Bearing the Image of Dust and Heaven

When the USS Quincy Navy cruiser was torpedoed and sunk in the Battle of Savo Island during World War 2, my grandfather ended up jumping into the dark deep of the Pacific Ocean. Ironically, he couldn’t swim. In the watery field of defeat, debris, and bodies, my grandfather—petty officer first class Earnest W—clung to an empty barrel until he, and hundreds of other survivors, were eventually rescued by other ships. 

At 12, my grandmother Adelyn lost her five-year-old brother; at 15, she lost her mother; and at 18, she sat at the grave of her first husband every day until the town doctor warned her that the grief would kill her if she didn’t leave Southern Illinois. 

She moved to Chicago to work in the steel mills. After the war, my grandfather moved away from his family farm and headed to Chicago too. Ernie met Adelyn in a bar, and they eventually married and had my mother. 

The resilience they exhibited early in their lives is inspiring. But I wonder at what point simply trying to survive becomes the virtue of fortitude we so admire. Or is fortitude an innate attribute in some people that enables them to keep their heads above water—proverbial or otherwise? Maybe fortitude is both something we can develop and a propensity we inherit, like confidence or a love of the outdoors. Could I develop that level of fortitude without making hard choices in hard places? And how hard would those places have to be? Neither my generation nor my children’s have endured the level of hardship a world war creates. I suppose I could just shake my head and lament that my grandparents’ generation—children during the Great Depression, children of veterans of the Great War, and later barely adults fighting a war themselves—is one we will never see again. Will we see fortitude like theirs come out of our own generations? 

My grandparents were hard working, self-sacrificing, generous, and honest. These qualities were no doubt formed in part from experiencing hard times . . . and moving forward. But although my grandfather was kind, he was never playful or childlike. My grandmother clipped tragic news stories from the Chicago Tribune as a way to warn us about the world, as if that knowledge might keep us safe. They believed God was good, but safety and security also became their minor gods. 

Fortitude was a legacy, but not passed down without fear.

Throughout history, the virtue of fortitude has been portrayed powerfully in art—sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. The sculpture “Fortitude” by John van Nost the Younger stands high atop a granite gateway at Dublin Castle. Relaxed and looking casually off in the distance, the young warrior holds a spear upright in one hand; at his feet, a lion cowers. At another gate, this time in Vienna, Fortitude is depicted as a female warrior, standing beside a sculpture of Constance and drawing a sword from the sheath at her side.

If I had been a sculptor in the early 1940s, I might have carved statues of my grandparents at the height of their courageous acts . . .

• A larger-than-life bronze of a young man in uniform, maybe with a tattered and drenched American flag clutched in his hand.
• A young woman, maybe in gray granite, gazing northward; in her left hand, extended slightly behind her, a rose would be slipping from her fingers.

I might have named them Bravery and Resilience. 

But I didn’t know them then, and I am not a sculptor. I’m a writer; I can only describe what I imagine, just as I can only imagine what it felt like jumping into an oil-slicked ocean full of sharks and dying friends or saying goodbye to the three best beloveds of my life before I turned 19.

Instead, I met my grandparents while they were in their 40s and living in a small house in a south suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. They were ordinary people, working nine-to-five as a tool and die maker and a Sunday dinner maker.

As wonderful as it is to picture the people we admire—maybe even ourselves—armored and valiant in the face of adversity, the face that usually looks back at us in the mirror at such times is bloody and bruised. 

When we think of the saints in Scripture, how often do we say “the apostle Paul” with only a slighter fall in inflection than the way we say the name “Jesus”? But for Jesus, Paul “suffered the loss of all things” (Philippians 3:8 ESV). Consider what that great apostle looked like by the time he had finished the race, however well he had run it. He paints this picture of himself and his trials for fellow Christians (2 Corinthians 11:24‒28 ESV):

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

Not exactly inspiration for a marble statue at the entrance of the Pearly Gates.

While fortitude is an admirable quality, in reality, it isn’t pretty. The better we run this race of faith, the more battered we likely will be at the end. 

By the time my grandparents reached their 70s, my grandfather was in a daily battle with brain cancer, and my grandmother, with diabetes, strokes, and incessant worry. 

Cast in bronze, my grandfather could have been depicted as a stout man sitting in a sagging armchair, his head balding and skull dented. My grandmother’s alabaster face would have been more stricken with pain than reflecting the light. 

These aren’t very romantic or inspiring images, and even less so in a culture that has trained our minds to worship a world in soft focus and saturated colors—with blemishes, and even people, erased. 

But this is not the only world we’re meant for; neither are we meant for metal and stone. Instead, “just as we have borne the image of the man of dust,” one day, “we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:49 ESV).

The featured image, “Angel of Grief,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Amanda Cleary Eastep

Amanda Cleary Eastep is the senior developmental editor at Moody Publishers and the author of the Tree Street Kids series for young readers, 8-12. (She blames Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis for dashing her mother’s hopes of having a brain surgeon for a daughter.) Amanda writes in a cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina, but she lived most of her life in the Chicago suburbs. She and her husband Dan have eight grown children and a holler full of wild critters. Aside from gathering around the table with her family to eat and laugh, she finds no greater joy than meeting the Creator in His creation.

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