Real Moral Courage
By Charles Rush
April 17, 2011
Mark 11: 1-10 and John 18: 33-38
[ Audio
(mp3, 8.4Mb) ]
the real world, you don't have to wait long for examples of moral cowardice. They don't usually look as heinous as Saddam Hussein being pulled out of a hole in the dirt or the ousted President of the Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo trembling after capture for killing thousands of his people.
Most of the
time, in the people right around us, it looks more like Manny Ramirez this
week, who retired suddenly from baseball after testing positive for steroids
for the third time.[i] He
could have been quite a story, moving to the United States from the Dominican
Republic, the kid from Washington Heights, a terrific athlete that was one of
the best hitters to play the game ever. But he was given to tantrums from
childhood and never quite got over them. Surly, wouldn't talk to the press.
Wouldn't really play defense. Stopped running when he hit a ground ball to
second, sat alone in the clubhouse.
He made
millions, has two World Series rings, and when he was going to have to answer
to steroids -- nah -- he decided to just take the money and run. No foundation
for the kids, no role model at all… He just kind of fizzled out, “Manny being
Manny” they say. God gave him so much. He didn't do much with it, so you forget
about these people because nothing memorable, nothing honorable is attached to
them. It is just not enough.
The men I've
known like this scare me. They invariably don't get it. They don't have it in
them spiritually to see what they could have become. They don't see how their
vision was too adolescent, too focused on just them. They don't realize how
little they settle for and how unfulfilling it is, perhaps especially because
they were still pretty successful by the world's standards.
We worry that
our kids might turn out like this. Parents of teenagers find themselves reading
the details of articles in the paper where our kids take the lower road, like
the Lacrosse team at St. Paul's school in Baltimore when one of the guys showed
a video he had taken of him having sex with a younger girl and all the other
boys just sat there and watched. It is true that boys will just sit there if
porno is on, but you know that there comes a moment for all of them when they
think, ‘this is not a good idea…'. And it is worrisome that none of them voice
that. More worrisome when they evade and feign ignorance upon direct
interrogation. “I didn't know what to do… so I just sat there”.
It is worrisome
because we know that in just a few years, they will be older and the stakes get
greater. We don't want to see them going along with what everyone else is
doing, what Dan Pat Moynihan so aptly described as “defining deviance down”.[ii]
In a few short
year, we know that they could well find themselves, low on the totem pole of
some organization that is running a less sensational version of the breakdown of
normal discipline and protocol like what happened at Abu Grahb. True, it is
unlikely they will be in a war zone or engaged in humiliation, but the culture
that decides to suspend the rules momentarily, that cuts corners in this
particular circumstance because we really need to, the culture that evades
accountability structurally, it is out there…
We know that in
a few short years after that, they may well be sitting around a table at the
investment bank listening to a slick presentation from the latest incarnation
of a deal that can't fail, like the guys at Enron explaining how shells upon
shells upon shells earn assets without liabilities. We know how hard it is to
be one of two voices expressing some reservation when everyone else is saying
it can't fail.
We know that
when they are fully grown and in top positions of leadership, you can always
take advantage of the intern in your White House, and your unresolved
contradictions can lead you to compromise your whole reputation and that of
your Nation in some scheme that is so avoidable and not worth the fleeting
titillation of self-indulgent power.
We know how
tempting and small it is to evade responsibility, to just go along to get
along. We know it is not enough.
The Gospel of
John has this wonderful exchange between Pilate and Jesus. It is set up as a
contrast between the Loveless power of Pilate and the powerless love of Jesus,
the moral cynicism of a man used to dispatching versus the moral courage of a
man sent to save.
Jesus tells
him, “my kingdom is not of this world” or as God says in Isaiah, “My ways are
not your ways”. Jesus is depicted as pure and almost innocent. He says, “I was
born… to bear witness to the Truth.”
And then the line
that all of you have heard so many times in the corridors of power… It echoes
down the decades that turn into centuries… It is a line that you hear regularly
with lawyers aplenty in the room, sometimes in the middle of difficult deals,
sometimes late at night after too many drinks, by the men and nowadays the
women who grind the sausage of actual power, who mainly deal with the real
compromised people and the actual ironies imposed by Trenton and Washington- “What
is the Truth?”
Legal truth you
talking about? Contractual truth? The spinned version of the truth for public relations and
marketing, because you surely can't be asking me to morally parse all of the
perq's and payoffs, all the compromises that had to be made to get around the
obstacles, all the vanities and motivations of the clients involved, all of the
filler that goes with the meat that makes the sausage of this big deal. Please,
that would be an interesting philosophical exercise, as complex as the World
Trade Towers itself, but really, “What is the Truth?”
You don't have
to live very long in the marketplace in any major city to learn to live with a
certain ironic detachment, let alone doing business or living in countries like
Greece, Syria, Pakistan or whole regions like Afghanistan, the Sudan, Libya
shortly…- this list is long-. And you struggle to keep ‘ironic detachment' from
degenerating over the years into a soft jaundice that can morph into a slow
deadening cynicism. “What is the Truth?”
Against all of
the sophisticated, studied ambiguity that surrounds us in the actual exercise
of power, we are occasionally confronted by some prototype of the Christ. And
there are seasons where we might not even seriously engage the confrontation
because we are so immersed in actually managing our hectic-demanding careers
that it is simply not wise to step back and reflect. We can't get removed
enough…
But there comes
the day (or perhaps the days), when we can reflect on the question because we
are asking ourselves the question already. I remember being at a birthday party
one of my fraternity brother threw for his wife in our early thirties. Half a
dozen of us, fooling around with each other, all employed lawyers, managers,
traders… He was teasing his wife's great uncles who were there about the vagaries
of old age, needling one of them pretty good. The other one stands up to change
rooms, and says to us, “I just hope that when you are old you can sleep well at
night because you can live with your conscience.”
Everyone smiled.
World War 2 generation guy, never talked about it… We didn't know what he knew…
but we already knew that he was probably right. You are already asking yourself
that question. Life is short and we can't take our assets with us, just control
and enjoy them for a few decades, so what exactly is our motivation? What
exactly are we doing this for? What really is the point of being here?
You see these
people like Jesus and they seem to have tapped into some deeper well of
meaning. Not only can they live with privations, set backs and very few perq's
that you indulge in routinely, you are certain that they don't have any problem
sleeping with their conscience. They are clearly living for a bigger mission.
Maybe it is too big a mission? Maybe shooting too high is the way to go, you aren't
sure? But, there is something beguiling-no compelling- about their conviction…
You are pretty sure that they are not fretting about ambiguity in their past.
You are pretty well sure that having the courage of your convictions is just
more fundamentally important than a lot of other things, a more grounded,
stable way to live.
Edith Cavell
was one of the early women to lead in making nursing a medical profession,
along with her American counterparts like Florence Nightingale. Before that,
nurses had been caring people, but ignorant about hygiene and medicine. She was
born into the countryside in England but as a young woman trained and opened a
cutting edge hospital in Brussels around 1910. At the time, some of the leading
physicians in the world practiced medicine there.
In August of
1914, the Germans invaded and this is what one of the nurses who worked for her
wrote about that experience.
I shall never
forget the evening before the Germans entered. We went up to the roof of the
clinic and saw the sky toward the east fiery red… It was an awe-inspiring
sight, its effect greatly enhanced by the thunder of the guns, the concussion
of which was so great that windows were broken around us. We were all trembling
with fear. Madame Cavell found me sitting on the landing weeping. She peered
into my face with that powerful gaze of hers…and bade me not give way to my
fears [original text says feelings], telling
me that my life no longer belonged to myself alone but also to my duty as a
nurse. And she finally succeeded in calming me, as she did all the others… she
always seemed to know the proper thing to say…”[iii]
As you might
imagine, this event was very stressful for the English, French and Belgian
nurses. They felt a moral duty to treat all wounded. But with the Germans
over-running their city, they had to treat their enemies who had just blown up
their city. Edith Cavell made the decision to make the hospital a Red Cross
hospital and treat all wounded and in the beginning of the campaign, the
hospital was full of both Germans and Allies.
As you know,
nothing stayed fixed in that war, and shortly the British counter-attacked and
the Battle of Mons ensued. As is so often the case in the fog of war, soldiers
were cut off from their units, stragglers found themselves behind enemy lines,
things got a lot more complicated very quickly.
Edith Cavell
organized her nurses and others to sewing clothes in their spare time. It was
becoming obvious that extra clothing would be necessary when the winter set in
and she wanted to provide. At one point, she even decided to take up a
voluntary collection among her hospital staff to start a small fund to help
with special requests for food that were happening all around her. No one was
anxious to part with their salaries but they did mutually sacrifice.
People often
ask whether that kind of sacrificial giving is taught or if it is just inside
some people. In Edith's case, her biographers would later discover that when
she was a child, her very modest Anglican family would regularly take a portion
of their Sunday meal and take it to the poor. Her very modest Anglican family
would regularly take a portion of their allowances and earnings, and put a
portion of them in a piggy bank to help those in greater need. She was raised
with the values of giving to a wider good, with practices that grounded them in
care, compassion, and making a difference with what you have been given.
Shortly, the
humanitarian challenges of the war became more difficult. A woman came to see
Edith Cavell one night with two English soldiers that were behind enemy lines.
They needed to escape and they asked for her help. Long story short, she gave
them civilian clothes, a small stipend of money, and arranged for a guide to
show them a route towards freedom.
Of course,
English soldiers kept coming. The nurses helped them with clothes, with a small
stipend, eventually false document papers and coordinated the guides. Of
course, the Germans searched the hospital for clothes, sometimes frisking the
nurses on their way to work. Shortly, the Germans started arresting any nurse
found carrying clothes. The stakes became very high personally.
Edith would
sometimes give the soldiers her mother's address and ask them to write and tell
her she was well. Her mother got a lot of letters like this one from
Lance-Corporal J. Doman:
“I am a wounded
soldier and was taken prisoner in Belgium where I escaped… Your daughter kept
us in hiding from the Germans for 15 days and treated us kindly. She got us a
guide to bring us through to Holland and finally we arrived safely in England.
She wants you to know that she is well and that you may visit her.”[iv]
Not that you would want to visit a war zone but you could.
This work
became more risky. Some thought it too risky and suggested suspending it. What
do you do in these situations? What do you do with people coming to you? Every
week, it was getting more dangerous and the questions kept being raised. Edith
Cavell finally said (according to a witness) “Nothing
but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my
doors to allied refugees.”
It is believed
that the Germans had spies in the hospital that she was treating. No one will
ever know the exact story but she was arrested, along with a number of other
nurses on the staff. This was an active war zone, so she didn't get a fair
trial. Allegations were presented as fact. Interrogation was harsh. She
eventually confessed to aiding and abetting the enemy, but it is believed that
her confession was substantially exaggerated by her German translator, as it
looks like a caricature.
She was jailed,
awaiting sentence, with only the Bible and a copy of The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas a Kempis. She underlined this passage: “I labor in the sweat of my
brow. I am racked with grief of heart… and there is none to deliver and save
me, but Thou, O Lord God my Savior, to whom I commit myself and all that is
mine, that you may keep watch over me, and being me safe to everlasting life.”[v]
Nothing else
would save her as it turned out. The sentence came back, “death”. A chaplain
came to deliver the news in her jail and asked her for a final statement for
the nurses at the hospital and her friends. Among other things, she “wished all
her friends to know that she willingly gave her life for her country” and said,
“I have no fear or shrinking. I have seen death so often that it is not strange
or fearful for me.” She concluded, “But this I would say, standing as I do in
view of God and eternity: I realize that patriotism is not enough; I must have
no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.”
And she penned
one last word to a friend in which she said, “try to find something useful to
do (with your life), something to make you forget yourself while making others
happy.”
