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Perhaps you remember the story about Antoinette Tuff. She’s the woman in Atlanta, Georgia, who was working in the main office of an elementary school when a man burst in with an automatic rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition. Everyone got out, thanks to her. Read more →

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In theory, courage is a good thing. One of the best things.

As Screwtape, the Senior Devil in The Screwtape Letters puts it:

We [in hell] have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy [God] permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage
becomes so obviously lovely and
important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame….

As a matter of practice, the truth is more complex. Bill Maher pointed out that the 9/11 bombers were not cowards. In the days after 9/11, the President was calling the terrorists “cowards,” but, as Maher noted, one can say a lot of things about a man who purposefully crashes a plane that he himself is inside, but that he’s a coward shouldn’t be one of them.

But it’s not just that courage can be used for evil. I don’t think courage counts unless you’re actually using it for good. One time I was having lunch with a friend and her children and one of the children was stung by a wasp. The crying child crawled onto his mother’s lap. The wasp, still in shock itself, fluttered down onto a napkin on the table. We watched in silence.

“It would be nice if somebody got rid of that wasp,” my friend said. She picked up the napkin, wasp still inside, and held it out to me. The judgment was implied. If I didn’t get rid of it, I was inconsiderate of a mother who needed to be tending to her child. Annoyance creased her face.

Angry wasp—with the potential to put me in anaphylactic shock? Or friend who thinks less of me? Tough call.

I took the wasp. Holding the edges of the napkin as if it contained explosive material, I took the unhappy critter outside, set it down on the table and watched, quivering, until it flew away.

Carrying the wasp, though it involved facing one of my fears, was not an act of courage. I didn’t do it to help the child or the mother. I did it because as a grown woman, I was embarrassed not to. Something one does for someone else’s approval cannot count as a courageous act.

When I was a small child, maybe ten years old, my brother sat next to a wasp nest and got something like twenty stings. He ran into the living room, hysterical. Being a well-meaning, if not terribly bright child, I went running out and grabbed the blankie he’d left behind, calming him considerably, and getting six or eight stings for myself. I did that because it was the only thing I could think of that would make him feel better. It was worth facing down angry wasps to help him out.

That was courage. Of course, the stings I got and the resulting allergic reaction is how one develops a phobia that haunts one into adulthood. Nobody ever said virtue was easy.

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A few months back 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Read more →

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When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working… Read more →

I expect by now you’ve heard the story: seen the pictures of the people bludgeoned by water cannons, the dog in a gas mask, the sufi dervish whirling in the street with deliberate disregard for the danger of his surroundings. It started simply enough. A group of people decided to sit in to protest a public park being razed in order to put in one more shopping mall. A group of people, young and old, decided that they had had enough of their country being sold off to the highest bidder, enough of the rights of the people being stripped away at the pleasure of the powers that be. And so they went to sit in the park. And there they sat as the bulldozers came at them, non-violent protesters in the long and distinguished lineage of Gandhi and King and Tiananmen Square and so many others. And in the long and shameful lineage of the British in India and Bull Connor and the Chinese government in 1989 and so many others, the Turkish government responded with water cannons and pepper spray, with police in riot gear prepared to do whatever it takes to subdue the population.

Who will not be subdued. Who continue to flock to the streets. I understand the courage of those first protesters, the ones who decided to sit down in a park and make their presence felt, who were willing to see what would happen when they demanded that someone take the needs of the people, and not just the corporations, into account. Sometimes you summon up what is inside of you and do the brave thing, walk the talk. But what about all those other people, the ones who joined the protest once they knew about the water cannons and the pepper spray, once the news spread (by word of mouth and social media, since the official media kept a complete blackout) of the injured and the dead? What about them? What does it take to knowingly walk into that kind of danger and chaos?

It takes, I think, an allegiance to a self that is greater than the self that feels the police batons and the pepper spray—a self that is injured not by physical indignities, but rather by moral ones. Call it Soul, if you will, this larger self, or call it Community Consciousness or Human Dignity or Living in the Kingdom of God. Whatever it is, it does not belong to a particular time, or place, or religion. It’s what led Gandhi, the Hindu, and King, the Christian, and the young man (Buddhist?) who faced down a bulldozer in Tiananmen Square to counter violence with persistent love. It’s what holds the Sufi dervish dancing in the streets of Istanbul and Bill McKibben getting arrested on the steps of the White House in protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. Who we are is bigger than who we are.

Not all of us. Not all the time. But enough of us, enough of the time, that it seems possible that love might have a chance against greed, that freedom and justice might sometimes prevail. Not all the time. But maybe enough.