[The following is a chapter from a book I wrote some time ago.  I am debating publishing it.  Your comments will be helpful.]

CHAPTER TWO

The Beast

When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the fever-heat of summer. (Psalm 32:3-4)

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death? (Romans 7:24)

“I just don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean it.”

“I’m sorry. What can I say? That’s not how I am.”

“It was like looking in from the outside and watching me do things I never could have imagined I would do. I can’t believe that I did those things even now, but I know that it’s true.”

There is a beast in each of us. Something alien, crouching in the dark parts of our being, waiting for the moment of anger, or passion, or pretense to leap into the light. To lurch from within us and make us into something we thought we were not.   Awful. Ugly. Evil.

Denial to cover it up. Shame to protect it. Hate to pacify it. Anger to feed it. Unwanted behavior to forget it. But we never get free of it. Each time the beast breathes the breath of our lungs, its power grows. Each time we push it back into our secret recesses, it clamors for more room. The cage shakes, the bars break and out it comes, seeking revenge for our denial of its grip on us. Driving us to our personal hell, we are propelled into another round of drinking or drugs, sex or violence, eating, envy, revenge, arrogance, resentment, disappointment.

“Wait just a minute,” you say. “I’m not like that. I’ve never had an affair. I don’t curse and swear. I treat everyone with respect. I keep my temper under control. I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs.   You can’t be talking about me.”

Dark Hallways

But I am talking about you — and about me. Everyone of us has dark hallways. Inside the corridors of our minds there are those places where the light switches have been deliberately turned off. That’s where we find the lair of the beast – that little bit of envy, that silent rage, that secret need for power, that fleeting thought of revenge, that sudden wish for violence, that daydream of desire. It’s all there, isn’t it? Whitewashed on the outside, rotting on the inside. Just underneath the lid held tightly in place.

These are not closets. Closets have containment doors. We are well practiced at keeping closet doors shut. We know the shame of being found with a closet door open. These are not closets. They are passages – tunnels – dark hallways. They lead us from room to room. But as soon as we step into these hallways, we can never find the way back to the entrance. All we can do is move from one exit to the next – always down, deeper and deeper – to meet the Beast.

“I can’t imagine what this is all about,” you say (but the hair on the back of your neck is already starting to feel the fear of disclosure). “I have never been led into a dark inner place,” you protest (but your heart is pounding just a little bit louder). Let’s do a little dungeon exploration. Take my hand and I will show you just one of these hallways, but hold on tight for it’s very easy to get lost in here.

The entrance to this dark hallway carries the sign “Loneliness.” It’s a pleasant enough sounding excuse for many manifestations of the Beast. After all, we tell ourselves, no one should have to be lonely. What we need is companionship. What we get is heartache. The dark hallway we travel to get there is sex. Everyone knows love’s ashes. Sometime, somewhere the fire of passion was extinguished. It did not just go out. It was put out. Not enough fuel (too little understanding), not enough heat (too great expectations), not enough oxygen (too little communication) and out it went. You and I stood there empty. Burned. Ashes. The Beast in us filed away a memory-wound to use another day. It was a wound that would make us just a little less vulnerable, a little more cautious, a little more skeptical the next time. And, of course, wounds cause infection.

So the next time love presented itself to us, we remembered the wound. We remembered and we infected the new relationship with the hurts of the past. Spontaneity was displaced by wariness, exuberance was reduced to circumspection, truth was modified to advantage. The Beast prepared us for another pound of soot by equipping us to fulfill our own nightmare of disappointment. The more we tried to maneuver away from any risk of pain, the more pain’s razor edge cut our souls. When we lost enough blood, we ended it, justified because we held ashes in our hands. Our purity was mixed with poison. The beautiful apple that we wanted looked so delicious, but it was meant to kill.

This hallway leads us from disappointment to resignation. If we could not be loved without conditions, then we would have conditions for our loving. Relationships became contracts. We bargained for the companionship we sought by trading what we had for what we thought we could get. Minds for power, platitudes for intimacy, peace for presence. In the end it was only a board game with plastic players. Partners were interchangeable weapons used to fight against the creeping darkness inside. The Beast was having his way, invading our light at a faster and faster pace. Every new contract reinforced our essential lovelessness. The only way out was down.

