Could Our Empowerment Be Hurting Us?

How we pay for our exaggerated sense of power…

Have you noticed that we live in a pretty empowered world?

By empowered, I mean we feel we have the power to shape things – in our lives, in ourselves, and in the world around us.

In general, I think most would agree that an empowered mindset is a good thing. Where people might have once sat around waiting for things to happen to them, today we understand that good things come as a result of taking action. This prevents us from living like helpless creatures in our lives.

But is it possible that an empowered mindset can get out of balance? That it can go too far?

In his book Being Mortal, Atul Gawande talks about the horror he felt when, as a surgeon, he witnessed his patients die. I think we can all sympathize with the feelings of a professional failure, especially when the consequences are so severe. But his experience touched on something more profound. He believed it was his job, and within his power, to save his patient’s life. When a patient died, even when all the doctors knew how little chance the patient had, he felt somehow responsible.

Wait a minute. Does a surgeon really have the power to give or take life? Or is his role something else – more subtle perhaps?

Gawande’s self-recrimination touches on the secret of power in general. Power always has a flip side. And that flip side is responsibility. If I have the power to control something, then that means I’m responsible when it goes wrong.

This is why it’s so important to understand that while empowerment is good, a misplaced sense of power can wreak havoc in our lives. For instance, you would never consider a woman responsible for failing to get pregnant (assuming that she hasn’t locked herself in a tower where her husband cannot reach her…). Just imagine a society in which women are punished or imprisoned because they failed to get pregnant. Ridiculous!

We all realize that while we might try to encourage certain things to happen in our lives, some things, (getting pregnant, for instance), are just out of our control. Our power has limits. 

But where are the limits of our power??? Where does empowerment do us good and where does it lead us astray? And is it possible that the secular world teaches us to view the wrong things as being in our power? Or that some people in the religious world discourage us from taking responsibility where responsibility is really ours?

These are questions that drill into the core of our existence, and touch on how we choose to apply our efforts in life. If I believe I have no power over something, why waste my time on it? But if I believe I do have power – yet true power lies elsewhere – I may be setting myself up for a great deal of unnecessary grief and frustration.

As we slowly examine the practice of faith, this question must be at the back of our minds. What kind of effort bears fruit? And what represents the fruitless attempt to possess a part of life that was never ours to possess?

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