Shadow, Mirror, and Mime

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness. —Ephesians 6:12

William Stringfellow, the theologian who may be justly credited with reviving in this country a theology of the principalities and powers, claimed to be first put onto them by his friends and legal clients in Harlem who experienced, among other things, the mafia and its network of dealers as a predatory force invading their families and neighborhoods. His years of lucid reflection began in a certain sense with their intuitive theological street wisdom.

It is thereby all the more remarkable that in the churches' struggle against drugs there has been such meager theological reflection. Indeed the notorious frustration and substantial failure of the church in confronting the drug problem, so-called, may be partially rooted in this fundamental shortcoming: the failure to comprehend drugs biblically; that is, as numbered among the principalities and powers.

The officially sponsored "Just Say No" approach—and its churchly equivalents—effectively masks the character of the drug powers. While intimating resistance ("say no"), it first reduces the struggle to ("just") an individual exchange, an illegal street-level deal. The principality in its economic, political, cultural, and above all spiritual aspects remains hidden and is given a free hand to go about its deadly business.

Because the church's approach is firstly (and rightly) pastoral, the individualist temptation predominates. It is, however, especially pastoral care that requires the fullest comprehension of the powers.

A principality, whatever its particular form and variety, is a living reality, distinguishable from human and other organic life. —William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience

TO COMPREHEND DRUGS as a power means, on the one hand, to see it whole, as an entity, the drug system: a configuration of competing underground corporations, economic arrangements, illegitimate operations, and cultural forms. It means seeing the system of transnational-national enterprises, akin, say, to the military-technological complex. What has been written about the political economy of drugs begins to get at this.

As an economic entity, the system reaches across the planet. Between the poppy or coca fields and the hustling street vendor lies this huge enterprise. In certain respects it is a network marketing operation (of the variety mastered legally by Amway) with a 700-2,000 percent markup from one end to the other.

Moreover, it conforms to the patterns of, and crosses the boundaries of, the two-tiered global economy. Above: Elites dominate production, manufacture, and global export, with a middle-management operation overseeing regional distribution, paramilitary security, money laundering, and the like. Below are the peasant farms (developing nations' raw materials) and the crackhouses or their equivalent feeding on cheap labor.

Legally it's an elaborate conspiracy, but as with any structural power the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Like Adam Smith's "invisible hand," it takes on a life of its own—claiming those who claim to control it. Moreover, since it operates illegally (the free market truly unleashed) it has a phenomenal vitality, an inordinate versatility.

For example, at street level the crackhouses on my block can rapidly shift their mode of operation from infrastructure support with runners for the open drug bazaar in the park, to drive-up operations going night and day, to some setup involving the prostitutes who make the trek back and forth continuously to the main drag. The social traffic pattern and even the personnel can change, but it is the same operation. For this same reason, jailing a "kingpin" changes nothing. It's not a conspiracy, but a structural power. Change the faces top to bottom yet the principality abides.

The "principalities and powers" are the inner and outer aspect of any given manifestation of power. As the inner aspect they are the spirituality of institutions, the "within" of corporate structures and systems, the inner essence of outer organizations of power.... Every Power tends to have...an invisible pole, an inner spirit or driving force that animates, legitimates, and regulates its physical manifestation in the world. —Walter Wink, Naming the Powers

WHEN THE DRUG POWERS invade a city neighborhood they are attended by a palpable spirit. You can almost taste it, though it's tougher to name: fear and seduction breeding on despair. It is truly predatory and invasive, bearing along the real presence of death.

Admittedly, in the era of the Fall, as the New Testament attests, all the principalities are minions and servants of death. However, in the case of the drug powers, much like military ones (with which they have more than a little traffic), death wears no silk glove here. It is blatant and forward, idolized and invoked, named as an omnipresent threat. In popular discourse this is often recognized as the "violence of the drug culture." It is indeed endemic. But this is more than the rituals and codes, the pervasive trappings of a subculture; the spirit of death is exposed and raw.

This is not to suggest that the drug powers are any more fallen or demonic than the Pentagon and its surrogates. On the contrary. It is merely to observe that on the domestic scene, it is the one accounted, even in popular culture, as most enthralled with death.