The next exit was lit by a neon sign, “Please yourself .” The ultimate escape. When the world is filled with risk-avoidance, loving encounters lose meaning. Love and sex coexist in confused disharmony. Sex is nothing more than the use of a lobotomized orifice for self-flagellation. “This space for rent – make offer.” Despair drives us to seek the Beast. What we fled before we now embrace. We practice the art of anesthesia in auto-eroticism. Endorphins replace emptiness. The soul sinks while the body performs a ritual of angst relief. The end is inevitable, left alone in the darkness of our own shame.

Of course you and I are like this. We are human. We are battered, bruised, beaten beings. We have known pain, disappointment, agony, emptiness because we are alive. That is all it takes. Just living. And because just living can be such hell, we let the Beast take control. We batter others with the hands of the Beast. We cheat others with the heart of the Beast. We lie to others with the mouth of the Beast. We manipulate, malign and masturbate with the mind of the Beast. We dress in human skin to fool our victims. But underneath that living flesh is an alien seeking revenge on an unaccepting world. We die, it lives.

Why can’t the alcoholic stop drinking? Why can’t the addict stop shooting up? Why can’t the sex-addict stop lusting? Why can’t the embittered stop shouting? Why can’t the fearful stop crying? Why can’t the abused stop hitting? Can it be that there is any pleasure left in the drink, or the drugs, or the orgasm, the screaming, the tears, the violence? No, a thousand times, no. The real pleasure is gone. What is left is only numbing the pain. There is no peace, comfort or harmony in these things. That has all been extracted through instinctual repetition. There is only self-destruction, self-defeat, self-addiction. Every occurrence reinforces the strangle hold of the Beast. Every repetition removes more of my freedom. I am chained to the Beast, a living schizophrenic, a dying parasite.

The Spiral Staircase

Once more you protest. “Yes, it’s true that I have felt disappointment,” you say. “I have been hurt. I have been scared. But I’m over that. I have learned to control my feelings. You see. I don’t drink. I don’t screw around. I’m not like this thing you’re talking about. I’ve learned to handle my own problems.”

You’re absolutely right. You are not an alcoholic, a drug user, a sex addict, an abuser, a hater, a pleasure seeker. Not yet. You’re still traveling. You just haven’t arrived at the last exit. You haven’t played the End Game. But you will.   Because the Beast is alive in you. You have let him have a small space in your heart and he will never rest until he owns it all. You can fight him all your life, but in the end he will win no matter what you do. You can’t win the fight against this cancer because the Beast has the ultimate weapon. The Beast owns death.

This is so important and so dangerous. The great lie of the Beast is the lie of shame. No matter how seemingly insignificant our sin, we open the cage of the Beast when we allow the guilt that we feel to press our transgression into the dark recesses. King David made it very clear. “When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.” Hiding my sin feeds the Beast. It begins with the fear of rejection. If they only knew what I did, they could not love me. Somehow we think that we can be loved if we hide our shame. But we soon find that just the opposite is true. Since others continue to act as though they love me, I now conclude that they love me precisely because they do not know my guilt. But I know. So I stop loving me. And the result is that I must stop loving them, for I know that I am a sham. God comes next. Perhaps He was really first in this bestial logic. God does know. And since He knows my guilt, He also knows that I have denied my guilt. I hate myself for denying my guilt because by denying my guilt, I pretend to be someone I am not. I am forced to live a lie, to love a lie. And that I cannot do. So my hatred for the self I am but do not want to be is extended to God. I cannot let God see my guilt. I am ashamed. God could never love me because I can never love me. A bestial tautology. Love and lies cannot coexist.

We need to be careful not to think that bestial struggles are only for those who have corrupting behavior. It would be easy to say that alcoholics and drug users, child abusers and rapists, haters, hedonists and those of that caliber are candidates for the Beast, but not me. Actually, the Beast doesn’t care what baits the trap. It could just as easily be the pleasure of eating, the thrill of shopping, the extra adrenaline of competition. It can be as trivial as potato chips and coffee, television or sunbathing. The Beast can set the trap with the attraction of money or the aversion of airplanes.[1] He doesn’t care what the bait is as long as it works. When we confront the Beast, we confront an enemy who can use punishment or reward with equal alacrity.

