A Question of Power

A Question of Power
Psalm 110

My wife keeps going on about power. I don’t take it personally. Actually, it works in my favor, because her fixation lies with the way contemporary Western thinking is preoccupied by questions about who has power and about how power features in the relationships of men and women, parents and children, pastors and congregations, and professors and students. She thinks that our understanding and appreciation of these relationships is being spoiled by the focus on power and by an obsession with obtaining it, with the powerless gaining power, or with empowering people. The dynamics parallel those that apply in connection with the significance of sacred places such as the temple. Their importance is perverted by the way they become symbols of power, so that in the present day the key question about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is who controls it. Yet such considerations confirm the principle that human wilfulness makes it dangerous to concentrate power and important to diffuse it...