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Chalice and Blade, 2025, digitally altered photograph by © Jonee Kulman Brigham, Full Spring Studio
Does Love Win? And if so, How?
Does Love Win? And if so, How?
Chalice and Blade
Chalice and Blade
March 7, 2025
By: Jonee Kulman Brigham
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
— Martin Luther King, paraphrasing Theodore Parker
November 6, 2024, the day after the election, I drafted a poem called “Chalice and Blade” to wrestle with the questions: “Does love win? And if so, how?”
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
— Martin Luther King, paraphrasing Theodore Parker
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
— Martin Luther King, paraphrasing Theodore Parker
November 6, 2024, the day after the election, I drafted a poem called “Chalice and Blade” to wrestle with the questions: “Does love win? And if so, how?” I did it as an act of faith – trying to stir up my hope for humanity, and secondly, as a contribution to the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies. The journal is based on the founding scholarship of Riane Eisler and many others who are inspired by her vision of partnership, where caring for mutual well-being is primary – the antithesis of authoritarianism, where power of one group over another for the benefit of the powerful is the goal.
As I felt both defeat and dread on November 6 and afterward, I reached for sources of inspiration and encouragement. First was, Martin Luther King’s famous, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Maybe movement toward a caring society is inevitable, despite the slow jagged line of progress with its setbacks. King paraphrased his claim from abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker’s longer, more tentative statement, which in comparison seems as much a question as an answer.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” – Theodore Parker
Does love win? I wanted the reassurance of King’s conviction--the claim of a just destiny. But I also appreciated Parker’s acknowledgement of uncertainty.
We can look to history to see that arc progressing, even if our vision “reaches but little ways.” But will humans ever fully achieve a caring-centered world in the future? Riane Eisler’s work, that establishes that we used to live under those conditions in partnership-based societies based on mutual benefit, rather than power and control, supports the argument that we can live that way again. That love can win, because it has before.
Eisler uses the symbols of the chalice and the blade in her book of the same name to represent the two ends of the spectrum from partnership to domination. I also used these symbols in my poem, which was inspired by her work and dedicated to her. While I am able to stir up faith that indeed love will win, the question of how is more difficult for me. The way it unfolds in the poem represents a scenario I struggle to believe.
Chalice and Blade
Chalice and Blade
By Jonee Kulman Brigham, 2024
Dedicated to Riane Eisler
Act 1: Innocence
There was a time when love prevailed and filled our golden cup
our chalice ranneth over and filled the people up
we came from Earth, we breathed her sky
her water flowed through you and I
and she provided sun and rain
we feasted on her fruit and grain
although the harvest rose and waned
we shared with love, and shared the strain
Her gifts received without demand,
we lived a story of the land:
the chalice shares with open hand
Act 2: Forgetting
Perhaps one year the rain was low
the harvest small, the feast below
the portions that we used to know
and we forgot our memory of seasons made to ebb and flow
and how the sharing made love grow
And two or three of us had fears
and whispered in each other’s’ ears
that we had better use our powers
by wielding blades to take what’s ours
and in our greed, we took some more
until the others all were poor
and locked outside our pantry door
We used the blade to draw a line
between what’s yours and what is mine
man and woman, white and brown
one is up, the other down
a story to preserve the crown
And so it was throughout the years
the chalice empty but for tears
and right and wrong were based on fears
to hold the story that we made:
the chalice lives to serve the blade
Act 3: Restoration
But the love had never really died
for love is what we are inside
we birth it from a sacred womb
like buried seeds it will resume
like flowers blooming in the snow
the chalice rises from below
embracing everything we made
both love, and fear which wields the blade
And in the golden cup appears
the light of love dissolving fears
erasing lines the blade had drawn
that all the greed was based upon
acknowledging our history’s stain
apologizing for the pain
repairing harms that had been done
to reconcile us all as one
The blade—it slips from open hand
and falls into the fertile land
an open heart lays down the grain
the chalice tears are used for rain
and in the garden, we have made
the blade becomes a garden spade
Perhaps that year the sun was bright
the harvest sweet, a feast of light
and we remembered how to share
and live within each other’s care
and man and woman, white and brown
no longer split in up and down
without the labels that divide
can share the chalice side by side
Remembering the price we paid
we hold the story that we made:
grow the chalice, drop the blade
But, how, actually does love win?
But, how, actually does love win?
In the poem, the image of the ever-larger circle of love – the growing chalice that embraces all, is drawn from my appreciation of Edwin Markam’s epigram, Outwitted.
“He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!”