The Beast breathes the air of shame. Shame isolates me from the forgiveness of others. It separates me from the community of the guilty. It convinces me that I alone am unworthy of love. Shame is the dark power of the Beast. A power so great that I feel its slow strangulation every waking moment, until finally I must kill that thing I hate–me. Every unconfessed sin contains within it the mark of the Beast. Every unconfessed sin has the potential of shackling us to the power of shame and driving us to embrace the horror of the Beast.

Are you frightened enough to really look into that hallway? Have you seen him behind your bathroom mirror? Did you feel his presence when you last were angry, or lonely, or hurt? If we choose to deny him, he wins. He loves that shadow world, the world we can’t look at because of our shame. The more darkness we hold inside, the greater power we give to the Beast. To stay human, we must kick down the doors, open the windows, turn on the floodlights and let our parasites show. If we want to be human, we must expose the Beast inside us.

What a terrible specter that is. To let another know my secret shame. The fear immobilizes me. Panic floods my soul. To let someone else see the me that even I do not want to know that I am. It is almost too much to bear. This is the crux of our problem. We not only lack the power to fight the creature who is us, we lack the desire. We let the Beast live in us because we want to. The operations of the Beast numb us to the disappointments of reality. In order to kill the Beast, we would have to stop pretending that the world should treat us fairly. We would have to stop pretending that we should have things our way. We would have to stop pretending that we deserve comfort when we are hurt. We would have to face our naked selves without excuses. The Beast is alive because we would rather live with myth than with reality. Reality is harsh, unforgiving and remorseless. Anything could happen to us. Anything at all. When those things happen that take away our sense of well being, that strip us of our pride, our self respect, our love of ourselves, we uncage the Beast to protect us. We turn the Beast loose on our perceived enemies whether they be other people or the cold impersonal world itself. And the Beast responds. The Beast always comforts us by anesthetizing our pain and shifting our blame.

Bestial Logic

Avarice, anger, drunkenness, drugs, sex, violence, pleasure, hate. Bestial actions all do two very important things. First, they numb our pain either by helping us forget or by focusing our energy on some outside enemy. Secondly, they reconstitute our loss of power. I drink to forget. I also drink to take control of my hurt. The same is true of sex. If I orgasm to numb my loneliness, at the same time I deliberately shift the power of relationship from interaction to inner action. I take control back to myself. If I lash out in anger, if I shout, scream or verbally batter another, the energy output numbs my own sense of hurt. At the same time, it re-establishes my personal power through my ability to be vengeful, hateful or violent.

Numbing and powerlessness go together. My experience of pain, my encounter with disappointment is a failure of power. I have not been able to control my world in such a way that I was rewarded by the successful culmination of my desires. I failed. Something or someone got the upper hand and I was hurt. My power is threatened. So the Beast rushes to my aid at precisely the point where I am most needy. In the panic of a threat to personal power, I need to forget the failure and reconnect with the belief that I am in control. The strength of the Beast is its ability to fulfill these two psycho-emotive needs.

Now we see why we can’t fight the Beast and hope to win. We can’t fight because we are caught in a vicious circle. We are committed to personal power. That commitment means we inevitably suffer hurt and disappointment which threatens to destroy our personal power. If we try to live without the Beast, but keep our basic commitment to power, we commit psychological suicide. We have nothing to protect us. We are victimized. But if we try to live with the Beast and wish to maintain that commitment to personal power, we will have to let the Beast have greater and greater control of who we are each time we confront pain. To live in the world is to live in a wilderness, full of hurts and pains and fears, surrounded by hideous creatures and unimaginable traumas. In an effort to shore up our finitude in this vast wilderness, we succumb to the myth of power; the myth that power will protect us from the contingencies of life. Buried in that myth is the denial of death. The myth of power denies the reality of death. The Beast feeds us a diet pungent with the aroma of victory, victory over puny selves, victory over our feeble enemies, victory over our intransigent world. And while we eat, the Beast keeps us alive, focused on the fable of destiny, convincing us that we too can be a god.

