Vachon Imagined

When I attended Army Staff College, I spent a great deal of time studying war, strategy, leadership, and the men who shaped history. Of the many leaders we studied, one of my favorites was Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant was not a perfect man, but there was something deeply honorable about the clarity of his convictions.

He did not hide where he stood.

If Black Americans were denied freedom, he opposed it.

If citizens were denied their rights, he opposed it.

He believed government had a responsibility to protect those rights, and he was willing to spend his life defending that belief.

There is something admirable about a person willing to stand in the gap between power and injustice.

And yet, one of the observations often made about Grant was that he could be naive.

Not naive in battle.

Not naive in strategy.

Naive about people.

He seemed, at times, unable to fully recognize the greed, self-interest, and ambition that had existed long before he arrived on the stage of history.

The forces he fought were never confined to a battlefield.

They existed in hearts.

In institutions.

In fears.

In identities.

In the human tendency to divide the world into us and them.

Grant succeeded in many ways. He helped preserve the Union. He pushed back against systems that denied freedom and dignity to others. For a time, he advanced the cause of justice.

But he did not win the war on division.

No one does.

Because division is not a territory to conquer.

It is a condition of the mind.

One generation confronts it in slavery.

Another confronts it in politics.

Another confronts it in religion, class, sexuality, race, or ideology.

The names change.

The mechanism remains.

This does not mean justice is meaningless.

It does not mean we stop standing for what is right.

Quite the opposite.

People like Grant remind us that there are moments when conscience requires action.

But even the most righteous cause cannot permanently eliminate division, because the source of division is continually reborn in human consciousness.

Those who stand in the gap can hold the hand of justice for a time.

That matters.

It matters greatly.

But eventually they too must let go.

Eventually they return to what existed before the conflict and what remains after it.

To life itself.

To creation itself.

To the whole.

What Christians might call Christ—not a fragment at war with another fragment, but the reconciliation of all things into one.