Once, standing on a frozen riverbank, I watched the trust between a man and his dog give power to save the animal’s life. Though a strong, seasoned country dog well able to swim, he’d fallen into the river, couldn’t lift himself onto the ice, and began to panic.  The man’s presence, as he lay on the ice, allowed the frightened animal to follow directions of the beloved voice and outstretched hands, and be pulled to safety. 

Power can be used against one another, a sinful distortion of something good. Power exercised with love and received with trust is power fulfilled. This dynamic is observable between humans and creation (like the dog), and among humans.  All power stems from God alone.  Even so God, all-powerful and needing nothing from us, allows us through our trust in Him to participate in his good work.

Perhaps this is why Jesus “did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.”  And why he could say to one thief but not the other, “today you will be with me in Paradise.”  And how Christ “did not regard his equality with God as something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself (kenosis)…”

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Divine power is revealed in the Incarnation as kenotic, dialectic, and generative.  When God creates humans, he allows his power to become circumscribed in a necessary relationship of human trust. 

It’s visible in real lives.  For example, Bishop Baldassare Reina depicted the change in the young life of Chiara Corbello Petrillo, showing her growth in trust of God.  The bishop’s 2024 speech concluded the local phase of Chiara’s cause for beatification.  

He described her wrestling with God through her relationship to the man she eventually married.  Here she discovered that “God is King of history but more specifically, the King of her personal story.”  She was given the key by which she opened her life to God’s power: “Whatever God planned of good, beautiful or holy for her life, he would bring about…  regardless of sin, tribulations, sickness and death, God is faithful.” Though her life unexpectedly ended four years into her marriage, she and her husband Enrico dared to live those years abundantly.

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The change Bishop Reina points to is not that Chiara suffered—everyone suffers. It’s that she learned to trust God, not in theory but in action, kenotically. In her “personal story,” God’s power was magnified in her. Therefore, it was magnified in the Church, and the world. 

Isn’t this the power that founded the Church at Jerusalem on Pentecost, at Rome in Peter and Paul’s deaths, at Nicaea in the first ecumenical council? 

Isn’t this the power meant to infuse relationships within the Church?  Within the relationships between laypeople and clergy, in our difference places, we’re invited to experience the power of engendering life. We all know the destruction of one person using power against others in the Church. We also know what can happen when a bishop trusts God’s power, and trusts the power of the faithful, while the faithful trust the Church’s power given in Christ.

In the Church there can be no power except dialectically, which requires the exercise of listening, even as Father, Son and Spirit mutually listen. “I know you always hear me,” Jesus said to his Father.  Yet no power in the Church can override a steadfast refusal to trust the prophetic word given to it.  Such an attitude of distrust in the Holy Spirit’s power frustrates God’s love as a generative force in the world. 

No wonder we’re drawn towards witnesses of kenotic trust in God’s power, generating life and joy. The creed of Nicaea, in the original Greek, stresses that Christ was incarnate and became man by the equal involvement of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.  Chiara wrote that, through this painfully, joyfully discovered trust in God, she learned what it means to love a person.

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Chiara’s turning-point came through this word: “When God opens a door no one shall close it, and when God closes a door no one shall open it.” It’s not only for priests. All of us need to take it up, so “the one who is King of history becomes King of my personal story.” On the Cross, Christ changed suffering forever, for all, from the law of sin to a path of love.  Chiara and Enrico learned the joy of this path.  

As we come to trust God, suffering doesn’t go away but is changed. There’s no place it can go where joy cannot reach, but there’s a place joy can go where suffering cannot reach.  That’s called love.