Why magnificent people intercede with mercy and love.
There is a woman I know who drives forty-five minutes each way, twice a week, to sit with her aging mother. Her mother doesn’t always recognize her anymore. She goes anyway. She brings her mother’s favorite flowers, the ones that smell like summer, and she holds her hand through the fog of dementia, talking softly about nothing in particular. She does not consider herself heroic. She would probably laugh if you called her that. She is simply doing what love asks of her.
What she is doing has a name. It is intercession.
Most of us don’t think of it that way. When we hear the word intercession, we picture something formal and spiritual — a saint kneeling in a cathedral, a mystic deep in prayer, someone petitioning the divine on behalf of a suffering soul. These images are not wrong. They point toward something real and ancient. But they are incomplete. They leave out the woman driving across town with carnations on her passenger seat. They leave out the father pacing the hallway at two in the morning while his teenager is out past curfew. They leave out the coworker who quietly stayed late to help you finish a project you couldn’t face alone.
Intercession is far bigger than its traditional definition. And once you learn to see it, you will find it everywhere.
What Intercession Actually Means
Traditionally, intercession has been understood as praying for another person, pleading on another’s behalf, or being used by God to help an individual or group of people. These definitions capture an important truth: an intercessor willingly acts on behalf of another. There is always a someone who is willing, a someone who is struggling, and a gap that the intercessor crosses to close the distance between them.
This chapter is not rejecting that understanding. It is expanding it.
Because the same essential pattern — a willingness to bear a personal cost in order to act on behalf of someone else — shows up everywhere human beings gather. It shows up in kitchens and classrooms, on phones at midnight, in traffic jams where strangers help push a stalled car to the shoulder. It shows up in hospital waiting rooms and at dining room tables and in the grocery store when someone quietly pays for the person in front of them who came up short.
Here is the working definition this chapter will use: “To intercede is to willingly take action on behalf of another person despite a personal cost.” That’s it. No ordination required. No extraordinary spiritual gifts. No certification in heroism. Just the willingness to see someone else’s need and step toward it even when stepping forward costs you something. This definition opens a door. Walk through it, and you realize that intercession is not an exotic phenomenon. It is one of the most common experiences of human life.
It Is Already Happening All Around You
Think about the last week of your life. Think carefully. Someone in your orbit almost certainly lost sleep because of a concern that wasn’t their own. A parent who lay awake listening for the sound of their child’s breathing. A spouse who stayed up worrying about a partner’s job situation. A friend who couldn’t quite settle because they knew you were hurting.
Someone made an inconvenient choice on another person’s behalf. The colleague who rearranged their schedule so a teammate could make it to their kid’s recital. The neighbor who shoveled the walk of an elderly woman down the street even though it wasn’t their responsibility. The stranger who waited, umbrella in hand, to walk an elderly man safely across a slick parking lot.
Someone offered a word that cost them something. A compliment given to a struggling student by a teacher who took the extra sixty seconds to notice. An honest piece of feedback offered by a friend who risked the discomfort of honesty because they cared too much to stay silent. An apology made before it was deserved, because someone decided the relationship mattered more than being right.
Someone answered the phone. That last one might seem small, but it isn’t. When you answer the phone at midnight because your friend is in crisis, you are crossing a threshold. You are giving your sleep, your peace, your private hour — and you are handing it over freely because someone you love needs you. That is intercession. It is love made audible.
Intercession is not rare. It is one of the most common things human beings do for each other. We simply don’t have a good habit of naming it.
A parent losing sleep for a child. A spouse who quietly sacrifices their preference for their partner’s happiness. A teacher who stays after the bell rings because one student still doesn’t understand. A therapist who holds another person’s suffering in their hands and sits with it, hour after hour, week after week. A friend who tells you the truth you needed to hear even though it was awkward. Someone who brings cookies to the mechanic’s shop as a thank-you for going above and beyond. Someone who leaves an encouraging note for a stranger. Someone who stands up in a room full of people and says, “That’s not right,” when a person who can’t defend themselves is being treated unfairly. All of it counts. All of it is love in action. All of it is intercession.