Death and Life

The truth is something very different. The truth is that I can only pretend to escape death if I become something other than human. The truth is that humanness depends entirely on dying. The more that I push against the maelstrom of death, the more I am forced to give away my humanness. And this is precisely the strategy of the Beast. “Give me your wounds, and I will avenge them,” says the Beast. But the price we pay is to forsake forgiveness. Something human must die to feed the power need. “Give me your sorrows and I will erase them.” But we must pay the price of numbing reality. “Give me your depression, your disappointment, your despair and I will turn it into cold, hard power.” But we pay the price of turning from God’s comfort, peace and joy to something made by inhuman hands.

To follow the path of the Beast is only to delay the inevitable. That delay is extremely appealing. The path of the Beast claims to reinstate our divinity. The Beast promises us control. We believe that we can have the world perform according to our wishes either because we will force it to act appropriately or we will deny its intransigence and create our own cosmos. The Beast transforms our pain into the delusion of power or the mythology of fantasy. And in that moment, it seems as though the promise of the Beast is fulfilled. I can make others perform according to my wishes. I know the power of manipulation, threat and violence. I can enlist the Beast’s ownership of death to create fear in another. I can get what I want. And if I am not successful, if I do not have enough power, I can forget. The Beast will bring me any number of pain killers. I can reduce myself to anesthetized existence. Either way, the pain will stop for a moment. Either way I will become instinctual, Beast-like. Either way I will take a step away from being human.

There is no escape. To destroy the grip of the Beast on my life, I must first confront my commitment to control. Here we find the subtle toxin of the Beast. The Beast has a grip on me because I cannot be God. Only God has the power to order life in such a way that His desires are fulfilled. Only God can create a world in which justice and mercy reign. In spite of all of our attempts to the contrary, we cannot be God. We cannot re-create the world to fit our desires. We cannot insure that the world will operate in perfect harmony for us. To add insult to injury, we will die. The ultimate statement of our finitude is fixed for every one of us. Death comes calling. The truth about life is death, but no one committed to the need for control is willing to face this truth. The Beast accommodates our desire to be self-deluded.

This metaphysical explanation uncovers the depth of our problem, but it seems so removed from our ordinary experience. We deal in the insignificant trivialities of life, not in the musing of the great philosophers. What has the denial of our finitude, the denial of death got to do with driving to work, changing diapers, looking for a parking place or answering the telephone? A simple story will show the connection between ordinary everyday and the desire for divine control.

The Morning After

The day starts with surrender. When the alarm goes off, we remind ourselves that this is the day that the Lord has made, and we should be glad in it. But the three year old got up at 2:45 AM and cried until we also got up for the 25 minutes needed to get him back to sleep. And we didn’t get to bed early because there was some family trouble back on the West Coast, so the telephone was busy until 11PM. When the alarm goes off, we really don’t want to get up yet. Say a little prayer for the day while trying to catch a few more minutes of rest. Then the eyes snap open and we are already behind schedule. No time for a Psalm now. To the shower, the closet and out the door. Breakfast was a glass of orange juice somewhere in between shoes and coat. Just as the door to the car closed, we remember that we need gas. A few more minutes shot. Down to the station, but the lines are long and facing the wrong way. So we make a quick u-turn and find that someone else has pulled into the spot we were targeting. A small exclamation of disgust leaves the lips. Then the simmer of frustration while we wait. “Come on, come on.” Patience is not a virtue when you have to wait for it. Finally the gas pump. Out to the freeway, but (Oh, no!) an accident. More simmering. Forget that someone else will be permanently late. What matters most is that we are inconvenienced. “They ought to have a law,” comes the phrase as we see that a truck has overturned in the fast lane. Finally at work. The parking garage. A car appears in our reserved spot. That does it! Out comes the notepad, a short memo on the virtues of minding the rules slapped on the windshield, accompanied by a threat if it happens again. “Doesn’t anyone know who I am around here?” The cry for control!

