Power Made Perfect in Love

A young girl in Magdeburg began receiving almost daily “greetings” from the Holy Spirit when she was twelve. Those greetings did not make her grand in the eyes of the world; they drew her into a deeper listening. As a young woman she moved to a city where she knew almost no one and lived quietly as a beguine, yet from that hidden life flowed a book of startling boldness, written not in the language of scholars but in her own Middle Low German so that women and laypeople could hear and understand. What she had received as gift, she gave as gift.

She knew the world around her spoke of God in monarchical tones. From God descended popes and bishops, lords and vassals, fathers and rulers. Power justified hierarchy. Obedience was demanded. Favor was coveted. Punishment was feared. Many of us still carry that image within: a throne above, decrees below, love measured out according to loyalty.

Yet she dared to use royal imagery in a different way. She spoke of empress, queen, lord—but she understood power as a form of love. Majesty and omnipotence were not weapons to secure submission; they were signs of a divine desire for intimacy. It is not sheer power that makes God divine. It is love. That is a confident claim about the heart of reality, and it is also a confident claim about the deepest truth of our humanity: we are made for communion, not control.

In the preface of her book, God speaks and claims authorship in words that overturn every expectation:

“I made it in my powerlessness, for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts.” —Mechthild of Magdeburg

Here is a paradox that unsettles us. Even God is powerless to contain God. The divine nature is so given over to love that withholding would mean unmaking divinity itself. God is powerless to stop giving gifts. This is not weakness; it is the strength of unbounded generosity.

We know another kind of power. It demands strict justice and leaves the guilty to languish in their prison. It perpetuates suffering and calls it righteousness. We have felt its edge in our institutions and, if we are honest, in our own hearts. There is a part of us that wants might to win, that confuses control with order, that fears what mercy might unleash.

But this mystic withholds that diseased power from God. Out of love, the Father abandons the power to perpetuate suffering. The deeper and more authentic power is what redeems, heals, and restores. Mercy is a different kind of almightiness, one that draws even those brutalized by sin back into loving communion. Divine power allows love to displace might.

This vision changes how we see ourselves and one another. If the source of all is love that cannot restrain its gifts, then we are not pawns beneath a throne. We are recipients of an overflowing generosity, invited to become conduits of the same. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). The Tao speaks of the highest goodness as water, benefiting all and contending with none (Tao Te Ching 8), and the psalmist sings of mercy that endures forever (Psalm 136). Power that does not cling to itself becomes life for the world.

We are capable of this. We can renounce the diseased forms of might that wound and exclude. We can choose the strength that restores. Let that claim take root: the truest power in us is the power to love beyond measure.

Let us carry this vision gently into silence, allowing love’s quiet strength to reshape our understanding of power. Rest in the silence for a few minutes.

Be Still and Know:
Breathing in, I receive the gift that cannot be restrained.
Breathing out, I offer the love that cannot be contained.

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Heart of the Message:
Divine power is not coercive might but uncontainable love that redeems, heals, and restores, inviting us into intimate communion.

What would change in your life if you trusted that the deepest power at work in you and in the world is love that cannot stop giving?

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Love that renounces domination
Love that refuses to perpetuate suffering
Love that bends low, not to conquer
but to restore

A throne overturned by tenderness
A scepter exchanged for open hands
A majesty revealed as mercy

And we, once afraid of punishment,
drawn instead by gifts
we did not earn
yet cannot refuse

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