The Cost Is Always Real
Here is what separates intercession from ordinary transaction: it always costs something. Not always dramatically. Not always visibly. But always something.
The costs of intercession come in many forms. Time is one of the most common. When you give your time to another person’s need, you are spending something genuinely finite, something you cannot get back. Energy is another. Emotional labor — the work of holding space for someone else’s pain, of listening without fixing, of being present when you yourself are tired — is real labor. It depletes. It takes something out of you.
Intercession can cost comfort. It asks you to move toward difficulty rather than away from it. It can cost convenience, which is the modern luxury we guard most jealously. It can cost you certainty, because often you act without knowing whether your action will matter, whether it will be received, whether the cost will ultimately be worth it.
And then there are the larger costs. Reputation. Relationships. The willingness to be misunderstood or criticized or dismissed. The risk of embarrassment. The chance that you’ll step forward and be rejected. The possibility that your sacrifice will go unnoticed, or worse, be resented.
At the far end of the spectrum, intercession can cost freedom. Health. Safety. In the rarest and most extraordinary cases, it costs everything. But here is what is crucial to understand: the value of intercession is not measured by the size of the sacrifice.
When a woman brings cookies to a mechanic who was unexpectedly kind to her, she is giving something real. When a parent stays up through the night with a sick child for the fourth night in a row, she is giving something real. When a teacher takes an extra twenty minutes to help a struggling student understand a concept that is going to matter for their future, that teacher is giving something real.
The magnitude varies enormously. The principle is exactly the same. A small act of intercession and a large one are made of the same material. They are both expressions of the same fundamental willingness to let someone else’s need matter enough to act. The cookies and the sacrifice that changes history are kin. We do a disservice to ordinary intercessors when we suggest that their acts don’t count because they aren’t dramatic. They count enormously. They are the daily architecture of a functioning human community.
Why Magnificent People Keep Showing Up
Here is a question worth sitting with: why do some people repeatedly choose to bear costs for others? What is it in them?
Love is the most obvious answer, and also the truest one. When you love someone — really love them, not the warm feeling but the choosing that love requires over and over again — you become someone who is willing to be inconvenienced by their needs. That willingness is not weakness. It is one of the purest expressions of what love actually is.
But intercession isn’t always driven by romantic love or family love. Sometimes it is conscience. The quiet internal voice that says this is not right, someone should do something, and the uncomfortable recognition that you are the someone. Sometimes it is compassion, which is empathy that has been moved to action. Sometimes it is duty. Sometimes it is loyalty, the bone-deep kind that doesn’t calculate but simply shows up. Sometimes it is faith — the belief, however arrived at, that standing on behalf of another person is what one is here to do.
What is interesting is that for many magnificent people, the calculation shifts over time. The question is no longer whether intercession will cost them something. Of course it will. The question becomes whether the cost of not acting has become greater than the cost of acting. This is worth pausing on.
When you find yourself unable to walk away from someone’s suffering. When you can’t sleep because you know something is wrong and you have the capacity to help. When the passive option — the option of simply not getting involved — has become heavier than the active one. That is when intercession often happens. Not because the cost has disappeared. But because the cost of remaining passive has become intolerable.
This may be one of the most misunderstood aspects of intercession. When we look at people who make extraordinary sacrifices, we often assume they must have possessed extraordinary courage. We imagine them carefully weighing the costs and then nobly choosing the harder path. Sometimes that happens. But often something else occurs.
The person reaches a point where walking away becomes more painful than stepping forward. The parent cannot ignore the suffering of their child. The friend cannot pretend they do not know someone is hurting. The teacher cannot watch a student struggle without trying to help. The spouse cannot remain indifferent to the needs of the person they love.
The sacrifice is still real. The cost is still real. The fear is still real. But the cost of doing nothing has become greater.
