Profiles in Courage

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

October 15, 2006

I grew up in the hey-day of the superhero. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Green Lantern, The Green Hornet, Wonder Woman. These were the characters who populated my world as a child. I can remember lying in bed, before drifting off to sleep, trying to feel what it would be like to leap tall buildings with a single bound, to be faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive. My friend Steve and I would pretend for hours to be hero and villain, one plotting a dastardly scheme while the other always swooped in, just in the nick of time, to thwart it. Then there was the game we'd play of "Which super power would you want to have?" Would it be better to have x-ray vision or super-hearing? Super-strength or invisibility? For me, the ability to fly always carried the day. During this same time we heard lots about heroics of the non-super kind as well. In school we learned of the bravery of real men like Audy Murphy, the most decorated soldier in the Army's history, and John Glenn and Alan Shepard, pioneers in space. The word "courage" was always linked with other terms like "danger," "selfless," and "sacrifice." I dreamed of being on the other side of a heroic act, in the aftermath where one is idolized and awarded, lauded and loved by all. But a disturbing question always nagged at the back of my brain: Did I have the "right stuff?" When the chips were down, could I really do the heroic act? Did I have the courage to do the needful thing?

Courage is counted first among the classical human virtues of courage, compassion, humility, friendship and forgiveness. As the poet Maya Angelou has written, "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."

Since the age of the earliest philosophers, people have struggled to define this elusive human trait we call "courage." Aristotle concluded that courage is the perfect mean between the two extremes of cowardice and recklessness. He said that to be courageous we must have proper fear, or fear in proportion to the situation, proper confidence, and proper values. Plato tells us that courage requires two things: knowledge of the risks and rewards in a particular situation - what is to be dreaded and what is to be dared - and a noble purpose. Augustine, the early Catholic apologist, described courage in relational, almost poetic terms. He said that courage is "love bearing all things readily for the sake of the object beloved." Let me repeat that: courage is "love bearing all things readily for the sake of the object beloved." Ernest Hemingway defined courage simply as "grace under pressure." This virtue, this most basic of human characteristics, I think, has an almost indefinable quality. Perhaps the most we can do to try and define courage is to say that we know it when we see it.

There are, I believe, three types of courage. The first is what I call "situational courage." This is the type of courage that we often call "bravery" and it is the quality that begets heroes. It's the immediate response to an unexpected danger. Situational courage is a soldier throwing himself on a hand grenade, sacrificing himself for the sake of his comrades. It's the bystander on the street who steps in to thwart a convenience store robbery. Situational courage often requires us to make the ultimate sacrifice for the noblest of causes: our life for the lives of others. We saw a heartbreaking example of this type of courage just a couple of weeks ago. Thirteen year old Marian Fisher and her little sister Barbie were two of the school children taken hostage in the Nickel Mines schoolhouse. According to reports from survivors of this tragedy, Marian offered herself up to her assailant, asking to be shot first, in an attempt to save the other children. Then Barbie said "shoot me next." Marian died in the school that day, and Barbie is recovering from her wounds. This is the courage of heroes and legends. It is courage on a mythic scale. Do you, do I, possess that kind of courage? Hopefully none of us will ever be put to the test.

The second category of courage is what I call "enduring courage." It's synonymous with the term "fortitude." This is the courage that it takes to live, day in and day out, with a tragic or difficult situation that is not of our own making. Enduring courage is the spirit of a cancer patient, facing weeks and months of debilitating treatments with an uncertain outcome. It's the single mother working two or three jobs her entire life, scraping by and saving up so that her kids can go to college. It's the person who takes his ill and aging parent into his home, foregoing his own comfort to lovingly care for them in the last years of their life. We can identify this type of courage not only by its circumstance, but often by the denial that we hear from those who possess it. When we remark to someone in these situations about how brave they are to be facing their situation, the subject of our admiration will simply acknowledge that this is the life they've been given, that it's no big deal. I used to volunteer for Maine Handicapped Skiing, a program that provided outdoor recreational opportunities to people with physical disabilities. I developed a close relationship with one of the children in the program, a nine year old boy with cerebral palsy, and with his mother, Margaret. Daniel was wheelchair-bound and his older brother Seth, who also suffered from disease, walked on crutches. One day as I sat with Daniel and Seth's mom, she described her daily routine with the boys, an overwhelming series of tasks that filled up her life 24-7, leaving room for nothing else. As she described the series of bathings and liftings and doctor's appointments and countless other challenges she faced every day, I told her that I admired her courage. "I'm not brave," she told me. "It's just what a parent does for her children." Enduring courage is often coupled with inspirational levels of grace and humility.

