Are you familiar with Amnesty International?  I've long admired its tireless efforts to remediate and end torture and unjust punishment across the globe.  Over its fifty year history, Amnesty has earned an international reputation for its campaigns to seek justice for those who have not had it.  It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
     I mention Amnesty because a couple of months ago, my wife and I were invited to join fellow Amnesty supporters in our area for a evening of discussion about women's issues.  It was a delightful, stimulating, and informative evening.  We left greatly encouraged about Amnesty's outreach to oppressed women around the world.  Although the reasons for the oppression of woman are varied, many of them seem to center, as I see it, on the threat that many men believe that empowered women pose to their historically imbued hold on power.  Way too many men do not wish to give up the power they have enjoyed over women and, by extension, every other living being, during the many millennia that humanity has occupied the planet.  Sadly, due to sundry misinterpretations of their sacred texts, too many men of religion have been particularly complicit in this.
     From the day Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, man and woman were set on a collision course, forever striving for power over the other.  Both want to be in charge and, as anyone who has played king of the hill knows, it will always be the strongest who prevails.  For the time being, this will be the man.
     How ironic and fitting, then, that when he set out to redeem humanity from its metaphysical confusion and sin, God did not do so with physical power.  Indeed, he did just the opposite.  It was when God was at his weakest that he was strongest, and it was when God was most oppressed that he set the most people free.  When men insist on retaining their power, they are, consciously or not, trying to undo the most fundamental truth in the cosmos:  genuine power is letting go of it.