YeKengalé

In human terms, the ability to choose and the experience or exercise of power are so intertwined as to be virtually synonymous. By definition, powerlessness is the absence of the capacity to choose. Power exists therefore only in the presence of choice, and effective or meaningful power is the ability to align choice with intention of outcome.

The human experience, whether personal or collective, is organized around this quintessentially human characteristic of electing, selecting or choice-making and as our religious narratives illuminate, the central drama of mankind is political – i.e. what do we do with choice/power. The very purpose of all/any religion is to serve mankind as moral map or choice guide. The premise is that guideless power or uninformed choice is ultimately a disastrous prospect.

Human will has two basic reins and reason is not one of them. Until the human arrives at the conclusion that reason/rationality is good, and confusion is bad, neither has any necessary effect upon the direction of human choice. This accounts for the plethora of highly educated moral imbeciles. Good and Bad with its attendant Right and Wrong is the baseline of the human narrative and personality. All our tremendous intellectual and creative capacities stem from this foundation, which also accounts for the range of our capacities. In other words, our heights (and/or depths) are dictated by our ability (or not) to master our feelings, the most primitive barometer of good or bad. Our capacity to feel precedes our capacity to think, and the latter is based on the former even though it transcends it.

The reins of the will are pleasure and pain. One need not be acquainted with Pavlov to understand what every mother and child instinctively understands … and every subsequent human being having some vested interested in the manipulation of outcomes to maximize pleasure and minimize pain – to induce a human mind and its creative capacities for one’s own intentions, whether your own mind or anyone else’s, learning to utilize their triggers of pain and pleasure for the alignment or cooption of their potential is essential.

If choice is at the center of human morality, then conflicts of interests define human reality. Conflict and choice are what makes us essentially human. There is no world where all choices and their attendant consequences have equal value. Herein lies both the human predicament and the human potential. The moment of choice (collectively, the date of election) is what defines the human journey – the dash between dates of entry and demise.

And since the domain of religion and politics are inseverable, let me make some comment on the dominant theology of the times:

The perverse heresy of extreme Calvinism (which twists the concept of Predestination so that it becomes the doctrine of Predetermination) makes God a tyrant and man a machine. To think that election day (the moment of choice) can be predetermined by God is theological confusion: Firstly, there is no need for the ‘pre’ as the determiner always precedes the determination: the question is not ‘when’ but ‘who’ and to give that attribution to God not only robs Him of His glory but also robs Mankind of the sovereignty God Themself attributed us, and nullifies the Lord’s prayer which allows Mankind the privilege of glorifying (or disgracing … hence ‘Hallowed be thy Name’) God on the earth.

The misconstruance of both omniscience and divine foreknowledge is at the heart of every misrepresentation of the character and nature of God by the church (and attendant misappropriation of power by church-guided government) throughout her existence. Would that I had space and time to properly represent this truth here, but suffice it now to say that when Power and Love are not equated; coercion, castigation and (illicit) control are not only conceived and legitimized, but necessitated.

Omniscience can only be understood as the general crafting of the pathways of consequentiality. Permission to walk those specific pathways one chooses is the definition of Love. Though God may have the capacity to know from beginning to end, compelled by God’s own Divine nature, God is obliged, in God’s relationship with humanity to limit that knowledge for purposes of human guidance. Anything further would be an intrusion of the sovereignty God by Godself surrendered to Mankind on earth. One does not hold on to a gift but releases it. As far as we are concerned, God is waiting to see (and know) what we will do with our lives. The God of all Mankind not only creates boundaries, but respects them.

Contextual and most relevant to all the above is that most valued mental state or heart condition we call “Peace”. So important it is, we open and close our interpersonal communications and religious ceremonies, especially those marking the initial reception of each life into or final departure from the community with its invocation. Regardless of the deep insights Pavlov gives us into the inner construction and external outworkings of mental conditioning and animal behaviour, human civilization, with all its genius and incongruence is predicated on a higher principle: The notion of self-determination or self-mastery, which in its most exalted expressions tantamounts to common or collective unity: community, integrity, the unity of mind and will that mirrors most clearly the true image of God.

Peace both anchors us to the internal and unlimited well of both drive and directional clarity and disconnects us from the external sources of pain and pleasure and the internal needs they have forged attachments with through anxieties generated by acquired fear or lust. Peace allows us to recognize the presence of God’s transcendent gift of sovereignty, and in that light, utterly discount as trivial whatever transient experience, soon to become dissolved in memory, that momentarily looms over us like the shadow of death. Peace allows us to endure whatever crucifixion or salacious allurement should attempt to command our attention and disconnect us from the anchor beyond the veil, without remorse or trepidation, unflinching, consistent, self-contained.

It may appear to the contrary but peace not war defines the apex of human possibility, the mastery of self not the manipulation of others dignifies human experience; and it is an ever deepening internal communion, not an ever expanding external conquest that determines the measure of human power.

So, May The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his glorious face towards you and grant you, above all, His PEACE.