At some point, love changes the equation. Intercession is no longer a question of whether helping will cost something. It becomes a question of whether one can live with themselves if they do not help. For many magnificent people, that answer becomes increasingly clear.
Magnificent people often don’t act because it’s easy. They act because it has become impossible not to. That is a particular kind of love. It is love that has moved past preference into something that feels more like oxygen. Something necessary. Something without which you cannot quite be yourself.
Fear Lives Here Too
There is a persistent myth about people who intercede, especially those who do it in large, visible, costly ways. The myth is that they are fearless. That courage means the absence of fear. That the person who steps forward when everyone else steps back does so because they somehow don’t feel what the rest of us feel. This is almost never true.
The parent driving their child to a difficult conversation feels anxiety. The friend who decides to confront someone they love about a destructive pattern feels dread. The person who stands up in a meeting and says something unpopular feels their heart rate accelerate. The volunteer who moves toward crisis feels, at least in some moments, the pull of the easier option.
Fear is present. Doubt is present. The very real possibility of failure, embarrassment, or rejection is present. Intercession does not require these things to be absent. It only requires that something else be present alongside them — something that matters more.
This is what courage actually looks like. Not the absence of fear. Not the certainty that things will work out. But the willingness to move forward anyway because something — love, conviction, conscience, loyalty, faith — is louder than the fear.
Doubt is also part of it. Many intercessors act without knowing whether their action will work. The therapist doesn’t know if this particular session will be the turning point. The parent doesn’t know if they are handling this right. The friend who stays on the phone until three in the morning doesn’t know if it made a difference. They act because not acting felt worse. Because love, in many of its forms, keeps showing up even when certainty is nowhere in sight.
This is actually comforting, when you let it be. It means that intercession doesn’t require you to have everything figured out. It doesn’t require you to be fearless or certain or superhuman. It requires something more available than all of that: it requires that you care enough to try.
Why They Move Us
We all know the experience of watching someone intercede and feeling something shift in our chest. There is a quality to it that is almost hard to name — a recognition, maybe, or a kind of hope. Why does it move us so much?
Part of it is courage. When we watch someone step toward difficulty rather than away from it, something in us responds to that. We recognize what it costs. We know what it would have been easier to do. And we are moved by the fact that they did it anyway.
Part of it is visibility. Love is sometimes invisible — felt but not seen. But intercession makes love visible. It takes what might have remained internal and moves it into action in the world. When someone intercedes on your behalf, you can see the love. You can feel its weight. This is why acts of intercession often feel more significant than words of affirmation. They are love that has taken a form. They are proof.
Part of it is conviction. There is something magnetic about a person who acts from their deepest values. Not because they are performing their values, but because their values have become so integrated into who they are that acting on them is simply what they do. We are drawn to this. We admire it. We want it in our own lives. And part of what moves us, I think, is that intercessors refuse to live a beige life.
They are willing to risk embarrassment. They are willing to risk rejection. They are willing to be wrong, to fail, to look foolish, to lose something, because something else matters more. They step forward when everyone else is carefully maintaining their position. They stake something real. And whether or not their specific act works out, the willingness itself is beautiful.
We admire it not just because it benefits others. We admire it because it represents a way of being fully alive — a refusal to live at a safe, managed distance from the things that matter.
Love Cannot Exist Without It
Here is a question that deserves honest reflection: can enduring love exist without intercession?
Think about the relationships in your life that have genuinely sustained you. Think about the friendships that have lasted decades, the partnerships that have deepened rather than flattened over time, the parent-child relationships that have survived adolescence and distance and disagreement and change. What holds them together?
It is not the easy parts. The easy parts are pleasant but they are not the architecture. What holds enduring relationships together is the willingness, demonstrated again and again across time, to bear a cost on behalf of the other person. To show up when it is inconvenient. To stay in when leaving would be simpler. To give when you are already tired. To choose, deliberately and consciously, to let their need matter enough to act.
