Grace Under Fire

“Courage is grace under pressure,” according to Hemingway, but what is grace? Is it saving grace, fall from grace, being in good graces? There but for the grace of God, go I? What are the necessary attributes of ‘grace’?

Grace is the gift of favor

Grace is permission and forbearance

Grace is the gift of poised character through faith

Grace is clemency blended with mercy in perseverance

Often quoted excerpts from President Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage include:

“The true democracy, living and growing and inspiring, puts its faith in the people – faith that the people will not simply elect men who will represent their views ably and faithfully, but also elect men who will exercise their conscientious judgment – faith that the people will not condemn those whose devotion to principle leads them to unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honor and ultimately recognize right.”

again, and this is not bad for a non-philosopher;

“A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”

How faith informs courage is worth exploring. Those who master this quality we call heroes and saints. Those who fail, however nobly, we call clowns and fools. The boundary is unforgiving. That’s why those who have it are gilded with the crown of ‘charisma’. They enact their principles regardless of the personal peril or the approval of others. They become immortal. Those who lack it, no matter how hard they try, fall back into the vast and indifferent crowd. They are soon forgotten. Examples of both surround us today. We need only disconnect from our digital frenzy for a moment to see them. We must look for the advice of what grace is from some literary classics. They form a reliable compass for our own journey. There are four points on the compass of Grace.

COURAGE:

Bravery on the battlefield is the most common understanding of courage, but not all soldiers have grace under fire. Just because you're not a hero, does not mean you are a coward. School children memorize the first stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘IF…’ They mostly rattle it off without much reflection. That’s a pity. This first stanza succinctly expresses the quality of grace we seek.

"If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:"

President Harry Truman exemplified this ‘balance’ aspect of grace with two decisions as Commander-In-Chief. One was his decision to drop two Atom Bombs on Japan to produce its unconditional surrender ending WW II. Then, with equally balanced thinking he sacked the ever popular ‘American Caesar’, General Douglas McArthur who wanted to invade communist China as a way to finish the Korean War with victory. Truman was then, and even now to this day, savagely hated for both decisions. He didn’t care. The plaque on his desk read ‘The Buck Stops Here”. Existentially, he lived up to that presidential principle.

Examples of physical courage from soldiers, first responders, parents and athletes abound. Moral courage, on the other hand, is quite rare as Hemingway wrote and Robert F. Kennedy often quoted without attribution;

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change. — Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961), A Farewell to Arms

MERCY:

"The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. T’is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:"

---The Merchant of Venice Act IV, Scene I

Nobel Laureate Mother Teresa of Calcutta, called Saint by the Catholics, typifies the role of mercy in ‘grace under pressure’ both in her physical life and her spiritual life. Merely describing her physical world where she cared for the most abject and rejected sick and poor would gag a maggot. But filth, poverty, and sickness that surrounded her physically was nothing in comparison to the challenges she experienced in her life of faith. For a long period in her life, she reported a total loss of her faith in God. Her ‘long dark night of soul’ was ultimately rewarded both by mercy and with mercy.

Who among us can imagine dispensing grace through mercy in the very pit of abandonment? Although synonymous with the notion of charity in the world today, she is not without her critics. Easily the most rabid criticism of Mother Teresa is found in Christopher Hitchens' book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A self-described socialist and Marxist, Hitchens argued that Mother Teresa glorified poverty for her own selfish ends and provided a justification for continuing institutions and beliefs that sustained widespread poverty. Both Hitchens and Teresa are dead now. In the minds of us all, who do we suppose is a greater exemplar of the quality of mercy Shakespeare described?

PERSERVERENCE:

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained."

--- Marie Curie

Principled perseverance separates the heroes from the fools. Arrogance, boldness, ambition, and tenacity should not be confused with habitually principled persistence. This is easy to see when comparing two prominent women, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hillary Clinton.

Harry Truman anointed her as ‘The World’s First Lady’. Her core principles, nourished in her youth through a liberal arts education, sustained her for a lifetime dedication through repeated personal failure, social disappointment, and marital infidelity. Her long list of triumphs in women’s leadership in America needs no catalog here. However, one accomplishment receives little notice these days. She helped write the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It was a persistent achievement of a lifetime combining her considerable moral courage with mercy and perseverance. She knew it was the right thing to do, at the right time, for the right reasons and for no personal gain.

This week, Hillary Clinton declared her not so secret desire to join her husband on history’s list of American presidents. She has persisted in this desire at least since she entered the White House as First Lady in 1993.

So, there’s no lack of persistence or perseverance in Mrs. Clinton’s step. Quite aside from her Benghazi fiasco as Secretary of State, a scrubbed email server, and questionable financial contributions to the Clinton Foundation from inimical foreign powers, the only speed bumps in her path seem to be her consistent lack of principle. Instead of a life time of morally courageous acts of mercy her only apparent political qualification is her gender. ‘It’s time for a woman.’ Can easily be the unspoken campaign slogan for her coronation. Opportunism rather than principle is the underlying predicate of her ambition. There is no Eleanor Roosevelt resume of moral leadership she can claim. History will decide which one is the most towering figure in the American women’s leadership pantheon.

FAITH:

"It is not the critic who counts … The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is actually marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows great enthusiasm and great devotions, whose life is spent in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if failure wins out, it at least wins with greatness, so that this person’s place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

— Theodore Roosevelt

It’s no accident that both President Nixon and Charlton Heston title their autobiographies, In The Arena, as homage to Teddy Roosevelt. Belief that you can do it married to a faith that it’s worth doing is transformative grace. It is immaterial. It lies beyond the grasp of science. Even psychology fumbles to understand let alone explain it. Faith allows grace even when reason resists it. It takes grace to permit faith to fly in the face of reason, unafraid. Heston once confided in me, “Celebrity cannot but corrode a person’s character.” I often wondered why he never lashed out at the excesses of his critics. “Faith in God, his family and his country keeps him gracious”, his wife Lydia explained to me on their 50^th wedding anniversary. Just so.