Grant Us Wisdom, Grant Us Courage

In the brief period between the two World Wars and almost exactly a year after the stock market crashed in 1929, Riverside Church held its first church service in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Its high-profile pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote a hymn to commemorate the opening of this sprawling Neo-gothic edifice built largely from the coffers of Standard Oil founder and owner John D. Rockefeller (ironies abound).

As someone who has been commissioned to write the occasional hymn for various anniversaries around buildings or church foundings, the assignment tends to be pretty simple: a celebratory text that gives God thanks and praise for God’s faithful provision and charges the people to live out God’s mission from that day forward in this newly consecrated space. Easy-peasy.

Fosdick apparently had other ideas. As he looked out on a land that had been bankrupted by greed and harrowed by war (with more horrors to come; a month earlier Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party had increased their share in the German Reichstag from 12 to 107 seats), he marked the occasion instead with a clarion call, a declaration of what the church was meant to be and a prayer to live up to that mission.

God of grace and God of glory,
on thy people, pour thy power.
Crown thine ancient church’s story,
bring her bud to glorious flow’r.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour.

Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us,
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days.

Cure thy children’s warring madness,
bend our pride to thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.

Set our feet on lofty places,
gird our lives that they may be
armored with all Christ-like graces
in the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
that we fail not man or thee.

Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore.
Let the search for thy salvation,
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving thee whom we adore.¹For my fellow hymnic nerds, Fosdick originally had the tune REGENT SQUARE (“Angels from the Realms of Glory”). It was the Methodists who first paired it with the now universally used Welsh tune CWM RHONDDA in their 1935 hymnal. Fosdick was less than thrilled with the new pairing. When asked to comment by a Methodist colleague, he tartly replied, “My views are well known—you Methodists have always been a bunch of wise guys.” The evocative fourth stanza, with its gender exclusive language, is almost always dropped in contemporary hymnals.

This hymn has become my anthem in these days, both helping me name the deep sickness and oppression in myself and my country while giving me words to pray when I can’t seem to do more than mutter imprecatory curses and the occasional kyrie.

Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!

Though we try to ignore it or interpret our way out of it, Christ’s way is well documented in our biblical narrative. It is a way that blesses the poor, the grieving, the gentle, the justice-seeking, the merciful, peacemakers, the persecuted (Matt. 5:1–10); and it serves a word of woe to the well-fed rich who are more concerned with comfort and honor than justice and peace (Luke 6:24–26). It is a way that claims that we will be judged in the end by whether we fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned (Matt. 25:31–46). It is a way that teaches radical generosity and models humility.

When immigrants and refugees (or those suspected of being so because of the color of their skin) are dragged from their home and disappeared; when those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are publicly executed; when people go hungry because public assistance and SNAP benefits are used as a tool to punish state leaders who do not give public obeisance to national leaders, there can be no prevarication. Jesus Christ is scorned, and his way is assailed.

And this is not a question of one’s political position or opinion on immigration policies—though these too should be derived from our sacred story. The issues around migration are complex with no easy solutions. Yet, for those who claim the faith of Jesus, there is no biblical warrant or Christian justification for the state-sanctioned terror and abuse we have and are witnessing in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and it is incumbent upon leaders within the church of Jesus Christ to be clear: every person deserve to be treated with dignity and respect as image bearers of the Most High God. When people are instead dehumanized and abused, it is a literal sacrilege—the misuse of the sacred.

It was the church’s silence in the face of such sacrilege that Dietrich Bonhoeffer would decry just a decade later in his Ethics,

“[The Church] was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying to heaven. She has failed to speak the right word in the right way and at the right time…

The Church confesses that she has taken in vain the name of Jesus Christ, for she has been ashamed of this name before the world and she has not striven forcefully enough against the misuse of this name for an evil purpose. She has stood by while violence and wrong were being committed under cover of this name. And indeed she has left uncontradicted, and has thereby abetted, even open mockery of the most holy name…

[She] has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers [sic] of Jesus Christ…

she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victim…she has witnessed in silence the spoliation and exploitation of the poor and the enrichment and corruption of the strong.”

Kyrie eleison.

Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul…

Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore.