Marriage without intercession is just a pleasant arrangement that lasts as long as it remains comfortable. Friendship without intercession is really just a social convenience. Parenting without intercession — if it were even possible — would be closer to management than love.
The sacrifice doesn’t have to be dramatic. Most of the intercession that holds relationships together is quiet and ordinary. The partner who gets up early to make coffee because they know the other person has a hard day ahead. The friend who shows up with food after a loss without being asked. The parent who bites their tongue and doesn’t say the thing they could say because saying it would damage the relationship they are trying to protect. These are not headlines. They are the daily maintenance of love. But they are intercession. And without them, love does not grow. It does not deepen. It finds its own level and it stays there, comfortable and uninvested.
The moment love asks something of you — and it always eventually does — you are standing at the threshold of intercession. What you do with that moment shapes what the love becomes.
The Architecture Nobody Talks About
There is a way of thinking about intercession that I find both clarifying and a little humbling. Consider everything in human life that we genuinely admire. Consider what we mean when we talk about magnificent people, magnificent communities, magnificent achievements in the realm of human care. Peel back the surface of any of it and you will find intercession underneath.
Service is intercession. Every act of genuine service involves a willingness to prioritize someone else’s need over your own convenience. Compassion in action is intercession — feeling moved by suffering and then actually moving, actually doing something, actually crossing the space between yourself and the person who needs you. Courage — real courage, not bravado — is almost always intercession, because it almost always involves bearing a cost on behalf of someone or something that matters.
Loyalty at its deepest level is intercession. Not the easy loyalty of good times, but the loyalty that shows up in the hard seasons, that costs something, that refuses to abandon a person even when abandoning them would be the rational, self-protective thing to do. This is why loyalty moves us the way it does. It is intercession in the form of fidelity.
Remove intercession from a community and watch what happens. What you are left with is a collection of people managing their own affairs in reasonable proximity to each other. Which can be functional. But it is not magnificent. Magnificence in human community is built from the accumulated intercessions of people who were willing, again and again, to bear a cost on behalf of each other.
This is what I mean when I say that intercession is a load-bearing structure. It is not one virtue among many. It is the architecture that allows many other virtues to stand. Take it away, and much of what we call beautiful in human life has no foundation to rest on.
The Spectrum, From Small to Extraordinary
Intercession exists on a continuum, and it is worth walking its full length. At the everyday end, there is the woman bringing cookies to the mechanic. There is the coworker who covers for you without being asked. There is the neighbor who notices that your newspaper is piling up and calls to check in. There is the friend who texts you the exact right thing at the exact right moment — and you later learn they had been thinking about what to say for twenty minutes before they sent it. There is the stranger who holds an elevator door even when they are in a hurry, who smiles at a child who looks frightened, who leaves a generous review for the small business that treated them well.
These are real. They cost something — time, attention, thought, a small override of self-absorption. And they matter more than we typically credit them for. They are what holds the fabric of ordinary life together.
Moving along the spectrum, there are the sustained intercessors. The parents who give years of their lives, cheerfully or grimly or somewhere in between, to the project of raising a human being. The teachers who carry their students with them long after the school year ends, who worry about specific kids on summer mornings, who write letters of recommendation and show up to graduation ceremonies for students who have no family coming. The therapists, the social workers, the hospice workers, the caregivers — people who have chosen professions organized around the bearing of costs on behalf of others.
And then there are the extraordinary cases that follow: mercy moments, hunger strikers, and civil rights workers who marched into water cannons and billy clubs because the alternative — passive acceptance of injustice — had become impossible for them. The intercessors and activists, across history and across causes, who gave years of their lives, and sometimes their lives themselves, to something larger than their personal comfort.
