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|     RELATIONAL POWER: TRANSFORMATIONAL REALITY By Jeanne Solik In my journey, I find that power issues surface and resurface in a variety of guises. A softening wisdom allows me to increasingly cycle into the depths of love, where I am able to hold the reality that there are parts of me, who, like Lucifer, struggle to become the power-God I am at times tempted to envision, a God who converts, condemns, and annihilates. My transformative process, however, is best facilitated and most evident in those times when I experience unconditional love, the unconditional love of God, another, or myself. This truth invites me to consider what power means in the Spiritual Direction relationship, both in my own Direction and as a Spiritual Guide, especially as the one so directly affects and mirrors the other. After the release of her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver addressed a question regarding her presentation of Nathan Price, a central and the pivotal character in the novel. The questioner frames the question with acknowledgment of the challenge a writer faces in creating and developing �multi-faceted characters.� Specifically, the questioner asks Kingsolver if she believes she�s done Price and his faith justice. She replies, �I�m not sure what you mean by �doing him justice.� I certainly don�t owe him anything. He�s a character, invented by me, for no other purpose than to serve my plot. . . � Kingsolver�s response stands in stark contrast to Alice Walker�s explanation of her relationship with the characters in The Color Purple. �Sure the characters of my new novel were trying to form (or, as I invariably thought of it, trying to contact me, to speak through me),� Walker sought to provide what the characters needed to reveal themselves and to develop (356). Walker further explains that as she moved into relationship with her characters, she came to realize that what they needed � what they in fact demanded in order to expose themselves to her � was silence and patience. They challenged Walker to find ways to provide the necessary silence and patience, ways that were not in keeping with her more familiar and comfortable ways of living. Over time, her characters emerged and provided her not only with one of her most successful works, but with an experience of story and relationship that opened her to new ways of living and being, both as an author and a person. Power Issues When I consider the power issues in my own life, I recognize a tendency similar to Kingsolver�s, a tendency to operate from a position of unilateral power. According to the theologian Bernard Loomer, unilateral power is the �capacity to influence, guide, adjust, manipulate, shape, control, or transform the human or natural environment in order to advance one�s own purpose . . . to influence another, in contrast to being influenced� (173). It has been my more familiar, more comfortable way of approaching life � very often leading to confrontation rather than engagement. A few years back, after a particularly challenging week, I went to spiritual direction hoping to come into new awareness, to give voice to and move into dialogue with my interior maleness, which had made its desperation known to me in a series of unsettling dreams. I felt the continuing battle of polarities tearing at one another, good, bad; right, wrong; success, failure. I struggled to stand in the truth of faith � that bog of quicksand that transforms into a bridge between believing and knowing. Surrender Not Submission I was exhausted in the battle against myself, hoping for integration, longing for transcendence, and still stuck in the battle. I sensed God calling me to surrender; surrender considered in reference to its synonym submission. Surrender is understood as the giving up of one�s person, one�s property or possessions, including those people, places and things under one�s control. Submission underscores that the giving up is accomplished because of the subordinate position of the one doing the giving up, and the dominant position of the one being given in to. This call to surrender seemed to differentiate the two experiences of surrender and submission in a new way. I understood more clearly that the difference had to do with what was going on in the core of my being. Surrender is �About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater� (373). For me, what was needed was surrender, surrender into love and into grace. But I didn�t understand how it would be accomplished. My director asked me to sit in the turmoil, asked me to hear what the maleness wanted to say. And I heard nothing. But I sat and I listened. Later, as I turned into the alley just before arriving home, I finally heard what there was to hear. I almost didn�t recognize it. In a hiccup of silence, a silence of the battle and the dialogue within and without, there was a small, quiet, simple stillness. �I don�t want you to fix it; I just want you to hear me.