March, 1999

The Rose Bush and the Thorn

Love and power.

Love and power are probably the two most important words in human experience. We live surrounded by them, one way or another. Too often we are surrounded by people who do not love, and by people who use power.

The Franciscan Order likes to call itself the “seraphic” order. The word “seraph” comes from a Hebrew word meaning “burning,” and the early Franciscan theologians, inspired partly by Joachim of Fiore and partly by polemic against the Dominicans, cast themselves as the Order of burning love, as opposed to the Order of cold truth (the Dominicans, who emphasized preaching and truth). That meant that love was “our thing.” The only problem was that nobody I knew ever said clearly what love is. Like too many other important realities in life, you were supposed to just know what it is. That wasn’t good enough for me. I need some kind of workable definition if I am going to use a word in my own thinking.

Power is a different issue. I have always been fascinated by the use of power in political affairs. After fourteen years in a sheltered seminary environment, I was thrown into the middle of a summer school course taught by Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist whose research had been instrumental in supporting the 1954 Supreme Court Brown decision outlawing school segregation. The title of the course was “Social Power.” We spent the summer reading Marx and other authors and discussing what was just then coming to be known as the “Black Power” movement. I had the same problem: what is power?

I found the answer in two articles by Talcott Parsons, one entitled “The Nature of Influence, “ and the other entitled “The Nature of Power.”

According to Parsons, influence is when you are able to convince someone to do something–the other people really want to do what you want them to do. For power he uses the term “situational sanction.” A situational sanction is one that affects your situation. In colloquial terms, it makes things hot for you, or pleasant for you. You do what I want not because you really want to do it, but because if you don’t do it, I will make your life unpleasant. Power is the ability to make things hot for someone else, or, more simply, power is the ability to punish. If you have the ability to reward, you automatically have the ability to punish, simply by withholding the reward.

That’s a working definition of power. What about love?

A fellow friar living with me here at Quincy, John Joe Lakers, gave me the answer. “J.J.” is a philosopher, and has spent years writing a book on ethics that he has titled Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy. His basic thesis is that there are two approaches that one can take toward ethics, the discussion of what is good and bad. One is to ground ethics in a metaphor of power and judgment, and the other is to ground ethics in a metaphor of intimacy. Intimacy is respectful, vulnerable, passionate, faithful involvement with another person or persons. That is what love is: respectful, vulnerable, passionate, faithful involvement with another.

How do power and love relate?

It seemed obvious to me that there are times when we need to use power. The raising of children is one case. One can be involved with a child respectfully, etc., but there are times when one simply has to threaten punishment. It should not be violent punishment. (Violence is the intent to hurt or to harm, and I believe that violence is never justified.) But I can’t see how one can do away with all punishment or threat of punishment. In the world of politics there are similar cases: what does one do with a tyrant-dictator who treats others unjustly? Or, closer to home, with a criminal intent on committing a crime? We can try to physically restrain another from doing something bad, but physical restraint has its own kind of brutality and is not often appropriate. We have to use power. Power is more respectful than restraint.

It was at “Christian Family Camp” last summer, where I gave two talks, one on power and one on love, that I was faced with the issue. The adults who listened to my first talk on love were properly impressed–it all sounded great. But when I tried to deliver the gist of the talk to the staff, mostly college students, I ran into a buzz saw. How can you deal with people using just intimacy, they wanted to know. That’s wishy-washy thinking. It’s not real.

It was while walking down the road at 7:00 AM the next morning that the image came to me. Parents use power on their children, but not until after they have established a relationship of intimacy. The image of the rose bush seemed to describe the relationship beautifully: the thorn of power grows out of the rose bush of intimacy in order to protect the rose. Otherwise it becomes a crown of thorns. What is the rose? I left that up to people’s imagination. Maybe it is beauty, maybe it is unity.