This morning I had a conversation with a 15-year-old boy and heroin user who told me that inpatient treatment really wasn’t necessary, or, that he didn’t really want to do it, at any rate. Heroin and various opiate derivatives; old football injury, of course. “Old” being a somewhat relative term when you’re a decade out from the quarter-century mark. It wasn’t really an explanation, it was more of an example, an example of the sort of mindset that can only be trained.

Well, Bud, I said, Here’s the thing about that…

Wisdom following the ellipse. And such a fount of wisdom am I; that foolish sort of self-indulgent wisdom, the kind that should be kept bottled up, left to age. But enough ahead of this mess that I’d almost forgotten what misery it was, at times, to be 15. Only occasionally reminded by some kid who falls in just the same way I’ve done, and when I get down to talk to him, I find the elevation change to be something of a time machine, and I feel right at home. And I sit, yes to comfort, yes to counsel, but sometimes not really, not really to be the adult, not quite so much as to be the kid again, until I stand up and the slacks fall straight; I get the bends for a moment before growing up again in one crack of the lower back and one glance over to the rest of the adults, all somewhat irritated that my little jaunt into the past didn’t stop the present — and they’ve been waiting.

I have a few scattered memories that seem almost like jokes when I talk to a kid going through withdrawals, or maybe one processing a past of incest, abuse, confusion; maybe one who doesn’t remember me at all, after a suicide attempt that, though failing, stole memory, age, time. Less like a joke when I watch a group of paid shrieking harridans, cynically abusing the reality of trauma to compensate for what pathetic artifice of pain they may have experienced as a result of exposure to foreign ideas and uncomfortable contradictions. Or, maybe some of those with some memories like mine, with one key difference.

I remember a castle made of sugar cubes, designed and constructed by a smart but friendless little boy. A little boy who didn’t just build a castle, but rather traveled back to the middle ages for many hours over the course of several days and constructed a whole story. The castle was smashed within minutes of its arrival at school; no teacher intervened, no parents were told, and the little boy certainly didn’t feel himself getting any wiser. I remember digging through a dumpster in sub-zero weather to find a coat that had been torn off and hidden. I remember putting out a small fire that was my science project, ignited in the time it took for one bathroom break. I remember being punched in the back of the head or shoved down a flight of stairs. I remember slowly walking to the front of the classroom in the fifth grade, sharpening a pencil to a point, and telling another kid that if he touched me one more time, the pencil would be buried in his face. I have no recollection of any emotion or intellectual process that would have held me back from carrying out that threat in the moment.

So what’s the difference?

I also remember that boy’s name. I remember every name of these kids who made a significant (or at least a significantly important) part of my life fairly awful. I remember those names, not simply because I was a smart little kid, not simply because I spent those years in a very small town.

I have another memory of that same boy who I threatened to stab in the fifth grade, and that memory is far more recent. Nearly a decade ago, at our 10-year high school reunion, I sat across from him at a table and listened to an account of what he was presently up to. He was a diesel mechanic in Antarctica, and I was fascinated and entertained by his accounts of an amazingly interesting adulthood. I didn’t sit there talking to a kid who had just stabbed me in the shoulder with a mechanical pencil. Rather, an adult whose experiences were all a part of what formed the present, all a part of that learning experience that, when it happens in bursts, we call trial and error, though it is less apparent in the long term. There were only a handful of tables in the room, and of course, I knew every name — most of the names from whatever childhood memories I might have. A great many of those people had long-since become friends and some of them very close friends.

Trial and error are funny like that. It’s a necessary component of so much growth, experimentation, lessons learned the hard way, sometimes discovery. I can imagine the Senate confirmation hearings for Albert Einstein:

Do you remember, sir, that equation – back in 1904 – the one that was wildly incorrect?

Of course, I have more memories than the simple childhood bullying. Adults who behaved as adults ought not, toward myself, my family; many of those adults I never really made up with, and I don’t know whether the still living ones could ever get to that point.

It’s easy to follow the events of a small town, even when you don’t want to. So of course I have, more often unintentionally than not, and something strikes me. Many of those bad experiences arose from something very near to what this country just witnessed in the form of supreme court confirmation hearings. Character assassination, all-out nuclear war, a complete disregard for convention and for personal dignity, a shameless lack of respect stemming from the philosophy that the ends justify the means. It wasn’t anything of national importance, certainly. It happened in a Church, which, I suppose compounds the unexpected, the hypocrisy, the glaring contradictions. It didn’t lead me to believe that God is a fraud and his Church a sham — rather the opposite; that God is pretty good at spotting an area of need, and that a Church made up of humans will experience a great deal, and sometimes even a fatal dose, of humanity.

In the decades that followed, I’ve heard a lot about, well, the fruits borne by those seeds that were maybe not so much sown as hurled. I could go line by line and describe what really does amount to human misery, compounded, perhaps, by miserable humans. I suppose I could arrogantly declare that somehow this is justice … but … that isn’t just wrong, though it is certainly wrong. It is so short-sighted and foolish that it feels easy. That is the lazy way out, it is the crude way out, and it is the hypocritical, self-defeating, disgustingly bitter way out. It may or may not be modern, and it may or may not be presently en vogue, but it requires such cynicism that, well…

… as they say, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Yes, and … I think that statement is somewhat incomplete. It may tell us a little something about rain, but it does not say what it ought to say about man. If only one rain fell, and upon only one person, the rain still falls on the just and the unjust alike. When it rains on me, the rain falls on the just, soaking the unjust, who can only look up and thank God for sparing the lightning.

Conservatism is on the decline in the United States, especially (and most rapidly) among conservatives. Humility still lies at the very heart of conservatism, and grace arises naturally from humility. Grace is on the decline in the United States right now, in a time when our need for grace far outweighs our willingness to give it.

I don’t mean that false humility of self-deprecation for the sake of enhanced virtue. I’m humbled by this award, or, I’m so humbled by this wealth, by my victory, by your recognition of my greatness. I mean the humility that comes when you find yourself confronted with someone else’s weakness, with someone else’s humanity – the humility that comes when you find yourself in the position of needing to extend grace, though you’re tempted not to; when you recognize that to deny this institution to others would weaken it; when you recognize that you need that grace as much as he does.

Conservatism’s humility is not one that arises from virtue, it is one that arises from weakness. Perhaps it arises from a self-interest: the knowledge that if I’m weak, and everyone else is weak, then we had better shackle the lot of us and empower so sparingly as to protect us all from anyone who might be so damned arrogant to think himself virtuous.

It’s a humility we need to rediscover and re-embrace, a grace we need to exercise even when it seems that we are doing so unilaterally. Without it we are fearless, we are ruthless, we are fighters, to be sure. We are strong; as strong as hard-packed sugar, fortified in our sugar-cube castles, confident in our righteousness, confident that this is justice and we are just, and yet…

… the rain still falls.