Friday, the Third Week of Lent – Rohe

“It is through total and unmitigated powerlessness that God shows us divine mercy.  The Radical, divine choice is the choice to reveal glory, beauty, truth, peace, joy and most of all love in the through the complete divestment of power.”  (Henri Nouwen, Finding My Way Home, 33)

I once read that Jesus and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.

We as humans will inherently always resist, deny, and avoid until it is forced upon us one way or another.  It is through trials and tribulations most of times we discover the reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.

 

Or as Paul expressed it:
I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the very things I want to do and find myself doing the very things I hate . . . for although the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not. (Romans 7:15, 18)

 

To be powerless means to be absolutely helpless. These feelings of helplessness are ironically the best time in a person’s life where they truly begin their spiritual journey. We question why is that?  Because we are forced to look deeper into one’s self, the more we are aware of these feelings the more desperate and willing we are to reach out for help.  You turn yourself over to the love of God or the Higher Power is what heals us.

The Bible does reflect a lot about powerlessness, but it emphasizes more on the spiritual side than the physical – poor in spirit, spiritual poverty, spiritual weakness, etc.  This is because man and women are living beings that derive their existence and power from the Spirit of God.  Man is powerless without God.  (Job 32:8 33:4)

– Rohe Kuhar, EFM Year Two