This spiritual dimension has everything to do with the stronghold grip that drugs exercise on lives and communities. Yes, there is a biochemical dependency that may be clinically observed. But chemistry is not social determinism. Chemical dependency is the emblem, the coin of exchange, of a larger and deeper spiritual claim. Even those in the system (be they corporate gang members or laundering money wizards) who by discipline "stay clean" are nevertheless subject to this same bondage.

The scene of turmoil and confusion associated with the demonic powers becomes acute when it is recognized that these are rival, competitive powers despite the fact that, at times, they seem to confront human life as compatible or collaborating powers. All alliances among the principalities (the reciprocal arrangements of the Pentagon, some self-styled think tanks, and the weapons industries furnish an example) are transient and expedient. Such liaisons are aptly described in Revelation by terms like "fornication," "sorcery," or "playing the wanton" (Revelation 18:7-15, 23). —William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

IN THE PANTHEON OF current powers, drugs evince this pattern of rivalry and collusion, often simultaneously. The following are offered as examples.

In my own town of Detroit, the city administration and its police force are geared up in a fight against drugs. At the same time they are in convenient collusion with them. I do not refer to the corruption of the police force or the current scandal concerning embezzlement of unaccounted drug seizure funds, but the way in which incursions of crackhouses decimate a neighborhood that has been identified for clearing and redevelopment.

A community standing in the way of a ballpark, an airport expansion, or a new auto plant will suddenly find itself deep in struggle with an influx of drugs. What housing market there is drops; renters depart; homes are abandoned and eventually burned; neighborhood organizing is deflected and dissipated; the logic of redevelopment is reinforced in the public mind. In the main the mechanism is simple: Cops are less likely to risk their necks for a neighborhood already designated as having no future.

There doesn't even have to be a conspiracy in some 14th-floor meeting room. And yet I once heard the city's director of economic development describe a police strategy of "corralling all the dope houses into one neighborhood" (in this case one slated for development) "so we can drop the net on them." Nonsense apart from incipient collusion.

Another more obvious example of collusion is the symbiotic connection between the drug powers and the financial industry. This is true at every level—from the International Monetary Fund to auto dealers selling cars for cash in small denominations.

When the IMF puts the squeeze on developing nations, it forces peasant farmers further to the brink of survival and pushes them toward the lucrative drug system. Juan Valdez and friends are compelled to alter their cash crop of choice. The permanent developing nations' debt crisis has addicted whole national economies to the underground drug trade, and the international bankers blithely take their interest in drug dollars.

The financial powers are also deeply entrenched through various money-laundering operations. The going rate in 1992 for turning hot cash into electronic balances is estimated at 7 to 10 percent. Since converting to a dollar economy, Panama has been and remains in the early 1990s (the "Just Cause" Noriega war notwithstanding) an international laundering center. In the states one only has to call to mind the number of failed savings and loans that were gutted, under deregulation, by certain international dealers and brokers with access to drug dollars.

I can't help thinking in this connection of John Wesley's words to the distillers of industrial England. Preaching in the streets of Bristol, he ministered among the dock workers who were often paid in rum! They were literally addicted to their jobs. Of the distillers, indeed of all who profited from the suffering of others, he wrote:

They murder His Majesty's subjects wholesale, neither does their eye pity or spare. They drive them to hell, like sheep. And what is their gain? Is it not the blood of these men? Who would envy them their large estates and sumptuous palaces?...Blood, blood is there: the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood.

Perhaps the most notorious example of conflict and collaboration is the involvement of the CIA in international drug traffic. The United States is only the most prominent in a list of nations whose clandestine agencies have linked up with traffickers: nationalist China, pre-war Japan, Gaullist France, French Indochina, Thailand, and Pakistan.

CIA involvement goes back nearly to its inception, though its best documented complicity was with the heroin trade of Southeast Asia, forming an alliance with the opium-growing Hmong tribe. The agency helped eliminate competitors and provided transport via its front airlines services, in exchange for the tribe's part in the American war. (This activity, incidentally, coincided directly with the period of heroin epidemic that swept U.S. inner cities.) Familiar, more recent alliances include the mujahedeen in the Afghan war and the contras in the undeclared war against Nicaragua.

In general, the theme of rivalry and collusion is signified by the relationship of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the covert operations of the CIA. The international investigative and enforcement efforts of the former bump heads with the hands-off "national security" claims of the latter. In effect the CIA grants cover and de facto immunity to the drug powers, often at critical periods, which allows them to expand, forging connections to new markets.

