision?"
"Um, someone all alone, loneliness."
Karen bases her decision on a view of life that has nothing to do with a system of principles or justice, but consists of an embodied network of relationships of which she and her friends are a part.
Both children deal with the issues of exclusion and priority created by choice, but while Jeffrey thinks about what things go first, Karen focuses on who is left out (In a Different Voice, pp. 32-33).
These views are, of course, complementary. We need both. But they are different. One is based upon an awareness of separation where conflict is predisposed, and must be contained by some means of authority. The other is based upon an assumption of basic union, where conflict is resolved on the basis of who needs the most at the moment. The first view, which is predominant in our society, makes it very easy to neglect, segregate or repress certain people, places, animals, races and genders, and why the second in our society is considered subversive, if not communistic.
Gilligan wonders "whether … one way of speaking about human life and relationships which has long been associated with development and with progress can give way to a new thinking that begins with the premise that we live not in separation but in relationship."
III.
What would it mean to live as Americans, with a fundamental sense of relationship? For our families filled with "exes," where our children go one way and our aging parents another? To live according to the phrase of indigenous peoples: "mitakuye oyasin," "all my relatives"?
Whatever it might mean, it would not imply one thing that we might fear, namely, that we will all become permissive and acquiescent. Sometimes there is confusion between inclusion and acceptance, and permissiveness and agreement. To embrace others does not necessarily mean to condone their actions. It means to live with an underlying awareness of each discrete person, molecule, animal's desire for connection, and to align ourselves with this direction, instead of that of fear and protection.
Living with this awareness creates within us a new kind of power. It strengthens our desire also to connect. So we may defend ourselves -- defend our body, our ideas, our property -- but we do so from a fundamental power base that is much wider than ourselves. We understand that at an absolute level, we are all in this together, that we all want the same thing, and that we are more than competing parts.
Buddhist teacher Kack Kornfield reminds us of the difference between inclusion and condoning with this story:
A woman friend who was studying in India was traveling through the dark streets of Calcutta one night on the way to the train station. For many months she had been practicing both Insight Meditation and the complementary practices of loving kindness and compassion. That night she was on her way to a meditation retreat with a friend. Suddenly a man jumped on her rickshaw and tried to pull her off.She and her friend managed to push him away, and still frightened, they continued on to the railway station. When she told her story to her teacher, he expressed his concern and said, "Oh, dear, with all the loving kindness and compassion in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head" (The Path with Heart, p. 224).
As funny as it sounds, there is truth in this anecdote. The difference is not in the action but in the different motivation from which the action stems. This difference is the one we celebrate and would draw nearer to in our lives.
Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others had this power. Martin Luther King cared for the white oppressors as well as for subjugated African-Americans. He saw that where there is a slave and master, we are all suffering because we are all connected.
Gandhi did not kowtow to the government of Great Britain. But he performed his acts of resistance from the motivation that we are a united, not separate humanity. In fact, he drew his power, which he called satyrahaha (truth power), from the awareness of this underlying unity.
IV.
Let's be practical. What might such a power to embrace look like for us today in the political sphere? Here is one illustration. It is from Ireland.
For hundreds of years, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland have been caught up in a battle over who is dominant and who is separate. Before peace negotiations, David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, said: "Northern Ireland is the only place I know where someone will drive 100 miles out of the way just to receive an insult."
How, then, did a peace agreement finally come about in this context? The negotiator of the Ulster peace agreement, George Mitchell, former U.S. Senate majority leader, achieved this success, first of all, by emphasizing their essential connection. He said, "I once told them that the challenge we faced was having to find a way to come up with words that neither side owns."
He reasoned that the mere fact that political leaders of this conflicted society were talking was progress. And he did one thing more: He listened. On one occasion, he let Robert McCartney, head of the militant UK Unionist Party, speak for seven hours uninterrupted.
Can you imagine that -- listening to your spouse, say, for seven hours without interrupting? Not necessarily agreeing, but listening. And not just listening, but hearing, hearing the pain underneath the anger, the fear beneath the bravado, the yearning hidden underneath the lack of trust.
Mitchell nurtured this process for three years. By listening so carefully, he was eventually able to present to all parties a synthesis of their arguments, noting commonalities and reducing to clear options their areas of continuing disagreement. This document, which he created from listening and derived from acceptance, formed the basis of the peace settlement.