Theological Extremes
In Christian theology there is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a “Mercy Moment.” A Mercy Moment occurs when a person is used by God to offer mercy and love to an individual who many would call evil. One of the most well-known examples striking the intersections of intercessory mercy and criminal transformation in modern history involves David Berkowitz, the notorious “Son of Sam” serial killer who terrorized New York City in the 1970s. Shortly after his arrest in 1978, prison minister Don Dickerman wrote Berkowitz a letter with the simple message that God still loved him and that Jesus could save him — to which Berkowitz responded with a death threat. That act of persistent, unilateral mercy — extending grace to a man who rejected it with contempt — planted a seed that would take a decade to germinate.
In 1987, prompted by a fellow inmate who kept reminding him that Christ stood ready to forgive no matter what a person had done, Berkowitz claimed that he read Psalm 34 one night in his cell and described the experience as feeling a heavy, invisible chain that had bound him for years suddenly break. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity, identifying as a Messianic Jew, and his transformation proved enduring — so complete that when he became eligible for parole in 2002, he wrote to the governor of New York asking not to be released, declaring that he believed he deserved to remain in prison for the rest of his life. Now known as the “Son of Hope,” he serves as a prison elder and worship leader, ministers to inmates in mental health housing, and testifies that no one has done so much evil that God cannot forgive them. This arc — from murderer who threatened to kill the man offering him mercy, to servant who embodies that same mercy for others — stands as one of the most theologically arresting examples of what intercessory love, patiently held, can ultimately unlock in even the most hardened soul.
There is another, more common type of Mercy Moment Intercession that many Christians believe occurs every day. Christian theologians assert that ordinary believers are regularly used by God to extend love and mercy to people who possess a predatory nature. If that love and mercy are accepted, the individual repents and turns toward Jesus Christ. But an even more intriguing belief follows: when the offer of love and mercy is rejected, a different mechanism is said to occur. According to this view, the person is no longer able to prey upon others with the same degree of success as before. The Mercy Moment Intercession is therefore understood not only as an opportunity for redemption, but also as a means of protecting future victims and preventing further harm.
Hunger Strikers
A hunger strike is a deliberate and non-violent method of protest where a person refuses to eat, and sometimes drink, for a prolonged period. It is typically used to draw public attention to a cause, demand policy changes, or protest against perceived injustices and mistreatment. The first recorded hunger strike dates back to ancient India, around the 5th century BCE, during the time of the Mahabharata. Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient Indian literature (the other being the Ramayana).
Hunger strikers are intercessors because their voluntary suffering—rooted in traditions such as the Mahabharata’s vrata and the Irish practice of Troscadh—embodies a sacrificial moral and spiritual stand against injustice, much like biblical or mystical intercession. By fasting, they symbolically “stand in the gap” for others, using their bodies as living appeals to conscience, divine justice, or societal change, mirroring the self-offering of prophets, saints, and spiritual warriors throughout history.
The American Suffragettes
The American suffragettes of the National Woman’s Party were, in the most profound sense, intercessors — women who placed their bodies between injustice and an entire sex, willing to suffer so that others might one day be free. Beginning in January 1917, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, some 2,000 women known as the “Silent Sentinels” picketed the White House for two and a half years, bearing signs calling on President Wilson to support suffrage and shaming him for his hypocrisy. When arrested on trumped-up charges of “obstructing traffic,” they refused to accept the premise of their criminality and demanded to be treated as political prisoners, launching hunger strikes to protest their treatment — after which guards force-fed them by holding them down and shoving tubes up their noses or down their throats.
The darkness reached its apex on the night of November 14, 1917, when prison guards at the Occoquan Workhouse brutalized the women with savage force — twisting arms, slamming bodies over iron benches, and handcuffing Lucy Burns with her hands above her head all night — an event that became seared into public consciousness as the “Night of Terror.” Yet it was precisely this willingness to absorb unspeakable cruelty without abandoning their cause that broke open the nation’s conscience: news media brought these stories of state brutality to the public, the electorate began sympathizing with the Sentinels, all women were released by November 28, and the following January President Wilson announced his support of woman suffrage — a cascade of events leading directly to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Like all true intercessors, these women did not merely argue for justice; they became its living price.