There is a further irony with a bitter edge: The "war on drugs" is itself a form of collusion. By way of analogy, before the end of the Cold War certain East European Greens were referring to the arms race as a "single two-headed monster." Their idea was that by mirroring and justifying one another the superpower military establishments were held in an elaborate interlocking structure. (Developing nations' peoples long ago experienced and named this as the common struggle of North vs. South.) Arms control agreements were nothing more than the institutionalization of their codependency.

The Pentagon was crippled and panicked by the demise of the Soviet Union. By partially filling the Cold War vacuum, the drug war has demonstrated elements of a similar collusion, though perhaps the relationship is less mutual. The Pentagon at the moment needs the drug powers more than vice versa.

An immediate need was to find new "enemies" to replace "communists" in the ongoing manufacture of public consensus. "Narco-terrorists" and "narco-guerrillas" remain viable candidates. The media enlisted in the drug war (nearly to the degree they marketed the Gulf war), scripting a sensational crisis right from administration press releases.

Needless to say, Pentagon technology has been drafted into the effort—AWACS airplanes and over-the-horizon Backscatter radar systems have new surveillance missions in the interdiction effort. Military aid to countries with atrocious human rights records may be masked and enmeshed in the drug war effort. Interventions, as the war against Panama demonstrates, may be successfully sanctioned and justified under the drug war rubric. Among those who laid odds on the next war (Bush's "October 1992 Surprise"?), many named Peru a top pick. Guerrillas and coca fields abounded. The U.S. already had military advisers on the ground.

Domestically, the war has furthered the assault on civil liberties. Search without warrant, property seizures, surveillance and ID systems for public housing, youth curfews, extended pretrial jail time, large-scale police incursions—these unconstitutional legal practices are merely the necessary "war powers" the authorities expect to employ. The "enemy" at home is also a political necessity that justifies and inflates state power. In the process, African-American males are made a criminalized and endangered species.

Racism is an ideological power that insinuates itself in a variety of institutional structures. It is at work in the drug war—and it collaborates simultaneously with the drug powers. Combat and collusion.

A TV ad ran on the East Coast in which a voice intones indignantly over urban images: "Forty-six percent of the drug use in the New York area is in New York City!" The implication is clear and commonplace. Then following a pregnant pause the voice asks further, "Where do you suppose the other 54 percent is?"

The point comes home. Surveys indicate that the typical crack addict is a white, middle-class male, though you'd never know it from either media portrayals or arrest records. Only 12 percent of those using illegal drugs are African American, but they constitute 44 percent of those arrested for simple possession. Add in the pervasive racial bias in prosecution and sentencing, and we have a formula for a booming prison industry feeding on African Americans.

The same bias is in league with the assaults of the drug powers themselves. One thinks of the cinematic representation in The Godfather: The Dons sit at table debating the wisdom and morality of a mafia entrance into the drug business. It is a dispute already threatening war among the families. Marlon Brando steps forward to deliver the acceptable compromise: We will sell, but only to Negroes. The scene, needless to say, has its equivalents and corollaries.

Because periods of intense activism in the African-American community are often followed (and dulled or dissipated) by an influx of narcotics, activists have often suspected in such cases a political conspiracy. In general, though, it is a structural collusion of the powers that is at work in targeting the black community. The simple logic of profit makes them a target market for the trafficking principalities. The economic devastation of the inner cities (is any documentation needed for the history of racism there?) affords a hospitable environment for the underground economics of the drug powers. It's the domestic equivalent of the IMF.

And the atmosphere of despair is part of the spiritual matrix that opens the door. There is a surrogate economy, though it is largely delusional. Drug marketing offers black youth the same long-shot, hit-big options as professional athletics or the lottery. Drugs are one of the few things that bring suburban money into my neighborhood; however, in keeping with conventional patterns, the lion's share goes up and out to middle management and their bosses. Still, it fires the mind to imagine what the Detroit-area billion-dollar-a-year business of the drug powers might mean converted to a genuine local alternative.

In order to perceive the Addictive System for what it is, one must be in it but not of it. In other words, one must be in recovery from its effects. —Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict

There is a question , at once sociological and theological, a debate of more than passing interest, that bears fundamentally on one's view of recovery, of freedom from the drug powers. It's this: Are we talking about one society or two?

