Because we reflexively think of power as “power over” power can be seen as a negative for Unitarian Universalists. But power in itself is neutral. Dr. King said, “power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power.” Accruing power to make lives better places us on the side of the divine.
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Ten years ago, in 2013, I served a term on the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California.
This is the Statewide organization that organizes Unitarian Universalists from congregations around our state to work collectively on social justice issues.
Just after I came on to the Board, Rev. Lindi Ramsden, who had been the founding Executive Director of the organization ten years earlier, announced that she would be resigning.
So that announcement changed the focus of the Board’s work throughout my term. First of all, we had to search for a new Executive Director. But we also seized the opportunity to rethink and possibly re-invent, the organization.
There’s a crucial step that happens in the life of an organization when the founder moves on. How does an organization sustain itself beyond the original energy and vision of the founder? What would we be, without her at the center? What was the organization for, who were our constituents, what were our values, where should we go from here?
We engaged a consulting firm to lead an appreciative inquiry process throughout the state to help us do this work. And we realized two things right away, one small, one big.
A lot of Unitarian Universalists in California, referred to the UULM, as our “lobbying” organization in Sacramento. They thought of the mission of the UULM as influencing the votes of lawmakers in the California legislature. The UULM did that, in annual lobbying days, but we also worked on organizing and activism, and education and many other initiatives, having nothing to do with legislators.
One of the problems was that the word “legislative” was right there in our name. So the small thing we did right away was to change the name of the organization to the Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry.
The big thing we did, though, was to refocus the target of the organization’s work. In the ten years between Lindi’s founding of the UULM, and the year that I came on to the Board, the center of meaningful political activity in California had shifted away from the state level, up to the national level and down to the local level.
The big issues for UUs when the UULM was founded in the year 2003, were the push for marriage equality, work for universal healthcare, immigration reform, and addressing climate change.
California was enmeshed in those issues, statewide, in 2003. But by 2013, the situation had changed.
By 2013, California had briefly legalized same-sex marriage, in 2008, and then banned it again with Prop 8. The issue was dead in California. But marriage equality was now being discussed at the Federal level, with cases moving toward a Supreme Court decision that would bring marriage equality nationwide in 2015.
By 2013, Congress had passed the Affordable Healthcare Act, “Obamacare” which was as close as the United States was likely to come to universal healthcare, while the idea of California ever adopting a state-based single payer system was looking increasingly unlikely.
Immigration had always been a Federal issue, of course. But the big news in immigration in 2013 was Obama creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, at the Federal Level protecting “the Dreamers,” from deportation.
There was certainly additional work California could do to address climate change in our state, but the really impactful work on climate policy had to take place Federally, or even internationally.
And furthermore, the character of California politics had changed fundamentally between 2003 and 2013. In 2003, our Governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2003, we had significant minorities of Republicans in the State Legislature who could block bills and hold up budgets. There used to be meaningful work we could do to attempt to persuade a few more legislators to vote our way, or to get the governor to sign a controversial bill we wanted to pass. But by 2013 the democrats held nearly every statewide office and super-majorities in both state houses that made any Republican opposition irrelevant.
That made state politics rather dull. So, no surprise, UUs statewide began to lose interest in the UUJM and shifted their money and time to organizations that could have a bigger impact, either on the Federal level, or, increasingly, to organizations doing important work at the local level.
Housing availability and homeless issues are local issues. Rising crime and policing reform are local issues. Local governments can create a living wage, or create parks, or change zoning laws, or mandate school curricula. Local issues make real differences in the lives of our neighbors.
So the big change that the UULM Board worked on, during the term I was there, was to reposition the Unitarian Universalist justice work in California from the state level down to the local level. We imagined that the role of the UULM, now called the UUJM, would no longer be about statewide campaigns, but rather supporting local clusters of congregations to do local work, on their own issues, in their own neighborhoods. The UUJM could provide expertise, and training, and materials, and mailing lists. We could gather folks for a weekend program, develop strategies, raise energy and then send them off to do local work. That seemed valuable.
I responded to this new vision of what the UUJM could be by trying to organize the social justice minded folks in the UU congregations in LA County to create a local justice organization. We called ourselves Justice-LA. We convened a few organizing meetings. There are about a dozen UU congregations in LA County between Long Beach and Santa Clarita, and from Santa Monica and Canoga Park in the west to Pasadena in the east. We applied for a grant from the PSWD and raised enough money to hire a quarter-time staff person to lead us.
But Justice-LA never really took off. The staff person we hired collected his salary for a year until the money ran out. Then the group disbanded. Nor was the UUJM strategy of organizing locally successful elsewhere in the state.
So I tell this story because it’s background for one other story I want to tell that illustrates the point I want to make for my sermon today.
There were a lot of reasons that the UUJM was highly effective under Lindi Ramsden’s leadership and then less so after she left, but one of the reasons, was that Lindi Ramsden understood power in a way, I found out, that other Unitarian Universalists did not.
Here’s that story.
When I was working to bring all of the social justice minded UUs in the LA County congregations together, one thing we did was arrange a training day on how to organize for collective action.
We gathered at the First Unitarian Church Los Angeles, where I was the minister at the time. And we had arranged for a training from an organization called LA Voice, which works to organize faith-based organizations for political action.
At the beginning of our day together, the trainer from LA Voice introduced the idea of power. And she asked for a show of hands.
“How many of you,” she asked these social-justice minded UUs from congregations around LA County, “when I say the word “power” have a negative response?”
Out of the whole room every hand went up but two. Every person in the room had a negative response to the word power, except for me, and one other person. I was shocked.