The third type of courage is what I call "pedestrian courage." No, it's not the bravery we need to cross the street in busy, rush-hour traffic. It's the courage to stand up to the daily challenges of life. This type of courage is perhaps the most elusive because the situations in which it is exercised are rarely heroic or remarkable. This isn't the fireman rushing into a burning building or the ordinary person living with extraordinary and challenging circumstances. But it is, in many ways, the most valuable trait that we possess. Pedestrian courage is the courage to act up or to speak out against injustice. It's the bravery to speak truth to power. It's seizing the opportunity to stand on the side of the oppressed and the underdog in the face of our fears of becoming the outsider ourselves. It's living each and every day according to the principles we hold to be true and dear. We are challenged to exercise this kind of courage in countless ways in our everyday lives. One example that I've encountered myself, is when someone at work tells a racist or sexist or homophobic joke, while our co-workers are laughing at someone else's expense, it's speaking up and saying "That's not right."

It was fifty years ago that John F. Kennedy wrote the book Profiles in Courage. You may recall that Kennedy published this volume when he was a member of the U.S. Senate, several years before he became President. He was, however, a decorated war hero who had single-handedly saved most of the crew of his PT boat in World War II, after it had been rammed by a Japanese vessel. So his bona fides were clear. Kennedy had this to say about courage. "The courage of a life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A [person] does what he [or she] must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality."

In our reading today, Tim O'Brien writes that he once thought that "courage comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down." He discovered what we all know to be true: that our capacity for courage is infinite, but we cannot save it up, hoping to bank on it at some later date. Instead of saving it up, we need to spend our courage lavishly. Senator John McCain, who knows something about bravery, says that courage is like a muscle. The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. I think his metaphor is appropriate, but I'd like to offer you an alternative to this formulation. Instead, let us think of courage as a spiritual practice, as a devotion, as a gift of the heart. After all, the word itself is derived from the French word "couer," or heart. Courage is something that we're all born with, perhaps in greater or lesser measure, but it is part of us nonetheless. And it is within our ability to develop our spirit of courage. Like meditation, prayer or other spiritual practices, where through constant attention and commitment we can enlarge our capacity to connect with that which is deepest within us, so can we enlarge and enhance our capacity to be courageous. And like other spiritual practices, the first step is to awaken ourselves to the opportunities to be courageous, to take note of what's going on around us and to take small steps toward responding courageously. Like a seedling that turns toward the sun, so will our spirit of courage turn us toward the good if we allow it to come out in the daylight. With regular practice, nurturing it with love and attention, our spirit of courage will grow and flourish.

Pedestrian courage, what Kennedy calls "the courage of a life," is perhaps the most important courage of all, because it is the one that we face most frequently and that we alone have control over. Thankfully, few of us will ever be put in a life-threatening situation where we have to face the ultimate hero's test. Many of us will, unfortunately, face circumstances that test our endurance, and how we react under those conditions is uncertain. But we have the ability to control how we face up to the small injustices, the daily challenges. We can decide whether and when to speak up. In a culture that elevates money and status and material standing as its highest values, we can choose to swim against the tide, to stand on principle, to make courageous decisions. They may be small - not expensing a lunch with colleagues when you know everyone else is doing it - or they may be great - like refusing the request of your biggest client to fudge the numbers on a financial report. But small acts of courage are no less important than those that make headlines, because it is the acts of everyday courage that define who we are as human beings. There's a reason that we sometimes refer to these situations, situations where we are confronted with difficult moral choices, as "moments of truth." These are the moments when our true nature is revealed to us, and to others.

It takes courage to live up to our principles, and the principles of our faith hold us to a very high standard. As Unitarian Universalists we are called on not just to recognize and appreciate the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. We do not merely accept as reality the existence of the interdependent web. It is not enough for us merely to hope that someday we will realize the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. Our faith calls upon us to "affirm and promote" these values. Our covenant with one another requires us to act. And to act takes great courage, day in and day out. This is the responsibility that our faith imposes upon us. The beauty of our faith is that we are not alone in this quest. We are not expected to act courageously all by ourselves. We come together in religious community to support and encourage one another in the attempt. This is the highest goal for which we can strive together. Let us this morning affirm our commitment to act courageously as we face the challenges of this and every day, and let us be reminded of the words of the Reverend Wayne B. Arnason, found in our hymnal:

Blessed Be and Amen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Did this sermon bring forth any special feelings, thoughts or concerns that you would like to share? Consider this link as providing you with an opportunity to talk back.