What is courage? It cannot be merely the opposite of fear. I have experienced a lack of fear for most of my life, and it has come to me lately that I have felt like a fearless person only because I had every opportunity to be unafraid. I had a comfortable, relatively stable home with two parents who never once threatened divorce in my presence. I had their love and fairly consistent discipline. I had a mother who seldom demonstrated fear, or at least anything I could recognize as fear. In other words, I was the daughter of a strong woman, and it came naturally to be strong. I had brothers with whom to share adventures. My talents and strengths were developed, and I rarely stepped outside them beyond an occasional foray into mathematics, which was only a challenge because it wasn't my favorite subject. I attempted things I thought were difficult, but truth be told, life was so easy. I think I often pretended to be stretching toward the limits of my abilities, but it was false humility, which is the most cowardly form of pride. My home and family were solid; my whole life seemed a constant. I felt brave. I felt strong because I had never been broken.
Now, as I look ahead to the years of my adulthood, I am drawn almost irresistibly toward adventures and challenges, the like of which I have not yet encountered. In contemplating the course of my life, I have finally been forced to ask the question, "Am I able?" So is it courage to choose a course in which I may answer, "Yes," and then to excel in that course? Or is it courage to choose what is beyond me and answer instead, "No, but I trust I will be made able when the time comes"?
I have not struggled with my own smallness or even recognized it so much at any other point in my life. Will I choose a life my size? Anyone who knows me knows the answer: Of course not! But what will become of me when I choose the life I know I must choose sooner or later? Will I be supported, or will the ground fall out from under me? Will I find courage, or will I find myself huddled in a corner weeping and completely overcome in the face of battle?
I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I think courage comes when we decide we don't have to know. I'm not talking of recklessness - of pursuing a path for which we are ill-equipped when we are meant to pursue a different one. Rather, I think courage demands that we lay aside our need to know what comes next and to know that we can handle it. Perhaps courage is less in our strength and more in admitting our weakness and agreeing to do what cannot be done. Perhaps courage is not finding the power within ourselves, as so much of our culture would have us believe, and more in trusting the Power that is beyond us and above everything.
I welcome your thoughts.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. ~C.S. Lewis
ReplyDeleteMy love to you, my strong young woman....
Unlike you I have lived a life in fear. Like you, I have never had cause for it, but being to an extent a perfectionist I have always had a fear of failure that has usually caused me to succeed and find that fear unfounded. A famous man once said that courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to face danger in spite of your fears. This is a definition that I hold to. It does match your definition in some places such as doing what we were meant to do rather than what our abilities might indicate we would do easily. In finding our strength from outside of ourselves rather then by looking within.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don't completely agree with your thoughts on this. In my mind, you have defined what it is to have faith and hope. I believe that faith, hope, and courage are closely related in many aspects of how they work in the real world. I do not think you can have and keep faith, hope, or courage separate separate from each other. They are like like the three parts of a (simple) Celtic trinity knot. (To name something you like.) They must all be present to complete the figure, but they have distinct parts as well.
To take the analogy further, (Please not that this marks the end of pre-organized thought. I am now righting this, for better or for worse, as it comes to me) They are all part of the same thing. I do not know of a word in our language that ties them together under one banner, but the purpose is clear. They are what we must have to live the lives God has called us to despite what our lives want our life to be like. (That was a bit confusing. I used two definitions for life. I hope you followed that sentence. It will be important.) Our life, which is the combined desires of ourselves and the rest of the world for our path, is in conflict with the life we have given to God to control. We have a choice who drives our lives. It is easy to let ourselves drive. It is hard to let God take over, and that is were Faith, Hope, and Courage come in.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Reply however you see fit. (Hopefully I won't have to cut this down due to the comment length cap.)
As I read through your post I could not help but notice an intricate connection between courage and strength. As you have said it is recklessness that plunges in ill prepared and I could not agree more. To plunge into a fray we do not know or have even contemplated it blindness and folly. True courage is found when we look into the steely eyes of our challenge and know that our strength is equal to the task as we rush into the seemingly impossible challenges of life.
ReplyDeleteIn this perspective God is not only our source of strength but also our source of courage. When we know Him fully, have his heart beat as ours and have His thoughts course through our mind we will have the courage to stand before the jaws of this world and face the furnace of it wrath.
Two years later looking back:
ReplyDelete"Will I be supported, or will the ground fall out from under me? Will I find courage, or will I find myself huddled in a corner weeping and completely overcome in the face of battle?"
What I have learned since then is that these options are not mutually exclusive. I have been supported as the ground fell out from under me. I have found courage as I huddled in a corner weeping and completely overcome in the midst of battle. Courage doesn't keep you from falling. It doesn't keep you from hurting. It doesn't make you a hero. It doesn't even keep you alive. But it does make life worth living. The only difference between courage and cowardice is that courage stands up again. And again. And again. To the very last breath.