Yes, I do believe this is a good way to live. At the same time, I am not sure if it “works.” The fantasy of fearful and exclusionary people suddenly melting into understanding for their fellow humans, if only given enough love, sometimes feels like the naiveté of a grade-schooler. Yet many faith traditions hold this sentiment, with the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you reinforcing a loving way of being in the world. (Despite this, many seem to live by a more cynical version of do unto others, before they do unto you.)
Many of us have seen a case of this loving transformation work out. But what about those truly entrenched in domination? The hardened bullies of the world--the authoritarian leaders?
The tension in these questions must have been in the air, because after November I saw more articles about the paradox of tolerance. Wikipedia describes it this way:
“The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.”
In the poem, while I chose the more hopeful line “The blade – it slips from open hand…” there was a part of me that was tempted to express a forceful denial of tolerance, to write something like, “The blade is wrenched from fisted hand…”
If the blade – the tools of domination used by the fearful-turned-mean - is not willingly surrendered, it must be taken. This need not be by violence, nor filled with hate. Like a loving parent, removing the stick from the hand of an angry child who is acting out, the removal can be firm while still holding the primacy of love. “I have asked, and you have not given me the stick. I am taking the stick now. This is not how we behave in our family.”
But is this focusing too much on outcomes? Is it the disarmament of the oppressors that defines love’s win? Is it the way that it is done with a loving heart? What if the dominators are too powerful to disarm. Does love lose?
No. That can’t be. Because we know there are many situations where, at least in the short term, the oppressors cannot be disarmed, even with violence, if a people decided to employ that approach.
Perhaps love wins when we stay loving. Perhaps it is an internal thing. In the poem, perhaps it is not when the blade “slips from open hand” nor in any moment of disarmament. Perhaps it wins because it is who we are inside. And we understand that it wins when we recognize that. When we understand the story of who we are.
Riane’s Answer
Riane’s Answer
I am so fortunate to know Riane Eisler through my involvement with the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies. Her work has shaped how I see the world and act within it. So I asked her the questions that title this column. Does love win? And if so, how?
Here is what she said:
We cannot predict the future, but we can do our very best to shape it.
So while, like all of us who care, I worry about our future, I know that we can each make a difference, and will continue to do what I can so that Love does prevail over fear, and we all recognize that there is the alternative of partnership.
We all want the same thing: caring connection. That, as my book Nurturing Our Humanity, shows is what we know from neuroscience, and just common sense, despite normative stories like "original sin" or "selfish genes" which, while they fight each other, actually tell the same false story about human nature.
We have lacked this knowledge and the frame of the partnership-domination scale. Trauma, and hence denial of reality, is built into the domination stories we have been told.
It is up to us to tell a different story, a true story. I think of the two physicists who got the Nobel prize for their work on entanglement, on the recognition of our inter-connectedness, not the in-group versus out-group thinking that is at the core of the fear and rage against the "other" we see in today's dominator regression. At the same time, there is, albeit in bits and pieces, much movement toward partnership, much challenging of domination, from the movements from racial and gender equality to the environmental movement, challenging our once hallowed conquest of Nature, of our Mother Earth.
As Riane says, the story of who we are as caring beings makes all the difference.
So going back to the questions of this column, I consider some provisional answers for now.
Q: Does love win?
A: It already has. We just need to see that it is our inherent nature to be together in caring connection. We need to see that its opposite -- fear-based domination -- is an aberration, a setback in our destiny. The moral arc bends toward justice, because we shape it in that direction, because on balance, that is who we are.
Q: And if so, how? – How does love win?
A: Love wins when we tell true stories about our loving nature, and dispel the myth of dominator stories as Riane’s life work has done. Stories are self-fulfilling prophecies. They set the stage for actions and shape our dreams of what is possible for the future.
Love wins by remembering who we are.
…
and we remembered how to share
and live within each other’s care
and man and woman, white and brown
no longer split in up and down
without the labels that divide
can share the chalice side by side
Remembering the price we paid
we hold the story that we made:
grow the chalice, drop the blade
Works Referenced
Brigham, J. K. (2024). Chalice and Blade: Dreaming a Partnership Future. Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, 11(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.24926/ijps.v11i2.6506
Carson, C. (2010, September 2). Theodore Parker And The “Moral Universe” (M. Block, Interviewer) [Interview]. https://www.npr.org/2010/09/02/129609461/theodore-parker-and-the-moral-universe
Eisler, R. (1988). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. HarperOne.
Eisler, R. (2025, February 28). Personal Communication (J. K. Brigham, Interviewer) [Email].
Eisler, R. (with Fry, D. P.). (2019). Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford University Press USA - OSO.
Markham, E. (with University of California Libraries). (1915). The shoes of happiness, and other poems; Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page & Company. http://archive.org/details/shoeshappines00markrich
Paradox of tolerance. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paradox_of_tolerance&oldid=1278385760
©Jonee Kulman Brigham
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