COURAGE
Life is a tough haul
for many people some of the time and for some people most of the time. This is
very true for committed people trying to live out Christian values every day.
They sometimes feel they have set out in life alone into the headwinds of
poverty and pain, unemployment, injustice, loneliness and limitation. They feel
unable to make much progress. Maybe we need to invite our Lord into our lives
more realistically, asking his wisdom and courage. We must believe that we can
change; we can be better and help others become better too. G. K. Chesterton
once remarked, “If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses,
what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?”
Courage is not the same as
fearlessness. It is not the absence of fear, but the control of it. “Grace
under pressure,” as Earnest Hemingway said. Courage gets above fear; it is, so
to say, “fear that has said its prayers” (General Pershine). The great storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson, was always plagued by ill health, and though he filled his novels with exciting characters and
exotic places, he was more interested in man’s inner spirit. He said that
everyone needed to possess courage, even those who outwardly lived less
adventurous lives. According to him, the ordinary person is no less noble
because no drum beats before him when he goes out to his daily battlefields and
no crowds shout his arrival when he returns from victory or defeat.
We too will
encounter and recognise the Lord even in the most trying and distressing
situations when we cannot cope, despite our best human resources. God may speak
loud and clear in power. But more often than not in the still small voice of an
intimate personal experience.
Courage is
not something we need rarely, but what we need on a daily basis: to live, to
suffer, to struggle and die. Winston Churchill ranked courage as “the first of
the human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”
The famed aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, who went down with her
aircraft over the Pacific and was never found again, understood that without courage, personal contentment is not
possible: “courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. The soul
that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”
Courage is the ability to act well
in spite of danger and fear. The very cornerstone of Christian ethical wisdom
is the concept of the “steep” or “arduous good”. Hence this virtue of courage
or fortitude reaches down to the willingness
to die, in the sense that
martyrdom is its supreme act. Fortitude, therefore, has to do with character rather than with conduct.
Fortitude connotes durability; endurance rather than bravery. Though it
includes the notion of suffering, it goes beyond acquiescence by refusing to be
mastered by it. Without fortitude there is no challenge or achievement.
An
important hallmark of Fortitude is the absence of bitterness, resentment,
arrogance, ostentation, and self-advertisement. Broad-shouldered, it carries
with it a governing sense of dignity.
To follow
through, to press ahead in the face of misrepresentation and the ebb and flow
of public opinion; to hold fast to the
Faith and practise it at those moments when it seems to have lost all sense
or relevance; to read the “signs of the times” and not be beguiled by them; to
retain one’s spirit in the face of incurable illness and to care lovingly for
the aged, the dying or the irreversibly handicapped; to master bereavement or
to bridge with love the gaps created by human inadequacy and inconstancy – all
these are the stuff of Fortitude.
The woods
are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have
promises to keep
And miles to
go before I sleep
And miles to
go before I sleep.
– Robert Frost
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