By Christine Sunderland @Chrisunderland
Today is Memorial Day, a national day of memory, thanking those who possessed the Classical and Christian virtue of fortitude in their fight for our freedom. Through their courage defending our nation, these men and women ensured peace in our land of law and order. We must teach our children such fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues of the moral life, leading to happiness.
In my novel, The Fire Trail, my main characters all possess fortitude as they face the world in which they find themselves. 
Berkeley, 2014, is beset by crime and chaos, censoring and incivility. Grad student Jessica Thierry witnesses a murder on the fire trail in the hills above the university. She is young to face such an ordeal and yet she does so with fortitude.
Fortitude advances the plot, inspiring and strengthening a character o act rightly. It is a summoning of strength that the reader watches with admiration, a calling for courage and moral desire. We see the challenge and we see the arc that the character must try to scale, as if climbing a rainbow to heaven. Will she have the fortitude to survive? Will others admire her or belittle her?
Fortitude implies more than strength, for it must be summoned. It is not a naturally endowed virtue (are any of them?), and it is a virtue necessary for the other cardinal virtues to thrive – prudence, justice, and temperance. Fortitude sculpts them, providing a means to be prudent, just, and temperate. Fortitude sculpts the character as well, strengthening his or her ability to choose the good and turn from the evil.
Christian novelists tell tales of virtue, creating heroes with fearless fortitude, embodying the Judeo-Christian ethos, the foundation of Western Civilization. @Chrissunderland #ChristianFiction #ACFW #writing Share on X
Fortitude is revealed through suffering, and suffering is the child of love. As Christian writers we portray love as sacrificial, at odds with the modern culture of self-gratification. We enter today’s conversation and ask, “What is the good life? How can I be happy?” We say the answer is to be found in the Judeo-Christian roots or ethos of Western Civilization. We show in our stories how to practice these virtues, to make them habits, and to strengthen them with fortitude, to sacrifice for love, for the good.
In my novel, Angel Mountain, the virtue of fortitude is preached from the mountainside. The earth quakes, fires rage, lightning strikes, and antifa protestors threaten, as the hermit Abram calls for repentance. Abram and his sister, Holocaust survivors, understand survival. They have the fortitude to not only hold onto life, but to make life better for others, to share what it is to be good, to be virtuous.
The saints and martyrs of Christianity and the kings and prophets of Judaism have modeled fortitude for us, giving us a book we call Holy Scriptures that reveals real heroes in the face of suffering. These men and women have created a foundation of virtue called Western Civilization, civilizing the jungle with the Western ethos, traditions, and beliefs.
And just so, on Memorial Day we celebrate the lives of those who inherited fortitude from those saints, martyrs, and heroes going back to Abraham, those men and women who defined the West and its civilized world, calling everyone through the written word, through stories with characters fortified with faith in the face of suffering, in the presence of evil itself.
We are the tellers of those tales, the minstrels who make the music that all can dance to, creating characters fortified by the Judeo-Christian virtues.
Christine Sunderland has authored seven award-winning novels: Pilgrimage, set in Italy, Offerings, set in France, Inheritance, set in England, Hana-lani, set in Hawaii, The Magdalene Mystery, set in Rome and Provence (all Oaktara), The Fire Trail (eLectio), set at UC Berkeley, and Angel Mountain (Wipf and Stock), set on Mount Diablo, east of Berkeley. She is currently submitting The Music of the Mountain, about life and death and life again. She is a member of the Anglican Province of the King. Visit Christine at www.ChristineSunderland.com (website and blog), Facebook, and LinkedIn.