In trying to untangle the onslaught of Trump’s cruelty I read Mariann Edgar Budde’s book, How We Learn to be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith.

In an example of perseverance, she writes about a sermon she heard given by the late Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes.  He spoke of Ernest Gordon who wrote the memoir of his three-year captivity in a Japanese prison camp that was made into two films, The Bridge on the River Kwai and To End All Wars.  At first Gordon and his fellow captives were very religious and prayed and expected that God would rescue them.  Many died and others became disillusioned and stopped praying and believing, but then, “something shifted as they responded to the needs of their fellow prisoners, as they cared for and protected them and witnessed others sacrificing their lives in love.”

They began to speak about God in their midst.  “This was not a revival of religion in the conventional sense, but rather the discovery that faith was not what you believed but what you did for others when it seemed you could do nothing at all.”

Budde then writes about Reinhold Niebuhr who wrote what we now know as the Serenity Prayer. Niebuhr also wrote:

Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing that we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

David Whyte writes about courage.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.