April 26, 2010
 
MANN TALK: There Go I But for the Grace of God
 
By Perry Mann
 
Of those who have attained worldly success, few credit it to God’s grace. There are even fewer who see a homeless drunk and reflect that there but for God’s grace go I. To believe that one’s fate is the result of God’s grace, or the lack of it, is to believe that no one is the master of his destiny and the captain of his fate. And a person of power and position is loath to believe that he is a leaf in the winds of nature and nurture and that the sail of his will is filled with the same winds. Yet the saying persists; and the more imaginative and compassionate, upon seeing a failure often an inner voice says: “There go I but for the grace of God.”
 
What is God’s grace? Indulgence, protection, favor, mercy, help, reprieve and forgiveness rendered by God to man freely and lovingly. Man is too wicked to earn grace, so God renders it to him notwithstanding, owing, say the ministers, to His Son’s sacrifice. But God, it appears, does not render grace as evenly and fairly as He does the rain and sun. If he did, one so favored would have no occasion to say his favored condition is owing to God’s grace and another’s desperate condition is, by inference, owing to an absence of God’s grace. If grace fell from heaven as free from favor as the sun shines upon men, no man would be bereft of it.
 
Since it is hard to conceive of a personal God who would dispense grace arbitrarily and capriciously, then it seems that what one means by grace is fate. There but for the favor of fate go I is nearer the truth, perhaps, than there but for the gift of God’s grace go I.
 
The stimulus for the above speculation about God’s grace and fate is an article relating a philosophical game devised by John Rawls, a Harvard professor. The game goes thusly: A person is given the power to arrange the world in accordance with his principles, procedures, laws, custom, rights, duties, biases and so on and by decree have them imposed upon the world from now on. But on the morrow, the arranger would awake in the skin of another and know not what the condition or status of the other might be. He could go to bed rich, educated, white, male Protestant, American, lean handsome and heterosexual and awake the next day---in world reflecting his decrees---poor, illiterate, black, female, animist, Haitian, ugly, homosexual, or anyone else in any other condition.
 
Would a favored one who exercised such an option devise a fairer and more equitable world than he would devise if he knew that he would awake as himself and in the same advantageous status as he went to bed? Most likely. He would be a fool not to in view of the chance that he would awake as a Haitian or a homeless untouchable on the streets of Calcutta.
 
I repeat: No rational man who planned to exercise Rawl’s option would arrange the world so as to maintain his favored position, because he would not know who he would be tomorrow. He would undoubtedly arrange it in a manner that would be fairer and more just in order to hedge against the eventuality that he would awake a pavement dweller or someone else whose chance of fulfillment is as scant as that of a mangy dog in a pound.
 
He would realize upon reflection that his favored position is not the result of his choices and efforts so much as the result of fate and of his nature and nurture; and that he would be a Haitian but for the grace of God or the favor of fate. Also, he would contemplate that, in a world as it is, no amount of boot-strap effort could elevate him from a Haitian’s or an Indian’s condition to his present favored place and position.
 
Rawl’s game makes one examine his politics and philosophy and causes one to consider how much one’s condition is fate’s doing. And upon one’s reflection about the ramifications of the game, he would conclude that the conservative would become more liberal and the liberal would become more conservative. The reactionary more revolutionary and the converse. Furthermore, one would consider how much fate had played in determining his life and how little he has had to do with what his is, where he is, how he is and why he is, a consideration that would inspire compassion and mercy and stifle dogmatism and self-righteousness.
 
If Jesse Helms, the bigoted senator from North Carolina, had played Rawl’s game and found himself the next day a poor black, subject to the laws, politics, prejudices and economics favored by the former Jesse Helms, could the former senator by dint of diligence and vigor of volition regain his former position in spite of the formidable obstacles lying between the chairmanship of a senate committee and a poor black man with the wrong sexual orientation, wrong politics and religion? Not likely. Would he be amenable to a more liberal agenda? Most likely.
 
If one with omniscience were to study Jesse Helms’ life, his nature and nurture, and how the dice of fate have come up for him, then what he is would be comprehensible and would have been predictable. And it is so for every person. We are not what we will; but we will what we are.
 
I have inventoried myself all my life. I studied my genetic and environmental inheritance and the salient biographical and historical events in my life, and I am not surprised to find that I am what I am, where I am, etc. My mother had a verbal intelligence above average. I benefited from that. Pearl Harbor, that fateful day and one of infamy, had an impact on my life. I lived four years and two days as a soldier and returned unhurt, trained and disciplined.
 
The Great Depression wrote indelibly upon the book of my fate and character and my predispositions and philosophy. Who is master of his destiny and captain of his fate when faced with the tsunamic forces of global depression and world war? Whose fate is not taken from his will and willy nilly shaped for him by the force of events?
 
Therefore, one should be ever conscious that his station is in large part fate’s decree and that his peak position may on the morrow be up-ended by fickle fate, resulting in a visit again, as he descends, with those he met, and often used as stair steps, as he ascended. He should temper his politics and judgments with that thought always in mind. And he should be ever aware, when he sees another in desperate straits, that there but for God’s grace or fate’s favor goes he.
 
* * *
 
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.