The other half has an equally trivial day. The three year old refuses to eat breakfast and decides that none of the correct clothes are worth wearing. There is a battle of wills over which pair of shoes will go to pre-school. Tears in the car about wanting cereal instead of a sandwich. Harsh words (justifiable!?) over wearing a seat belt. “Why me?” echoes in the mind. From the pre-school blitz to the gym. The locker room is too cold. The locker door closes on a new shirt stamping an insignia in grease. At least the workout doesn’t result in an injury. Shopping. The advertised special is out. Rain check line. There aren’t enough bag boys. Writing checks and packing your own groceries. “Why don’t they do something about how they treat customers?” In the car suddenly remembering the forgotten purchase of the birthday present. Pre-school birthdays, a pain for everyone except the kids. Back to the store. More waiting. Finally home, unpacking and then the telephone. Ring! a Mastercard offer. Hang up. Ring! just buy 6 weeks and . . Hang up. Ring! pre-school, the child is sick, you’ll have to come and get him. “God, be merciful to me, a mother!” “Why can’t the world be the way that I want it to be?” Control! Each a chocolate bar to feel better.

Power and Control

In our little drama of a work day morning, we talked about control. We made a distinction between the power of God and the human desire for control. This distinction is important and often confused. Our world is full of symbols of control. The epitome of our role models are typically control figures. Thus, the President, the Chief Executive, the Policemen, the Teacher, the Parent are all seen as representatives of authority and power, but the truth is that they are more often than not symbols of social agreement to standards of control. They exercise their power not because they are personally powerful but because they are perceived as ones who have the right of authority. When the social agreement collapses, the power disappears. This is not necessarily socially disturbing. The passage of one administration to another means that a new President receives the collective social agreement as a symbol of authority. The old President no longer has this power, but it would be unjustified to say that the old President is no longer the same person because he no longer has the social contract to be the authority figure.

When the police lose control of a situation, it is not because they have individually lost some power. The social contract to recognize them as authority symbols has changed. On large scale, this is the basis for revolution. Every parent knows the feeling of loss of control when confronted by the collapse of the social contract with teenage children. These situations help us see that what we typically call power is really the application of control through advantage or leverage. The power of the boss is really his leverage over my work agreement. Difficult employees are difficult precisely because they do not recognize this control. The power of the parent or the government works exactly the same way. Each has leverage or advantage over its subjects. This is control.

Janet Hagberg has catalogued the progressive stages of power in her book, Real Power[2]. She describes six stages from powerlessness to power by gestalt. She notes that our society generally rewards stages that define power by association, symbols or reflection. On reflection, we might ask how these stages differ from control behavior. Only Hagberg’s Stage Six (power by gestalt) seems to transcend issues of control. Power by gestalt has the following characteristics:

comfortable with paradox, unafraid of death, powerless, quiet in service, ethical, on the universal plane[3]

Stage Six individuals do not fit well into society. They seem to operate on an altogether different plane, with a personal vision that directs their lives without regard to the social contract. Hagberg says that they are “powerless”, but what we really see is that they have given up the myth of control. They are true examples of power precisely because they understand that they are not in control, of their lives or of anything else. The reason that we call them powerless is because we do not recognize the difference between power and control.[4] They do not easily fit our paradigm.

What, then, is power? We are not interested in the application of the term to the inanimate world except as those applications help us understand the principle area of our concern. Therefore, what we really want to know is how does the term “power” apply to human beings? What do we mean when we say that this human being has power? Hagberg’s insight that personal power which emanates from within has the appearance of being powerless (Stage Six) helps us see that we must remove the control and controlling issues from our understanding. That means that true power will not come from the consensus of social agreement. True power is not a function of control. That does not mean that individuals who exhibit true power will not have tremendous influence on the rest of us. It simply means that their influence will not be a matter of social position, agreement or advantage.   They will exert influence because they empower others, not because they control others. One who is powerless (in the current paradigm) cannot control.

There is only one framework which reveals the true meaning of power. That framework is the interplay between Man and God. The roots of our civilization recognized the sacred quality of real power in the Greek use of the term dynamai. The fundamental purpose of power for the Greeks was to align the cosmic forces for good and evil in order to escape the tragic consequences of the human condition. Power was couched in religion and dealt with the primary concern of religion – the fact of death. Men did not have power, they were only capable of sharing in the power resident in the divinities of the cosmos. But sharing that power was the only way that men could escape the tragedy of being both spirit and body.

It is but a short step from the notion of sharing the power of the cosmos to protect oneself from the inevitability of decay and death to the belief that power is to be found in controlling the cosmos. In some ways, the entire history of Western civilization is nothing more than the application of technology in pursuit of control of chaotic forces. The dark underworld of the body must be forced into submission through the application of technology of the mind. Death, the final chaos, is apparently kept at bay.