This is one example of embracing power. There are many others. If ever there is to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians and in all other conflicted places of the world, it will occur through the power to embrace.
V.
These two kinds of power exist not only as choices within the political sphere; they also exist as options within us. We can strive to divide and conquer ourselves, or we can move to embrace our internal diversity.
We have a society within of individual directions, often pulling against one another. We are an internal alliance of differing political parties. Sometimes there are even wars inside us. There are within me yearnings to do good and temptations to do wrong, pulls towards warmth and aloofness, fun and fear. We are composites of jealousy and generosity, fear and trust, despair and hope.
What all these interior sins and virtues have in common is that they all exist in us together. Although they may be segregated and disclaimed, they are striving in some way -- I know -- for unification. They want to be heard. We want to be whole.
We can grow to appreciate that oppositional parts of ourselves have more in common than they have opposite. Just as George Mitchell sat down with Protestant and Roman Catholic, we can sit down and listen to our own opposites. We can begin internal conflict resolution.
We can begin practices of justice and peace-making today, right now, in our thoughts and in our hearts. We can listen to those parts of us that we dislike, that make us uncomfortable, even that terrorize us, and hear the pain, the hurt, the fear that is underneath.
I know that all of these aspects of ourselves strive to be united. Our Universalist heritage proclaimed that everyone will eventually be saved, and this means every part of us as well.
Once there was a woman in a psychotherapy group I was in, subject to many warring parts. She was in fact what we call a multiple personality. You have heard of such -- "The Three Faces of Eve" -- persons who become so dissociated that one energy within them does not know the others are there. However, if you had met this woman at a party, you would not have known there was anything amiss. As long as certain inner personalities were dominant, she was highly functioning. In fact, she held down a responsible job in the financial district.
My therapist, Armand, was able to speak with her various parts. Each would take their turn. Once she tried to ram her car into a concrete wall and kill herself. Armand had a session with her just after this attempt, and spoke with the personality who was in charge at this time. This suicidal part reported that he thought another part of Mary (as I will call her) was a worthless being, and did not deserve to live, and so he said: "I drove her into a wall."
Armand became angry with this killer inside Mary because he cared for her and did not want her to die. Always before, a sub-personality would retire after a few minutes in the limelight with Armand and allow others to speak up. But after Armand got angry with this one, he would not leave; he would not relinquish control. Armand could not get rid of him.
Armand referred Mary to another therapist. This therapist was successful with Mary. Armand asked what he had done differently. He replied that when he met this sub- personality, he did only one thing: He tried to embrace it with all the love he possibly could. He trusted that at some deep level, this personality was trying to do what he thought at least was best for the total Mary, as complex as this maneuver might seem. Eventually this personality retired, and not only retired from this particular engagement but from Mary's life, and she became whole.
VI.
And so I ask us: Can we learn from our experiences with those parts of us we do not like, that all they need is our love? That is all. They may in instances need to be restrained, but what they need in order to ultimately transform themselves from our enemy to our friend is to be held in our embracing power.
The same thing that is true of our inner despots is true with those despots in the external world. If we really believe in our Universalist heritage, we will see our inner and outer worlds as interwoven and both potentially whole.
If something is not working in your relationships, I invite you to take a look at the kind of power that exists between you. If something is not working in our body politic, I encourage us to do the same. Likewise if something is not working in our economy. And if something is not working in our spiritual life, I also invite us to look at the place of power in the life of our ego.
I invite us, at the deepest level, to open ourselves to truth, and to the whole truth, which is that we are whole and holy. There is nothing in us that is wrong or need be forever alienated -- though if you are a Buddhist, you may allow yourself a few lifetimes. But we do not have to wait a few lifetimes. We can open our hearts right now, embrace ourselves, embrace those we love, and conceivably begin in some small pocket of our mind -- begin to even care for those with whom we have difficulties.
Rilke wrote these words of prayer. I wish to make them my own. And so I offer them to you also as a consideration for our life's direction:
I live my life in growing orbits
which reach out over the world.
Perhaps I cannot achieve the last
but I give myself to it.
May we all. So be it. Blessed be. Amen.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on The Rev. Allen Wells's "Embracing Power" .
If you wish to add your own comments on this sermon, please enter your name, e-mail address, city, state or province, country, and of course your comments into the following form:
