For Heroes Proved
I’m at a loss for words-—at least words of my own invention and ownership. Watching more TV news than normal, listening to more media talking heads, hanging onto the explanations of a president, his staffers, military and State Dept. spokespersons, and taking in more film footage of the Herculean extraction underway in Kabul—I don’t know what to say. It is mind-boggling and sense numbing, reawakening feelings buried in memory’s vault, feelings that washed over me on 9-11, during the Iranian hostage ordeal, and over a heart-breaking weekend in November, 1963, when I was far too young to comprehend all that was going on.
Oh, I have my opinions, just as I’m sure you do as well. Many come from that critical place in my judgment where I wonder what is really happening, why it is happening now instead of before or later, and how we now find ourselves in such a predicament. Trying to be fair to those on the ground and in places where decisions are made, I must weigh each thought and temper my surges of emotion. My rather distant vantage point, and my narrow grasp of the unfolding situation makes me cautious in my analyses and careful in my conclusions. Yet my feelings of disbelief and aggravation at what is playing out before our eyes are hard to mute.
As a student of history, and a firm believer in the instructive and healing wisdom of those who walked this earth before our arrival, I listen for words that I may appropriate and possibly substitute for my own. A number of them have been on my mind this week, four of which I commend to your reflection:
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” They certainly are today, as they must have been in 1776 when Thomas Paine, who likely never heard of Afghanistan, used them to open his influential pamphlet, The American Crisis. As an estranged Englishman taking refuge in colonial America, he proved that the pen was, at least, as mighty as the sword. His first broadside against the mother country, Common Sense, helped inspire the Declaration that remains a cornerstone of our republic. In Crisis, Paine bolstered the spirits of Gen. George Washington’s beleaguered army as they hunkered down for the winter at Valley Forge. With bodies and souls tried and tested as few of us can imagine or ever endure, Paine’s words, read to them by their commanders, helped spark the courage they needed to fight another day.
Katherine Lee Bates was a 33-year old English professor when her literary imagination took wings while she gazed across our country’s vast open spaces that stretched far below her on Pike’s Peak’s lofty summit. What she left us in verse, wedded so beautifully to Samuel Ward’s touching melody, has become one of our most beloved national hymns. While I continue to be uplifted by spacious skies, pilgrim feet and patriot dream, it is the third stanza of her 1911 poem that has been playing nonstop in my mind this week: “O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life.” Could any words more truly capture what we are asking of our military today? If ever heroism is being proved, it is in this strife-torn land. If ever we wonder where heroes yet walk the earth, we need only look to those men and women who have placed their love of country and their merciful compassion for others above their own lives.
I say this with a degree of hesitancy, as caricatures of heroes surround us at every turn, creations of Hollywood, Dell, and big-time sports entertainments. Heroes anointed by public acclamation should never be confused with heroes proved through valorous deeds. The late Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime studying the universal human impulse to make sense of reality through ritual and story. Central to those mythic narratives is the hero, whom Campbell identified in every tradition and culture he explored. His description of the heroic is worth our hearing right now: “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” While feats of strength and supernatural talents may stir the juvenile imagination, it is only when we see courage under fire, and sacrifice for more than self, that heroism rises above celebrity. Firefighters and passengers on doomed airplanes redefined the heroic on 9-11. Nurses and doctors continue to do so in the pandemic. And now, as we watch from afar, the heroism of men and women, thirteen whose flag-draped caskets came home this weekend, deserves both our gratitude and our emulation.
These are, indeed, times that try all of our souls. They are times that call from us the very best of our intelligence, perspective, self-control and determination. They summon us to march, shoulder-to-shoulder with pilgrims whose footsteps once beat a thoroughfare for freedom. They compel us to dream along with patriots whose vision of our purpose and destiny sees beyond both our years and our tears.
I’ll conclude with a fourth quote, this one attributed to one of the most significant political figures of the last century. Few people donned the mantle of leadership with more verve and passion than Winston Churchill. Over more than 50 years of military and political service to his country he garnered both praise and scorn. Yet in the bleakest of hours his unflappable courage and resilience inspired both his country and his slow-to-act allies across the Atlantic. “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.”
In these times of our lives, trying as they are, may the witness of heroes proved empower us with the resolve, the wisdom and the courage to endure and to overcome.
