Love, justice, and power lay down together in a verdant field.

– David Goa 

Members of Sahakarini, friends.

When Gail Stolee wrote to me some six weeks ago and asked who I might suggest to speak on power I responded with a number of names including those in our midst and nearby who have exercised political power, who have exercised bureaucratic power, leadership of various sorts.

I thought of those who have never known power. The young men (largely) in the Near East and parts of Asia who join ISIS because, as Thomas Friedman has pointed out, “they have never held power, never held a job and never held a girls hand.” ISIS gives them a wife, a pay cheque and the opportunity, or so they say, to change history.

I thought of the many in our midst who are daily deprived of the straightforward creative path where power is at rest with love and justice.

I remembered my old friend of blessed memory, Heiko Schlieper, the marvelous historian and iconographer who loved to repeat Lord Acton’s little formulation but repeat it with a difference. “Power corrupts and impotence corrupts absolutely.”

Gail talked with me a day or so later and asked me to reflect on power this evening with you. My first thought, given that my childhood was in this place with its many evangelical songs and hymns, that I could simply sing one of these, “There is power in the blood, wonderworking power in the blood.”

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