Once we recognize that power is intimately connected with the sacred, we must look at the other roots of our tradition to see how their influence modified this Greek quest. The Judeo-Christian use of power is also pre-eminently religious. But there is a very big difference. Where Greek thought was built on the dualism of body and spirit, the Jewish background had no such dualism. Overcoming the tragic condition of Mankind was not an issue of subduing a chaotic creation or a decaying material existence. God created both the natural order and Man. And both were pronounced good. The issue which confronts power from the Jewish perspective is not the chthonic chaos but the deliberate disobedience of Mankind. It is not a matter of primeval disharmony but of destroyed relationship. What stands behind power is not a share of the divinity of the natural forces but the righteous will of a personal Creator. This changes the whole picture. Power is not a function of control because power is first and foremost a function of righteousness, that is to say, it is the result of a personal right standing before one’s own Creator. Thus, it automatically excludes any extension to advantage, leverage or control. To stand before one’s Creator is to recognize unconditional powerlessness. It is to acknowledge absolute dependence. It is to be overwhelmed by one’s misalignment with the true holiness of the Source of all being. Defying death is not an issue at all. In the face of the Creator God there is no such thing as death. There is only life with or without righteousness.

The Judeo-Christian tradition places power in its proper context. That context shows us that real power must belong to the sphere of inner holiness, that the energy of real power influences men precisely because it calls them to self examination in relation to their own right standing before the Creator. It can never be control by social contract, force, conscription or any mental or physical means. Real power is of an entirely different nature – it originates with God and expresses itself in men through humility, sacrifice, acceptance and obedience.

Hagberg describes the sixth stage as a stage where individuals no longer fear death. Now we see that there are obvious reasons for this. The shared power which emanates from the Creator God is a power that has broken the control of death over Mankind. There is no need to fear death if one is aligned with God. The issues for those who share in the endowment of real power are not issues of the Greek struggle against chaos. They are issues of the struggle against sin and they can only be fought in the arena of weakness. To exhibit real power is to reveal the God of weakness. No wonder the world cannot accommodate such people into its paradigm of control. The world does not share the same universe.

Power and Fantasy

Real power is of divine origin. It shows itself in the humility of acceptance, the integrity of inner peace, the absence of fear and the complete human helplessness of divine dependence. Real power is as alien to our way of thinking and behaving as conversations among animals. We can imagine that such things exist, but we can do so only by forcing their presence into our mold of the world. The challenge and the call of real power compels us to return to our own origin – to re-establish our relationship with the divine and to become partakers in that energy. Real power can never be humanly generated. It can only empower us to become truly human.

In contrast, the power that we recognize as control is not sacred in its origin. It is thoroughly man-made. As a result, the power of control has its origin in the principles which govern the world order apart from God. Theologically, this form of power is the bastardization of the divine. It denies the dependence of creation on the Creator. It seeks to manipulate the world from the perspective of the active agent, the human being wishing to exercise control. Does this mean that all control power is inappropriate (or worse, sinful)? The answer must be a resounding, “No!” There is a place for the exercise of authority. Even God demonstrates such power and provides for control power as an extension of the divine will. But control power can never be an end in itself. Power for the sake of control is not human. It is bestial. It is based on my need to become god, to block my pain, to force reality to meet my needs. Insofar as it separates me from my right standing relationship with the true source of all power, it undermines my own humanness.

In the world as it is, the exercise of control power is the accepted medium of interaction. In spite of our recognition that our relationships are not what we want them to be because of the struggle of each party over control, we steadfastly refuse to see that the relationship fails to meet our expectations not because we do not have the right mechanics of shared control but because control power is antithetical to real relationships. Control power must depend on advantage. But real relationships can only flourish in an atmosphere of self-sacrifice, that is in precisely the atmosphere where control has no advantage. Relationships with our friends, work peers, spouses and children disintegrate to the degree that we attempt to apply control power instead of sharing enabling power. This is no accident. It is simply a reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves and with God. The more that we attempt to control either self or God, the less satisfying and successful the relationship becomes. Real power is an endowment of divine energy, initiated from position of weakness. Only real power is capable of overcoming the control of the Beast because only real power removes the threat that the Beast uses for advantage. The weakness of real power refuses to allow the Beast a stronghold of shame because such weakness offers no excuse for its own condition. It is helpless and admits it. The dependence of real power casts aside the final weapon of the Beast because Death is no longer a priority issue.