These two couplets from the third and fifth stanzas have started to merge in my mind.  Last week, as I read about a 37-year-old nurse shot in the back in Minnesota while lying on the ground under several ICE agents, I could feel that numbness setting in—that sickening thought, “Well, add this one on to the list of the many horrors of our day.”

I simply didn’t want to think about it, nor the Hmong man ripped from his home in the Minneapolis winter in shorts and sandals, nor the hundreds of people languishing and dying in inhumane conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz” because there has to be some limit to the onslaught of death, cruelty, and lies we endure. And as a person with a good deal of privilege and status, that is a more viable option than for those whose lived experience will not let them ignore the violence and fear they have become engulfed within. “Save me from weak resignation, / to the evils I deplore,” I found myself whispering. Don’t let me become normalized to this.

Yet, I do not think this means we must open ourselves up to a 24-hour news cycle, constantly checking our social media stories and watching videos of people being abused and killed to remain sensitized to suffering. Instead, in a system that seeks to terrorize us into numbness or despair, we must claim our right to feel the full range of our humanity.

For anesthesia does seem to be one of the primary ways we deal with this onslaught (Francis Weller calls anesthesia and amnesia the two major sins of the West). And it makes sense. Who wants to feel pain all the time? But there is great danger lurking within this strategy. When we anesthetize ourselves, when we no longer feel the pain we should, we will eventually miss the warning signs pain gives to alert us to the potential of even greater harm. We do not feel the heat from the stove about to scald us. At the same time, we cut ourselves off from feeling those positive emotions like happiness and joy as we should. The anesthetized can feel neither the flame that burns nor the caress that heals.

So, I drink more or eat more, buy more and consume more if I can. I become a person “rich in things and poor in soul,” so cosseted by stuff that I no longer am able to experience the world as I should. It is why I’m becoming more convinced and convicted in my own life that simplicity is the necessary precondition for those who wish to reclaim their full humanity.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour.

These two—wisdom and courage—must go together if we are to face this moment. Courage without wisdom soon becomes rash reaction—an equal and opposite show of unrestrained power that further entrenches opponents and continues the cycle of polarization and violence unabated. “Radical and reactionary live together in an unhappy marriage,” Norwegian poet Tomas Tranströmer wrote, “diminished by each other, leaning on each other.” Wisdom without courage on the other hand becomes a detached quietism—the person always diagnosing the problems but never daring to live into an embodied response that might incur a cost.

Yet, wisdom and courage—that’s where true faith is lived. And in the Christian tradition, this combination of wisdom and courage is incarnate in the person of Jesus. He stood resolutely against all oppressive forces, but rejected using the top-down power of empire even toward just ends. He knew that the struggle wasn’t against flesh and blood, but systemic powers and principalities; and so he refused the temptation to hate any person, even his enemies, for they could have no idea what they were doing.

This did not mean avoiding confrontation or accountability (Jesus was also happy to flip a table!), but if Jesus was indeed the embodiment of God and Love, we must interpret all his actions through this lens. Even Jesus’ anger, then, was an act of love for both oppressed and oppressor. For what could be more loving for both the potential victim and victimizer than to interrupt an act of violence and save both from the subsequent injuries, whether they be physical, emotional, or moral?

In all honesty, I’m not sure how to enact any of this in my own life at the moment. I’m writing in an attempt to figure that out and hopefully at least reorient my compass a bit more toward True North so I might take a few stumbling steps in that direction. I have a sense that this way should be sustainable, communal, and contemplative, but I have not figured out exactly what the means in my own life. Maybe writing is even apart of that work.

But in the midst of the confusion, I still find myself praying:

Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore…
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the facing of this hour.

This piece originally appeared in Dr. Bjorlin’s Substack, Lost in Wonder.

Endnotes

• 1
  For my fellow hymnic nerds, Fosdick originally had the tune REGENT SQUARE (“Angels from the Realms of Glory”). It was the Methodists who first paired it with the now universally used Welsh tune CWM RHONDDA in their 1935 hymnal. Fosdick was less than thrilled with the new pairing. When asked to comment by a Methodist colleague, he tartly replied, “My views are well known—you Methodists have always been a bunch of wise guys.” The evocative fourth stanza, with its gender exclusive language, is almost always dropped in contemporary hymnals.