I’ve been reflecting recently on the relationship between love and power.
Not as abstract concepts, but as living forces that shape our lives, our leadership, and the choices we make every day.
It’s a theme that has been alive in several recent conversations I’ve had, including one with Adam Kahane and Jennifer Garvey Berger.
During our conversation, Adam shared two potent quotes…
The first is from Martin Luther King Jr.:
Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.
The second is from Paul Tillich, a Protestant theologian and philosopher:
[Power is] the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity and love [is] the drive towards unity of the separated.
Both of those quotes impacted me deeply — I could feel them in my body.
And then Adam shared one more thread of this tapestry…
Justice.
As Paul Tillich says, justice is the form that allows power and love to both be expressed.
So rather than love and power being a polarity that we toggle between, or find our own unique balance within…
Justice becomes the essential entity that allows both to come together into united action.
And while we may have differing opinions about just laws or just rulers… justice as an entity is something different.
It’s something that lives within us. An internal place that, when we learn to connect to it, we can orient from as we navigate life.
A compass.
A teacher of mine, Patrick Connor, often says that the sponsoring seed of an action greatly influences the outcome of that action and how generative it ultimately becomes.
I think there’s something deeply important in that.
Because two people can take the same action to begin vastly different journeys, depending on the consciousness beneath that action.
So imagine what actions we’d take — and where they would lead — if more of them came from that internal place of justice. The union of love and power, oriented towards the good of the whole…
Because when we orient toward the good of the whole, something begins to shift in us.
The center of gravity moves beyond our own immediate concerns.
And the questions we ask ourselves shift from:
What do I long for?
To:
What do we long for?
And:
What future do we want to hand over?
This is one of the deepest invitations of inner work.
To deepen into our hearts, and widen our sphere of concern until our lives become an expression of something larger than ourselves.
With care,
Joel