� Transformative Relationship In that moment, I felt the shift and knew inherently that I had learned a new way to live within the uncertainty, to live more fully who I am wherever I am. I experienced the difference between submission and surrender, between making change happen and participating in transformative relationship. As I honestly assess my history and receptiveness to transformation, I recognize the potential impact of Loomer�s truth in my life and in my spiritual direction practice: As long as one�s size and sense of worth are measured by the strength of one�s capacity to influence others, as long as power is associated with the sense of initiative and aggressiveness, and passivity is indicative of weakness or a corresponding lack of power, then the natural and inevitable inequalities among individuals and groups become the means whereby the estrangements in life become wider and deeper. The rich become richer, the poor become poorer. The strong become stronger and the weak become weaker and more dependent. From a deeply religious point of view, and in the long run, this manner of handling the inequalities of life results in an increasing impoverishment for both the strong and the weak. (175) Loomer suggests the implementation of an alternative conception of power that is relational in character. This conception of power is similar, I think, to Walker�s experience. It is, in Loomer�s words, �the ability both to produce and to undergo an effect. It is the capacity both to influence others and to be influenced by others. Relational power involves both a giving and a receiving� (183). Thereby, relational power shares the experience of change, of transformation. There is no �producer� of the effect on a �passive� recipient of the influence. There is mutuality, that expects, that accepts that in the very coming together, change happens and transformation can occur. Relational Power Relational power understands that �everyone and everything we encounter becomes part of the fabric of our lives� (187). It asserts that we are contextual creatures who are woven into the tapestry of our society, our community, just as that community is woven into us. The interior life of the individual is an integration of relations established, and the �true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships� (186). Relational power requires confirmation and challenge, creativity and discipline, the acceptance that weakness and strength coexist within an individual, within a society and community, as does maturity and immaturity, actualization and brokenness, maleness and femaleness. I know the presence of both unilateral and relational power. Still, Loomer�s perspective doesn�t stop at providing only a space for the experience of transformation. His words call me to a deeper realization, a broader and fuller experience of relationship, of the potential relational power holds. I understand more fully that �The ultimate aim of relational power is the creation and enhancement of those relationships in which all participating members are transformed into individuals and groups of greater stature� (194). As we sustain these relationships, we are drawn more completely into a �web of interconnectedness that constitutes the seamless context within which all human life is lived� (197). In Direction Session I remember one of the final direction sessions with a directee, a woman who had come into new awareness of and relation with significant pieces of her life during our time together. For me, this woman�s process called me, challenged me to new levels of self-examination and awareness. I often came away from our sessions and marveled at the �irony� of our meeting in this way, in this place, in this time of my personal development and as a spiritual companion. She mirrored my analysis of internal arguments, my assessments of possible outcomes, negative and positive, my diligence in weighing and considering the fairness and value of each. On reflection, I realized how in hearing her struggles, her challenges and questions, her reality, I was invited to enter my own more fully. While I was able to be present to her and be witness with her in her process, it was also true that, at times, some of my old buttons were pushed, buttons that only my family-of-origin had held claim to, buttons that I thought had long ago been conquered and disabled. I felt as if there were two of me, the one who sat with this spiritual traveler in direction sessions, able to provide safety and hearing, unconditional love and support, and the other, the one who remains in conflict with so much of who I was in my family-of-origin, with so many of the characters who surround and close in on me, often unexpected and uninvited. Relationship with those characters and those parts of myself had been stifled as higher parts of myself, or maybe more powerful parts of myself, took control and worked to silence, to convert so much that needed desperately to be embraced. And I�m reminded again of the contrasting experiences Barbara Kingsolver and Alice Walker had with their fictional characters. Sitting in that session and, subsequently, sitting with my own characters past and present, I understand that it is in continuing relationship, in participation with the community of myself, with those I sit with in spiritual direction, with living beings who willingly participate or not, that I am able to witness, to know, and to live in the transformational reality of relational power. Works Cited Kingsolver, Barbara. �Frequently Asked Questions.� 01/29/00. http://www.kingsolver.com/faq/answers.asp#question21 Loomer, Bernard M. �Two Kinds of Power.� The Future Church of 140 BCE. Ed. Bernard J. Lee. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 173. Walker, Alice. �Writing The Color Purple.� In Search of Our Mothers� Gardens. Alice Walker. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983. 355-360. | | ||
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