From Your Minister
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As I have held the idea of courage in my mind, preparing to write this column, I have seen and heard it all around me.
A friend confronts a drinking problem, becoming one of the millions who gather each week and pray for “the courage to change the things I can.”
A woman moves into a senior facility, leaving her beloved home of 52 years, so that her kids don’t have to make the decision for her later.
A man tells his boss about a mistake he made, one that could cost him his job and his family’s livelihood, because he can’t live with the secret.
In a 1952 book entitled The Courage to Be, theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “Courage is self-affirmation in spite of that which tends to prevent the self from affirming itself.”
There is so much that prevents us from affirming our true selves. The deep desire to be a little better than we are. Fear that our true selves will be punished or judged.
That long list of isms, including racism and sexism, ableism and heterosexism, which declare that some people’s authentic selves are not worthy of affirmation. In the face of all the obstacles to self-affirmation, when any individual does exhibit courage, it makes the entire human race a little bigger.
Consider how contagious courage is. A friend takes a risk and shares something deeply vulnerable. In return, you are moved to share some of your own struggle, telling a story you hadn’t thought of for years. A co-worker challenges negative practices at work. Though you are silent at the time, you go to him later and think about how to change the work environment together.
At their best, our faith communities are laboratories of en-courage-ment, where our authentic selves are affirmed, strengthening our ability for self-affirmation.
When I listened to Rosa Parks’ memorial service on the radio, I heard a piece of her story I hadn’t heard before. Eleanor Holmes Norton shared that prior to Parks’ courageous act of resistance, she had been at the Highlander Center, in worship services which repeatedly affirmed the equality of all before God. On that bus, it was her deep resonance with the truth of this cosmic equality which offered Parks the courage to risk her safety and thereby to change history.
Not all acts of courage are recorded in books, but I believe that they ripple out just as surely as Parks’ historic act. We can’t always see the effects that courage has but each small act of courage alters the world, just as acts of fear, whether in secret or broadcast for all the world to see, contract and diminish the whole world community. In other words, acts of courage take place in a field of energy. Courage is a team sport, not a solo act.
This, of course, is not what we learn about it in western myths. For me, as a kid, courage was embodied in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” a TV show featuring two white male (handsome!) stoic secret agents who were prone to witty quips when tied up and about to be tortured and killed. This, I thought, was the definition of cool, and I would never be it! The lead agent was even named Solo—Napoleon Solo. (Only as I write this does it occur to me that the Harrison Ford character in the Star Wars series is also named Solo—Han Solo.)
So, though we’ve learned in TV and movies that courage is a Solo act, perhaps what makes a good script about heroism on TV is actually part of “what tends to keep the self from affirming itself.”
The Buddhists have a concept known as dependent co-arising. This concept holds me when I feel most hopeless or dis-couraged. I first encountered the belief in Joanna Macy’s book World as Lover, World as Self, as the notion that “things do not produce each other or make each other happen, as in linear causality; they help each other happen by providing occasion or locus or context, and in so doing, they in turn are affected. There is a mutuality here, a reciprocal dynamic.” Unitarian Universalists would call this the interdependent web.
This concept gives me hope and courage because it implies there are connections I can’t see, but which are all around me. If I embody the most authentic self I can muster, and act in the ways which are most authentically mine to act, I will be part of an energy field around the world which is seeking liberation and expansion. (When I embody the scared, inauthentic self I am also part of an energy field, of course.)
It is my deepest hope that being part of the CLF community will inspire acts of courage, because our authentic selves are strengthened in this vast web of connection around the globe. Where do you feel out of connection with your authentic self? What small act of courage might you take today to address that imbalance? How might the CLF community help you with that?
Dorothy Bernard said that “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” May we remember that we are never alone, that our small selves and actions are part of a larger web of being. And may this larger web give us strength and courage.
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