The next
morning, the German chaplain led her from her cell to a pole outside the prison
where a guard blindfolded her, handcuffed her to a pole, and she was shot to
death. The soldiers later reported that her eyes were full of tears. In light
of the fact that she had reached a point of equanimity before her death that in
effect forgave those around her, even as she lamented everything about it, her
tears have that humane compassion, so to speak, the Heart of God that breaks
for the ironic tragedy that so characterizes our broken world at these moments.
And in the end,
what we remember through this week, as we read through the last days of Jesus
life, is that we had goodness and nobility in our midst, and tragically, we
killed it. In the dramatic reading that is read on Good Friday, when it gets to
the place that Pilate must address the crowd and ask, “What shall I do with
this Man?” all of us say in one voice, “Crucify him, Crucify him”.
We take the low
road. Jesus points the way towards the higher road. And the Edith Cavell's of
the world, they too stand in the breach on our behalf, internalizing the more
profound, the richer way of living. Brian Piccolo once described his values to
a reporter by saying: “My God is first; my country and my family are second; I
am third.” Edith Cavell invested her life like that. And in the end she could
live through difficulty, endure hardship, and even face her own death with
sadness, to be sure, but not with bitterness or regret. She embodied the moral
courage of living by your convictions. She had true grit.
It is believed
that some two hundred soldiers directly owed their lives to her, mostly
identified by letters of gratitude that they wrote to her family. It is hard to
say what radial effect it has on these boys when they became men, that they took
a new lease on life to raise their families and shape them in deeper
appreciation, but it can only be better, more healed…
We have that
power too, more than we know. Rushworth Kidder interviewed a group of thirty
year-old African-American men for show that he was doing on moral formation.
These men all had the same story. They grew up in the Ghetto. They grew up in
incomplete, dysfunctional families. They grew up surrounded by gangs and
criminals and should have been prime candidates for prison at a young age. But
they didn't go to prison.
In fact, all of
them became financially successful. All of them became leaders. All of them got
out and made it. Professor Kidder just asked them ‘how they did it.'. Everyone
had a quite similar response. They would mention a teacher from 4th
grade, a coach, a youth minister who had inspired them not only by their wisdom
but the fact that they quite obviously lived what they were talking about. They
embodied that wisdom.
Professor
Kidder said, “But wait. You've just told me about your schooling, where you had
dozens of dreadful teachers. You've just told me about your large and
dysfunctional family, where hardly anyone seemed to care. You've just told me
about your scores of friends- many now in jail, others now dead- who set the
wrong examples. And now you're telling me that, in the face of that
relentless downdrag of depravity, Mrs.
Smith alone from 4th grade lifted you up?”
They each said,
“That is what I am telling you.”[vi]
My brothers and
sisters, the gospel of John said about Jesus, that he was “the light that
shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” He had an
integrity and purpose that was inspiring to behold. The Romans could shred his
body with torture but they could not extinguish the light of integrity that was
within him. The Romans could kill his body, but they could not stop the light
from illuminating the darkness, even of death.
You can tap
into that light. You can embody that light. You can reflect that light. Set
your life on something better, something higher. Find that more useful way,
something that will “make you forget yourself while you are building others
around you.” You have an awesome power to shape your world to be a better
place. You have an awesome power to fill your people with that light and
authenticity.
[i] I
am presuming that this article is largely accurate as several were written
quite like it. See “In the end, Manny was just being Manny”, by Bill Reynolds
The Providence Journal Apr 12, 2011 01:16PM
[ii]
See his article from The American Scholar,
vol. 62, no. 1, winter 1993, pp. 171-3
[iii]
Brown, Gordon, Courage (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008), p. 20. The
book is written by the Prime Minister of England, a profiles in courage,
featuring the lives of King, Mandella, Aung Sang Su Kyi, etc.. I haven't yet
read enough of the book to recommend it, but the idea is a good one.
[iv]
Ibid. p. 27
[v]
Ibid. p. 31.
[vi]
This was a fairly good book, Kidder, Rushworth M., Moral Courage (New
York: Harper, 2005), p. 275
© 2011
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All rights reserved.