There is a theological expression for the condition of experiencing real power. It is called grace. Grace is the biblical expression for sharing the endowment of real power. Grace is concerned not with control but with recovery. The God of grace is interested in the restitution of a relationship of right standing, that is, in the recovery of true humanness through a return to the intended sacred fellowship between Man and Creator God. This can only come about through the confrontation and confession of Man’s illegitimate rebellion. Grace is the result of repentance. Grace is not a once-for-all action. Grace is a living openness to God. To be a believer is to live grace-fully, to be in a constant state of confession and repentance. Why is this so essential? Because the power of the Beast lies in the darkness of the unconfessed. Shame is nothing more than the accumulated guilt of unconfessed sin. But what control this “nothing more” exercises.

Why is control power bestial rather than human? The answer lies in the concept of freedom. The Beast would have us believe that freedom is the same as license. For the Beast, freedom is a corollary of power. If I have enough control, I can do what I want. If I have enough power, I have license to do anything. “Look at God,” whispers the Beast. “Is there anything that God cannot do? He is all powerful. Therefore, He is free to do whatever he wants. That is real freedom. To be uninhibited in the expression of my desires. To be in control.” And if I experience my finitude as frustration of my power, the Beast comforts me with the freedom of fantasy. “It’s true that you can’t always get what you want,” he says. “At least in this world. But there is another world, a world inside, where you can be anything, do anything. Where no one can stop you. Numb the real world and live in your dreams. Be free.”

This is the freedom of a condemned prisoner. The reality of his existence is that he is already dead. It is just a matter of time. He is already an erased person. But at the moment it does not appear so. The prisoner can move about in the cell. He can contemplate, converse and commiserate. He can imagine that reality is something other than the four concrete walls. He can vent his frustration and anger. What he cannot do is escape. Every time the instinctual reactions of the Beast find expression in our lives, the chains that bind us to this ironic freedom grow a little heavier. The Beast succeeds by deliberately confusing control and power.

We need to be very clear about the meaning of freedom. Freedom is not a word that was invented in the me-generation. It has nothing to do with facilitating my desires. What we like to call “freedom” when we think that we choose to participate in our special addictions to power and fantasy is actually the opposite of freedom. Addictions do not free us; they enslave us. The addictions of the Beast make us captive to the mythology that we can have the world our way.   When we indulge ourselves in this myth, we experience counterfeit freedom just as we exhibit counterfeit power.

Control power moves in the opposite direction of freedom. From control I can only derive compulsion. Bestial (counterfeit) freedom closes the possibilities of encounter by restricting my openness to alternatives. The commitment to control narrows my focus, centers attention on me, on my needs and desires. Every time this occurs, I limit the social, physical and spiritual interactions that could occur. The result is that my world becomes smaller, my options fewer. With fewer options comes limited choices until finally the hallmark characteristic of humanness can no longer be expressed. When I act as the Beast, I act not on choice but on instinct. My pathways have been prescribed. I become a determined being.

The Beast would have me believe that this power will rescue me from pain, that I can exercise my freedom to deliver me from my wilderness. The Beast lives on that basis that survival requires self protection and self aggression – that I must fight the world and others for my right to be – that I must be in control. But control does not lead me to peace. It does not draw me to responsibility. It does not offer me consolation or love. Control power depends entirely on advantage and advantage is entirely relative. Control requires a Master-Slave relationship. Control removes any hope of grace. Nietzsche’s Will To Power is not an expression of human being. It is an expression of animal dominance. Human beings cannot live by control power because, in the words of Bob Dylan, “You gotta serve somebody.” No one is ultimately in control except God and His control does not stem from advantage but from holiness. The great irony is this: If human beings try to live life according to control alone, they become living examples of the law of the jungle. They become animals, creatures driven by instinctual logic, who are ultimately not in control at all.

