Nothing in the mundane world can’t be, and hasn’t been, weaponized, that is, made into an instrument of domination or defense: property, laws, stones picked up from the ground, geography, ideas, grievances, facts, lies, governments, individual people, the past, the future, sacrifices–nothing is or has been exempt.
This power (and tendency) to weaponize whatever is at hand, we might call tough power. It corresponds to classic notions of ‘strength’: invincibility, inexorability, impregnability, imperviousness.
Tough power doesn’t always weaponize but, here’s the key, it can, often has, and still does, take what’s at hand and make it hard and edged suitable for cutting or piercing. The history and the capability are ever present. By power, I mean an ability to shape reality, a capacity to resist or insist. Tough power is exercised by all, good or bad, because it’s the way things are done in the mundane.
There is also however what we can call tender power (often, by contrast, characterized as weakness) characterized by receptivity, openness, vulnerability, trust, permeability, without the hard rind of tough power. This is the power of freshness, of transcendent freshness, which never, ever, weaponizes. It is a power that expands the realm of positive possibilities and innovations; that inspires and imagines; that, instead of competition or commerce, creates communion; that persists, ineffably influential, even when defeated; and that in the transcendent realm, endures everlastingly, so that no tender moment, or shade of tenderness in any moment, in the history of mankind is ever lost.
Where tender power works is in encounters which are hybrid mundane/transcendent occasions. Encounters are where freshness is able to exert influence on the mundane realm, and the mundane is able to contribute to the progressive consummation of creation in the transcendent.
We, the denizens of the mundane world, learn early the uses of tough power, if only to protect ourselves from dominators, and to discipline ourselves to the attainment of common goals. We know that tough power is ‘how the world works’, and weaponization is sometimes a last (or first) resort.
Tender power, the power of transcendent freshness working through those who encounter, is easy to dismiss because it doesn’t fit the combative or transactional formats defined by tough power. Yet the story in the Christian tradition of Jesus dying by crucifixion, is cited as the perfect example of tender power.
There are those who believe tough power, or ‘strength’, is the only ultimately efficacious power, but there are those who believe as well in the reality of tender power, that is in the reality of transcendent freshness, whether considered as an agent or an agency, and in the power of ‘weakness’.
We come to believe in tender power through our encounters, and through encountering, our perceptions and priorities evolve, and through this evolution, freshness exercises its tender power, albeit indirectly, in our tough power world.