It is patently clear that we live in a two-tiered economy—one with a widening gap and ever more rigid barricades. But are the drug powers a creature that flourishes in the "culture of poverty"? Are they the de facto and extralegal rulers of those under chemical apartheid? Does freedom mean being liberated from the darkness of the street and baptized into the mainstream productivity of the dominant American culture?

Possession and the Powers of Addiction
Perhaps I've begged the question, but let me suggest that the drug powers are as American as Apple computers. The percentages ought to ring a bell if we acknowledge that while Americans are 6 percent of the world's population they consume 60 percent of the world's illegal drugs. Narcotics are the ideal consumer product in a culture of consumption. Every manufacturer would love to have the consumer loyalty that crack cocaine engenders. A product to die for.

Moreover, it is consumer products that are the conspicuous emblem of the urban hustlers: from shoes and coats, to gold chains (ironically from South Africa), to car phones and luxury rides. The drug powers are not consumerism gone awry but carried to its deadly conclusion. They are its shadow, mirror, and mime.

We have only to recall the multinational corporate character of the powers—one that is born out at street level as well. Gangs in my own city, as elsewhere, mimic well-organized business formations. A recent study of corporate gangs in Detroit found that members had never heard of Thurgood Marshall, but every last one of them knew of Lee Iacocca.

Moreover, addiction itself is deeply entrenched in, some say intrinsic to, the dominant culture. More and more there is talk of the "addictive society." This is a social analysis discovered in the therapeutic work of recovery. Counselors have come to understand that alcoholics and addicts of various stripes are regularly participants in a dysfunctional family or a system of relationships that are all cooperating and codependent with the addict. It has been a short leap to recognize that the same mechanisms and patterns operate on the larger scale of culture. Anne Wilson Schaef is one popular author who has now named as the addictive system what she formerly called the white male system.

Within an array of common mechanisms, people may be addicted to more than agents of chemical dependence: drugs (including nicotine and alcohol), food, or any other consumable; but also "process" agents of addiction such as sexual patterns, work, making money, even religious fixations. It doesn't take long to perceive that an entire culture may be organized around these mechanisms.

There is a shock of recognition in seeing writ large in culture the patterns of the individual addict and family system: Power and control are the ultimate goal. The lie is the norm and everyone cooperates in its perpetration. Memory is conveniently short so no lessons may be learned. Scarcity is the model with everyone competing for a limited amount of attention or "love." Confusion is manufactured. Projection becomes a standard form of denial. Fear, though unacknowledged, permeates the system. These are but glimpses, though they couldn't ring truer.

These comprise the social and spiritual matrix in which the drug powers flourish. The mechanisms of addiction are endemic to the culture and synonymous with its spirit.

They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when Jesus had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs; and no one could bind him anymore, even with a chain; for often he had been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the fetters he broke to pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones. —Mark 5:1-5

Recent interpretation of this most political exorcism (Mark 5:1-20) is intriguing within the context of our current discussion. Drawing on the work of Rene Girard, Walter Wink has commented on the relationship of the townspeople to the demoniac. How does he survive and grow strong among the tombs? Are they feeding him? Is it really impossible to fashion unbreakable chains? Is there collusion in some ritualized drama of violence and restraint repeated over and over? The suggestion is that the Gerasenes and their demoniac have settled into a pattern of "cyclical pathology," an elaborate codependency of sorts. They enable his madness.

Beyond that, he is their "scapegoat" for the violence they are unable to face in themselves. On the one hand, he acts out their rage to be free. (The entire region was under the chains of Roman domination.) On the other hand, he "stones" himself—internalizing the violence of both the occupation and their unexpressed revolt. In developing nations' situations of oppression, this phenomenon of the self-destructive urges is sometimes called the "colonization of the mind."

The empire has fractured him. He lives openly with death and the dead. As the representative of all Gerasa, his theatrics dull and deaden their pain and violence. For our purposes here it is ironic, to say the least, that the Greek name for scapegoat (as Girard points out) is at root the word for drugs, pharmakos.