Freedom and Obligation

True freedom pushes me toward greater openness because true freedom leads me toward the truth. When I experience true freedom, I find that my possibilities for action multiply, not because I have license to do as I please but because I understand the interconnectedness of my choices for the existence of other beings and my ultimate powerlessness. My field is no longer narrowly defined by the instinctual needs of self. I see that every choice which I may make contains within it a myriad of obligations. “Free to do as I please” is an oxymoron for I am never free when I act as I please. I can only be free when I am pleased to act in ways that strengthen my obligations and are the result of my own sense of dependence.

Real freedom is our capacity to be bound, directed and obligated by what we encounter. It is not something that we can earn nor is it a possession that we can grasp. It is rather a willingness to be indebted to the truth. The authentication of humanness that we long to experience, that sense that we are truly important and loved, cannot be won, forced, cajoled or bargained. Any application of control power used to coerce love destroys love. Freedom moves me away from control, toward dependence. The exercise of freedom puts me in a relationship of reliance on another. Only dependence can verify my worth because only dependence can involve acceptance. To be free is to be accepted as I truly am—powerless and dependent. To be free is to embrace reality without excuse, to love my finiteness for what it is, an expression of my relationship to my Creator, and to revel in the mystery of my being.

Freedom cannot be dislodged from life. I do not exist in the vacuum of bestial instinct even if I choose to pretend that I do. The resistance of the world to my will is nothing more nor less than the refusal of my existential dependence to give way to bestial reality. The will to power is an attempt to fight the real nature of my being. Freedom entails obligation because life entails dependence. I cannot be truly free in a society which requires that my freedom be purchased at the expense of others’ slavery, whether that slavery be physical, mental, social or spiritual. Freedom entails obligation because it requires that I extend to other human beings the same valuations of worth which I desire. This can never be true in a society based on control for control always implies a Master and a Slave. The obligation resident in my freedom expands the responsibility of my choice by enlarging my interconnectedness. It enhances my humanness by reminding me of my finitude. I cannot be deluded by the myth of independence if I am confronted with the infinite ramifications associated with even the smallest of my choices. To be free to choose is to stand in a position of utter dependence – not only for the eventual outcome of my choices but for the very fabric of my existence which allows me to make such choices. Only when I am truly finite can I be truly free. Then, and only then, will I understand and accept that I am not ultimately responsible because I am not and cannot be God. If I am to live at all as a human, it must be by grace. Otherwise, the overwhelming cacophony of my very being will force me to embrace the Beast, to numb my life into instinctual operation, just to survive.

This is the message of freedom found in the Bible. God acts freely to give Man his place in creation. God acts with responsibility and obligation in creating another personal being by establishing interconnectedness as the prerequisite of humanness. Interconnectedness with each other establishes us as human but it does not end in our obligation to other humans. It extends to God Himself. God created Man to be connected to Him. To be truly free, then, is to stand in a self-aware and self-proclaimed dependent relationship with the Creator and the created. That relationship is not to be characterized by the hierarchy of Master and Slave but by the community of family members—parent and child. That relationship removes the power of bestial logic because it affirms that I matter even though I am not God because I matter to God.

The Bible also recognizes that the intended interconnectedness of freedom is not the modus operandi of this present world. There is no lack of realism in the Biblical portrayal. Man has given up true freedom for the world of control power. Whether by ignorance, deception or rebellion, we now attempt to create the world based on control. As a result, we are forced to exert inhuman, bestial relationships on creation. We are not willing to let the creation operate on the basis of grace because we have refused to believe the word of our divine Parent. The final irony is that our efforts to exert control over ourselves and creation leave us the most out of control creatures. Like fish trying to swim on dry land, denying our status as created beings leaves us animate contradictions of all that we say and do. The Beast.

[1] Compare the attraction and aversion addictions listed in Gerald May, Addiction and Grace, Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 38-39 for a very enlightening experience.

[2]Janet O. Hagberg, Real Power: Stages of Personal Power in Organizations (Harper & Row, San Francisco), 1984.

[3]Hagberg, p. 147.

[4]Hagberg has a very telling comment when she raises the question about a seventh stage She says “I have a strong suspicion that there is a Stage Seven in this model of personal power. I have deliberately chosen not to describe the stage, probably because I had enough trouble describing people at Stage Six. My sense is that it would be called something like Power by Transcendence and that the crisis to overcome in order to reach it would be the crisis of being human.” (p. 148)