The 1981 Irish Hunger Strikers
The 1981 hunger strike in the H-Blocks of HM Prison Maze — known also as Long Kesh — stands as one of the most agonizing and consequential acts of mass intercession in modern political history. Its roots lay in 1976, when the British government abolished the “Special Category” status that IRA prisoners had previously been granted, which had allowed them, among other things, to wear their own clothes — a concession whose removal they experienced as a deliberate act of criminalization, stripping them of the identity of political combatants and reducing them to common criminals.
The protest began as early as 1976 when prisoners went “on the blanket,” refusing to wear prison uniforms and going naked or wrapped in blankets when authorities removed everything from their cells; it then escalated into the “dirty protest” of 1978, in which prisoners smeared their cell walls with excrement rather than submit to a system they refused to legitimize.
By 1981, having exhausted every other avenue, the prisoners arrived at the most terrible instrument available to the utterly powerless: their own bodies, offered unto death. The five demands for which they were willing to die — the right to wear their own clothes, to refuse prison work, to free association and education, to regular visits and correspondence, and to full restoration of lost remission — were not extravagant. They were the minimum acknowledgment that a human being imprisoned for political conviction is not the same as a man imprisoned for theft.
On March 1, 1981, Bobby Sands — the IRA’s Officer Commanding in the H-Blocks — refused food, and he was followed by 22 men, each joining the strike one at a time at staggered intervals, a strategy designed to sustain media attention and maximize the moral weight of each death as it came. What unfolded over the next eight months was a via dolorosa of ten individual deaths, each man’s slow extinguishing a separate act of witness. Bobby Sands died on May 5 after 66 days; Francis Hughes on May 12 after 59 days; Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara together on May 21 after 61 days each; Joe McDonnell on July 8; Martin Hurson on July 13 after only 46 days, his body surrendering faster than the others; Kevin Lynch on August 1 after 71 days; Kieran Doherty on August 2 after 73 days — the longest endurance of all; Thomas McElwee on August 8; and Michael Devine on August 20 after 60 days.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had the authority to meet the men’s demands, never wavered, declaring flatly: “Crime is crime is crime. It is not political.” Against that iron refusal, ten men placed their lives — and lost them.
Yet even as the dying was happening, something extraordinary broke through the wall of Thatcher’s intransigence. On April 9, while still on hunger strike, Bobby Sands was elected a Westminster MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in a by-election, which focused the world’s media on the strike with an intensity the British government had not anticipated. New York City mayor Ed Koch urged Britain to withdraw from Northern Ireland, and the International Longshoremen’s Association announced a twenty-four-hour boycott of British ships entering US ports — the suffering of ten men in a prison in County Antrim rippling outward into the conscience of nations. The republican movement gained a great deal of international sympathy, and 100,000 people lined the route of Bobby Sands’s funeral. The strike concluded in October 1981 as families began intervening to authorize medical care for the remaining strikers — an act of love that ended the fast but could not undo its cost.
The political aftermath of the hunger strikes rewrote the landscape of Irish nationalism in ways that continue to reverberate today. In the wake of the strike, Sinn Féin (Ireland’s democratic socialist party) emerged from the shadows of the IRA to become a serious political actor in its own right, having learned in those terrible months that suffering witnessed is suffering that votes.
Bobby Sands’s election as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone delivered an electoral boost for the republican movement that transformed its strategic calculus, and shortly after the strike ended, the British government quietly granted concessions meeting most of the five demands — the very demands for which ten men had chosen to die rather than abandon. The hunger strikers did not live to see their vindication. But in the tradition of all true intercessors — those who stand in the gap between what is and what ought to be, offering their own flesh as the argument — they purchased with their deaths a shift in the moral and political order that no living negotiation had been able to achieve.