It need hardly be argued that drug addicts are scapegoated in this country: A New York City councilperson once suggested chaining them to trees, so that passersby could spit on them! There is of course the redundant call, uttered even from the White House, for the enactment of the death penalty in connection with drug cases—and one recalls the notorious public statements of former drug czar William Bennett that he had no problem morally with beheading drug dealers!

Addicts in turn evince the pattern of illicit freedom which is really bondage and self-destruction. Or consider the parallel of the street gangs who demonstrate all the dramatic flash and color of rebellion or revolt, but without political effect; they are beating themselves to death. They effect the consumer trappings of the dominant culture and shoot themselves with its weapons.

With respect to the Gerasene demoniac, it is the most striking instance in all the gospels of a demon being named as a systematic structure of violence and power, in this case the Roman military "legion." (During the period when all the synoptic gospels were written, an entire legion was indeed quartered at Gerasa.) This is a suitable name for the very power that conspires with others to kill Christ.

We should not underestimate the risk Jesus assumes in the encounter with the demoniac. One who cannot be bound rushes out to meet him as from the graves, the realm of death. He is a storm incarnate. The demoniac is a fragmented confusion of conflicting impulse and emotion. Jesus is perceived clearly as a threat, someone with no business here. But he stands his ground and responds in the single-minded authority of love.

They hold a conversation, the Lord asking his name. The spiritual power of domination, the pathology, inner and outer, the mechanisms of scapegoating, the specter of violence are all gathered and present, but they do not obscure the love of Jesus for the demoniac. The power present is overcome, in history and heart, not by will or violence but by grace. Jesus, in the encounter, exposes the power of death and with a word dismantles the scapegoat mechanism. In that is the beginning of freedom and release.

At the conclusion of the episode, the townspeople come out to find the 2,000 drowned pigs and the demoniac "clothed and in his right mind." They are upset and afraid, pressing Jesus to depart the region. It is possible the economic loss of the herd is at issue. (In Acts 16 Paul and Silas are beaten and jailed for an exorcism that costs some slaveowners their hope of financial gain.)

But more likely it's the revolt of a dysfunctional arrangement against new-found wholeness. Such a healing is often less welcome than one might imagine. When the man begs to join the disciples as they depart, Jesus sends him back into Gerasa, to friends and family. "We know from family systems therapy," writes Wink, "what a threat this can mean to a sick system, which must repossess its former victim or find a new victim if it is not to explode."

Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; above all take the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. —Ephesians 6:13-18

Viewing drugs biblically as a principality would seem certain to alter the church's ministry in the whole area. It cannot be said to dictate any particular course of ministry but does imply a change in orientation. What I offer here is merely a suggestive sampling of possibilities.

Confession, for example, rather than condescension or self-righteousness, would need to be more a point of departure. If the drug powers are the shadow children of American culture, then any church bound to the materialist interests of the addictive society will be hard pressed to offer anything more than spiritual cover-ups to the addict community. Insofar as the church itself is functioning as an addictive organization, as some contend, it will afford little in the way of alternatives or genuine freedom. A church that needs enemies and scapegoats will likely be unable to truly love and serve those who have been treated as either.

In the manner of biblical realism, to recognize the drug powers is to be disabused of our naivete. We are well to be disillusioned. Girded with the truth, we get a fuller sense of what we're up against—more than a chemical agent, truly a system and a spirit. The depth and dimension of the struggle are revealed.

The accompanying danger is to become, thereby, disempowered and overwhelmed by despair: Who is like the drug powers and who can fight against them? Wherever the church has struggled with the powers—Nazism, say, or nuclearism, or the demons of racism and sexism, or any similar principality—we have experienced the same temptation to turn away in despair. That, more than anything else, is their power. This is also to say, we are from the get-go thrown upon grace (which is their downfall).

The alternative, long practiced, is biblical illiteracy and theological ignorance. The powers, unseen in their economic, political, and above all spiritual dimension are given free reign. Not to know is bondage. In this sense biblical realism, publicly practiced, is itself a tactic—by naming and exposing the drug powers, their cloak is torn away. Part of God's work in the cross of Christ is this very work of unmasking—the powers are actually prodded into the arena and publicly exposed in the cross.

A certain work of exposure is going on in the relentless, if not obsessive, campaigns of the Christic Institute folks. They have sought, in particular, to expose the collusion of the drug powers and the covert operations. Because of the need for and the inherent difficulty of documentation, it is a variety of exposure that takes on a conspiratorial cast.

