Fire, fury, and power. Simple words, improvised in self-righteousnessin successionspark the air with anxiety. Uncertainty thickens, and an ominous flame of fear leads the way.

Words, said in a time and place, reshape the planet. Small words of hatred or care uttered by everyday people in everyday places create lifedeath and flourishing on our fragile planet every day. And our rich interconnectedness amplifies these words all in ways well out of control.

Sentences that unfold stories of violence or the competition of masculine ego hit the energies of our actual embodied lives. Those words, the syntax of what is imagined, legitimize violence or hatred or allow systems of oppression to continue creating lives of misery. Words spoken and unspoken sanction gender violence, white supremacy, transphobia, and heterosexism. Stories of pain flow down, generation to generation. The sins of the father still visit, generation to generation. Hearts break, generation to generation.

Fire, fury, and power. Three words often given as attributes and tributes to strong leaders, military commanders, patriarchal men who cant imagine what dialogue, solidarity, resilience, survival, vulnerability or sincerity feel like. Its tragicor, would beif people who exercise such violence werent so threatening to the rest of us, to our imaginations and bodies, to the stories we want to tell, to the creaturely lives beyond the human calling out for their own futures. The truth is, were often complicit in these blockages of care, injustice, impassibility.

Fire, fury, and power. Three attributes often imagined as sovereign leadership, presidential, godly, even. Omnipotence, all-powerful violence locked and loaded, loves to ground itself in divine power to absolve itself from its sins. Robert Jeffress performed this violent logic for the world again. Weve seen it before, and well see it again.

But omnipotence and the fire, fury, and power it represents is a lived and theological mistake. My intellectual inspiration Alfred North Whitehead once called this out prophetically in his book, Process and Reality. He laments that "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." The violence of misogynist, imperial power imposed itself, legitimized itself, and projected itself by imagining an all-powerful ruler who doesnt care what others think, who imposes his will on a flimsy creation.

But, for Whitehead, neither divinity nor real power operates by that violence. Fire, fury, and power cannot make life liveable, especially on a planet where these strange humans can destroy all of life several times over. If God is all powerful, whatever fickle decision goes. But if divine power is the power of love, then that power is exercised as mutuality, reciprocity, justice, care, creaturely flourishing. That power dwells, as Whitehead would say, upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love.

And here is where I fall in love with Whitehead. God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. True power leads us forth by offering manifold possibilities, visions of justice and hope, by patient contemplation of our lives and relations. Hearts are convicted and co-creatively bring their forth radical visions of community, care, and resistance to violent imaginations. We become poets of peace who speak new lines of possibility, in that everydayness.

Poets, not sovereigns.

The poet Denise Levertov, in her Making Peace , offers that tender poetry like this, words of her own, where we might utter peace, stanza by stanza into the world,/ each act of living/ one of its words

Each act of living tells a story. And we live in a moment where those acts matter deeply. #BlackLivesMatter #TransLivesMatter #PlanetaryLivesMatter; stories urgently needed to be told.

Maybe, just maybe, we speak of fire in different ways. Fire becomes a desire to spark and enliven our days with a passion for seeking love, justice, and mercy together. Fire is about a passion for peace so enticing that it lures others to its cause as well. Fire becomes a symbol of the basic needs people need to survive, newness, new creation, renewal. Fire is no longer used as a display of violence or force.

Maybe, just maybe, we speak of fury in different ways. We honor the fury of those ancestors, liberationists, and protesters whose rage for justice lights a beacon through impossible places, makes a way out of no way (as Womanist writers might say). Fury becomes one way of many we cultivate sight to unmask systems and habits of violence. Fury becomes a persistent way of reclaiming our time and cultivating resilience as we do so.

Maybe, just maybe, we speak of power as the power of love, not force.

We desperately need poets, you and me, for such a time as this.