Bobby Sands’s election to Parliament while on hunger strike was a seismic event. It demonstrated that republican candidates could win votes as well as fight with weapons. Many historians view the hunger strike and the ten men’s sacrifice of their lives as a turning point that accelerated Sinn Féin’s move toward electoral politics.
Magnificent Intercessors
All of these examples are the most severe imaginable. Yet, there is something almost incomprehensible about a person who offers their own body and soul as the argument — who says, in effect, “I will remove myself from this world rather than participate in an injustice I can no longer live with.” This is intercession at its most extreme, most costly, and most arresting. These figures haunt our imagination because they make visible, with total clarity, the question that all intercession asks: how much are you willing to give?
What is crucial to understand is that these extraordinary figures are not a different species. While they stand at the far end of the continuum, they are connected to the woman driving across town to see her mother, to the friend who answers the phone at midnight, and to every person who willingly bears a cost for someone else. The principle is the same. The willingness is the same. What differs is only the magnitude.
This matters for how we think about our own lives. We are not being asked to choose between cookies and martyrdom. We are being invited to recognize that every act of genuine intercession—every moment we willingly bear a cost on behalf of another person—is made from the same substance as history’s greatest sacrifices. The scale may differ. The love does not. We are made of the same material, and our smallest acts of intercession participate in the same force that has changed families, nations, and lives throughout history.
What Intercession Really Asks
At its heart, intercession asks one question. Not “What am I willing to receive?” Not “What is fair?” Not “How do I make sure this doesn’t cost me too much?” Intercession asks: “What am I willing to give?”
This is a different orientation entirely. It is the orientation of love rather than transaction. It is the difference between a relationship organized around mutual benefit and a relationship organized around mutual care. Both can look similar from the outside. But they feel very different from the inside, and they produce very different results over time.
Magnificent people — truly magnificent people, the ones who make other people’s lives better simply by being in them — have a particular relationship with this question. They return to it often. They let it guide their choices. They are willing to ask it even when the answer is uncomfortable. Even when the answer is costly. Even when the answer requires them to step into difficulty rather than away from it.
This is not some rarified quality of exceptional souls. It is a practice. And like all practices, it begins with small things. It begins with the willingness to notice someone else’s need and do something about it, even at a small cost to yourself. It begins with answering the phone and showing up with food and staying late and saying the honest thing and buying the cookies and standing up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves.
It begins where all love begins: with attention. With the simple willingness to actually see the people around you, to take their needs seriously, to let their experience matter enough to move you into action. From that simple beginning, everything else grows.
Closing
A magnificent life is not defined by the size of the sacrifice. It is defined by the willingness to bear a cost on behalf of another. Some intercessors comfort a friend. Some care for a parent. Some endure imprisonment, public humiliation, or even death in service of a cause larger than themselves. The principle is the same. They see a need, a burden, a hurt, an opportunity, and they willingly step forward. The world is more beautiful because they do.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, The Hollies 1969
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
References
Berkowitz, David. Son of Hope: The Prison Journals of David Berkowitz. Morning Star Communications, 2006.
Tauriello, RoxAnne. From Son of Sam to Son of Hope: The Amazing Story of David Berkowitz. 2020. ISBN: 9781645696056.
Klausner, Lawrence D. Son of Sam: Based on the Authorized Transcription of the Tapes, Official Documents, and Diaries of David Berkowitz. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Stevens, Doris. Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. (The definitive firsthand account by a participant, including eyewitness testimony of the Night of Terror and the hunger strikes.)
Walton, Mary. A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. (The most comprehensive modern biography of Alice Paul, covering her arrests, force-feedings, and strategic leadership.)
Zahniser, J.D. and Amelia R. Fry. Alice Paul: Claiming Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (Scholarly biography drawing on primary sources, documenting Paul’s hunger strikes, psychiatric imprisonment, and ultimate triumph.)
Rajagopalachari, C.Mahabharata. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1958.
Beresford, David. Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
Sands, Bobby. Writings from Prison. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1998.
O’Malley, Padraig. Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