Their work, which would benefit from conscious theological reflection, needs to be supported but broadened and expanded by the church. Where can we see institutional and structural collusion? How would the church's gift of discernment bear on understanding the spiritual reality of this collaboration? Can this systemic comprehension make a difference to addicts? To street-level communities? Do gang members know their place in the political economy? Would it make a difference if they did?

An interesting version of street-level exposure has been simply for the community to be a conspicuous public presence on the drug corners (sometimes even with video cameras), shining the light of day on the traffic. Buyers move on and out.

The church probably needs to expose the drug war, which is to say renounce and resist it, at least as officially cast—a militarized assault abroad and a paramilitary one at home. (Indeed, at the height of the drug war's political profile, some Christians were calling themselves "conscientious objectors to the war on drugs.") That war can only be said to have succeeded in the manipulation of consensus. Apart from that political function it is a measurable failure. No surprise to those attentive to the spirituality of the powers. When you fight violence with violence, violence is what increases and prevails. Violence against the drug powers only inflames and spreads and fuels them.

Drawing upon other struggles and other contexts of war, the church needs to claim the charisms of nonviolent battle mentioned in Ephesians. In Philadelphia, a congregation near a notorious drug marketing corner spent time together in prayer and active nonviolence training before undertaking a biweekly prayer vigil on the street. I have written before (see "Discerning the Angel of Detroit," Sojourners, October 1989) about the movement of crack marches in Detroit that have processed through neighborhoods chanting and singing to reclaim them from the pervasive spirit of despair. Such refrains as, "Up with hope! Down with dope!" or "Pack up your crack and don't come back!" resound through the streets.

There is something akin to an exorcism in this, casting out of the neighborhood a pervasive spirit of fear and despair. But exorcisms can be dangerous ventures. Casting out the demons may be readily confused with demonizing people. (Jesus himself suffered such innuendos and accusations.) I have come to appreciate the approach of the Glide Memorial congregation in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. They too have marched chanting and singing on public housing projects, but instead of a pack-up-and-go approach, the challenge has been, "Come on down, it's recovery time." Such an evangelical invitation, which takes the community treatment resources and congregational commitment to back it up, is: Come home, get free.

In Detroit, one of the most successful and intriguing ministries has been undertaken by Joy of Jesus, a charismatic neighborhood ministry with a phenomenal sense of "parish," a neighborhood territory or turf for which they take responsibility. A network of block clubs based on the "principles of Christ" undertakes everything from pastoral referral to housing rehab and economic development. They are building a neighborhood that refuses the cocaine economy.

One can only imagine a city in which all the churches took their "parishes" seriously as turf to care for against the incursions of all sorts of powers, from drugs to gentrification. Joy of Jesus combines this parish mentality with an understanding of drugs as a spiritual power (though admittedly less as a structural or global system), which means they practice a variety of prayer counseling with addicts and their families in which "prayer warriors" are a silent but present part of the counseling process.

In the process they uncover patterns of abuse that go deep, and often back to several generations of dysfunction. They contend that "anything short of dealing with the spiritual roots is simply conformity, to law or will power—trading one addiction for another." At present they are getting secular and community funding for the program, because it's one with a history of success.

Prayer has generally been trivialized or ignored in the struggle with the drug powers. But exercising the common power of collectively praying at all times, in all prayer and supplication, is decisive in the struggle with the powers. In worship, it publicly redefines the possible, names the hope, changes the atmosphere of nonviolent combat, and creates openings for God's activity. Prayer names the enemy and breaks the grip of despair.

In that new atmosphere of parish and with an inkling of the powers, the kid on the street, say, can "just say no" as an individual act of resistance, but one that understands the scope of the powers in their various dimensions and is surrounded by the spiritual and material support of a community. It's the difference between a black woman refusing to give up her seat on the bus because she's tired, and Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat in the clear understanding that she is confronting a whole system top to bottom in that act—and doing it with the spiritual, and eventually political and economic, support of her community. It's the difference between exhaustion and a genuine freedom.

The freedom, of course, goes deeper even than that. What we abide in and require is the freedom that comes from the knowledge that in Christ, the drug powers have already been dethroned and defeated. The deadly cycle is broken. If we know that in theology and ministry and heart, the struggle itself is transformed and wholly different.