Then the trainer asked, “How many have a positive response to power?” The other person raised her hand tentatively and with a self-deprecating giggle as though she were admitting something shameful. But I shot my hand up as quickly, as high, and as proudly as I could.
I was dumbfounded by this scene.
Hadn’t we gathered in that room specifically because we wanted to learn how to organize and maximize our power? Wasn’t claiming and increasing power the entire point of the training? That’s what I wanted to do. What did the other people think we were doing? What did we imagine we would ever do if we didn’t have power, develop our power, use our power?
Obviously they understood power very differently than I did.
I think what had happened to the people in that room was that over years of experience working for social change, we had become so accustomed to framing our justice work as “speaking truth to power” that we forgot we are also powerful. We are powerful in the streets. We are powerful in the city council chamber. We are powerful when we sit across the desk from a legislator and make our case. We are powerful when we write letters, and speak out, and raise money.
But somehow, we don’t call that power. Because we have learned to only imagine power as negative: the negative power to crush, to bully, to hold down, to oppress. That’s what power is. The power to force the unwilling, or the power to withhold from the needy. Of course, we don’t want that power. We positioned ourselves on the side of love, loving those suffering under power, loving the victims of power, loving those marginalized by power. Loving the ones who we had the truth but not the power.
But what are we doing to those folks if we tell them they have no power? And what can we do for those folks if we reject our own power? If power is only negative, and belongs only to the oppressors, the opposition, the powerful people and organizations and systems we are there to oppose, and take back, and dismantle, then how will we ever accomplish our work of social change? How will the world ever move in the direction we want it to go? How will we ever achieve our purpose?
The UULM had been extraordinarily successful when Lindi Ramsden helped us realize our collective power as Unitarian Universalists and put our power to good use. When we chose to reject our power it became hard to imagine how a UU organization could accomplish anything, and so, of course, people lost interest and the organization failed.
Martin Luther King Jr. analyzed the problem perfectly when he wrote this in his autobiography:
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
Another way to phrase that analysis is that power apart from love is “power over.” But love partnered with power is “power with.”
Power over is negative power. Call this coercive power. We don’t want that. The power to push and force and bully. This is selfish power that cares only for the needs of the powerful, and never mind the costs to the people that get trampled beneath.
Power with, though, is positive power. Call this persuasive power. Power that seeks to understand and then to persuade and convince. The loving power that softens hard hearts. The power of persuasive power is the power of love: sympathy and caring. The power of listening and feeling into. This is power that seeks to care for all concerned on both sides of the issue, not to cast the opposition as enemies or evil, but as members of a broad community who have their own perspectives and needs, who are worthy of respect, who can benefit from hearing our truth, but who have something to teach us, too. Power allied to love seeks to bring along, not abandon, to join to the cause, not defeat.
Dr. King writes, “Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.”
Love and justice have demands. Creating and sustaining a world of love and justice requires change. We can only make a change if we have power and utilize it. Power is necessary to achieve purpose.
We’ve been talking about several ways that people find meaning in their lives. Power, or the ability to achieve purpose, is one of those possible areas of meaning-making, for some people.
The spiritual question of meaning is the question, “why does it matter?” And for some folks, the answer is: “My life matters because I can make a difference in the world. I can help. I can change things. I have made a difference. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. Other folks have better lives because of what I’ve been able to do.” That’s good. If we can say, “The world is a better place than it would have been had I not done the work I do” that’s meaningful.
Like the other ultimates I’ve named during this series of sermons on meaning in life, power, for some, is meaningful in itself, self-justifying, not because power serves some larger purpose, but because the ability to achieve purpose is an ultimate good unto itself.
Power itself, is the meaning-maker. Power put at the service of whatever cause happened to be most important in the time and the place at hand. My personal power. My power to listen to fears, to hold on in conflict, to be patient as hearts and minds slowly turn to new possibilities. The power of faith within. The power of hope, love, and joy, within. My contribution to the ongoing co-creation of the universe in the direction of the divine goals of love, peace, and justice.
Nor does power need to be grand to be meaningful. Think of the lovely poem of Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Where would that robin be if we deny our power? We are right to reject coercive power, but to deny we have power at all means abandoning the fainting robins of the world who are depending on us.
Remember as we learn to claim and celebrate our power, that we seek power with, not power over. Learn to distinguish the two. Coercive power creates resentment, enemies and feuds. That doesn’t end well. Persuasive power creates partners. We want honest, sympathetic power, not deceptive, manipulative power. No one wants to be bullied or forced or tricked. Power with means listening to what the robin actually wants before picking it up! Power with means helping the robin achieve its purpose not insisting you know what’s best for it.
Persuasive power respects community and builds community. Persuasive power makes its case and then works to move others toward its position. Persuasive power respects that people have freedom and may choose another way. If the person you hope to persuade isn’t immediately convinced of the rightness of your position that shouldn’t cause you to cast them into the outer darkness of the unlovable and irredeemable (there are none like that for Universalists), but only to shift them in your mind into the category of the not yet persuaded.
Or maybe, we should be so humble to admit, it is us that needs persuading. Power allied to love keeps our hearts so open that we connect to the possibility that we may be wrong, or that our goal is correct but our strategy is wrong, or that our goal and strategy are right but we’re moving too fast for the community and we need to give other folks the chance to catch up to our vision.
It’s true, coercive power is often successful in getting its way in the short term. That makes power over tempting to some. But power without love pushes people away and so, it will ultimately fail in a world where every particle of existence is forever connected in an interdependent web. The ones we push away, don’t go away. Eventually, all must be part of the world we seek.
Persuasive power brings along and brings in. Power that allies with love harnesses the only power that can lead to love.