Power can have a range of effects on faith, and it’s my belief that a truly robust faith has room for this feeling. For an earlier post about power, click here. To look at the intersection of power and faith, read on…
“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.” -Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
“…for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” —2 Timothy 1:7
Power shows itself in many ways. It may look like courage, confidence, humility, hope, or any number of powerful feelings. If anger is all about reacting to threats, power comes as an ingrained sense that is active rather than reactive. Like the other positively-charged emotions (joy and peace), it takes some work to cultivate a faith that sits in power, but it’s worth it.
My favorite aspect of powerful faith is hope. I love hope because of its defiant nature— showing up by definition where it shouldn’t be. Hope is a tool for dark times. I know I’m a broken record on this topic, but I’ll say it again: the word “hope” appears with greatest frequency in the book of Job and the Psalms of lament. Hope always shows up where hope shouldn’t be. Hope implies a confidence that a situation will get better and a willingness to work to make it so.
My view of hope really changed while working with chronically and terminally ill patients. For so many of my patients, “getting well” wasn’t even an option on the table, so they had to look for other forms of hope. Hope to go to a child’s graduation, hope that specific loved ones could be present at their time of death, hope to maintain some measure of independence throughout their final months— hope found its way into the most dire circumstances. Think too of the power this kind of hope requires! The world around us so often defines success as living to a ripe old age, but for these patients, old age wasn’t an option. They redefined their hope, refused to feel powerless, and as such, claimed power.
So it goes with our faith. We don’t build powerful faith just for good times; we feed into it so it can be a safe haven in difficult times. Hope and respect and appreciation and confidence don’t come easy though. They require discipline and dedication. So, as we did with joy a few weeks ago, take a look at the feeling wheel’s second tier for power: faithful, important, hopeful, appreciated, respected, and proud. What could it look like to let yourself feel these things? What could it look like to build them into your daily spirituality?
Leave room for power in your faith.