The power of love

From the sublime to the ridiculous

By the time, this morning, that I had penned an answer to an excellent article written on the As-If blog by Jan Lelie, which he wrote as a response to a superb article written by Robert Reich on his eponymous blog, it struck me that it was perhaps worthy of your attention, as are, most certainly, Professor Doctor Reich and (I’m sorry, I don’t know his proper titles) mijneer Lelie.

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Trust and enlightenment

My mother had a friend who had a cine camera and she always fancied one too, so, in the 1970s, she hauled me into a camera shop and we started our cine adventure, just before the invention of the home video camera. I had to read up all about how to frame shots, and splice film and all about projector gates and freeze framing and what not. I even did accompanying soundtracks on a separate cassette tape. She gave me the responsibility of making the camera and the projector work. She just wanted to see the home movies. She empowered me and, because I loved her, I poured my efforts into producing good films. And she thanked me with praise.

So, that’s how governments work, or how they ought to work. We have things we want achieved, which we entrust to government to do and, if they do it as we wish, we will heap praise on them, pay them a wage, but we don’t know the technicalities of producing the results.

Two things make these systems work: trust and enlightenment. There is a bond of trust between the enjoyer of the result (who pays for it) and the party engaged to produce it (who is paid for doing so). And there is enlightenment (in both of them) that determines what a fair wage is and what a good result is. Neither will contravene their conscience to maintain that fair and good are anything but that which is determined by enlightenment. Corruption occurs when trust is upheld absent enlightenment, using perfidious means (mendacity), which can even extend to what I call a Sepp Blatter Moment, in which the party lacking enlightenment switches over to a state in which recognition of the lack of enlightenment transmogrifies into an expectation that there be no enlightenment, such that that party’s expectation is no longer of a state of trust, but of a state of oppression: criminality, rather than honesty, becomes the basic premise.

Go-go dancers and strippers

It’s about ten years since I met somebody who introduced me to the notion that a word is a concept that man foists upon a thing. Astonishingly, he was a go-go dancer and stripper in a gay resort hotel. One can never predict where wisdom lies.

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

It’s part of the prayer that Jesus taught us to say but, as with so many things that Jesus taught us, He didn’t teach us—explicitly—what it means. One of the great merits of a text like the Communist Manifesto is that it tells you unequivocally at the end what it means. There is a call to action: “workers of the world unite, for you have nothing to lose but your chains.” But God is very equivocal. In fact, He is so equivocal that one might almost posit that God’s essence is His equivocality. Because, although kingdom can be taken to mean something other than what it means on Earth, I’m not sure that Mankind has ever truly grasped what power and glory mean.

Glory is what other people think about you. When Ukraine speaks of its glorious heroes, then it bestows glory on the men and women who fight in her cause: Ukraine bestows glory on Ukrainians. But Ukraine cannot bestow glory on Ukraine. Only other nations can do that. So Glory to Ukraine, whilst in the subjunctive, and therefore expressing an aspiration rather than a fact, is a tad disingenuous, for, when said by a Ukrainian, it means May others bestow glory on Ukraine, and that is a great aspiration, but not exactly something you can enforce; whereas the more appropriate sentiment might be May we be deserving of the glory that others might bestow upon us.

God is power. So, why did He not stop that Icelandic town from being eaten up by a volcano? Well, probably because He can’t. Well, why didn’t he stop Hamas from killing 1,200 people on 7 October last year? Well, again, because He can’t. Perhaps He tried by confronting the culprits with the badness of what they intended—assuming that what they intended was bad in God’s view—but they carried on regardless. They put their own interests above those of the victims—we assume. He tried; but did He fail? There’s another possibility: it was meant to be. That’s resigned acquiescence predicated on belief, and some might say it’s lazy. My own view is that God tried to prevent 7 October, and failed. That time. But His failure there He will make good elsewhere. Like a baker adding too much cream of tartar. Just add a bit more flour.

Our problem with God and power is that we define Him and it in terms of superiority and subordination: he who gives orders has power; he who obeys orders is subordinate. But God’s power doesn’t lie in dominant force, it lies in love. And, whilst Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Huey Lewis and the News and Jennifer Rush at one time all had songs entitled The Power of Love in the charts—I think, at the same time—the power of love is not romantic. It’s the power to not allow one’s regard for others to be degraded by insouciance, dislike, rebuffs, hatred, criticism, demotion, insult, harm, hurt, killing. God’s love withstands all of these things and more. Mankind is despicable, and yet God’s love shines through. He always loves us. Such as Anabaptists who will return to save their oppressor from death and, in so doing, consign themselves to death. If we could better understand God’s love as being what His power consists of, then, many more would believe, and many more would abandon their own perverse conception of power and realise that, in love, the ills of the Earth could be resolved at a stroke.