Reflections on Courage

The idea of courage has been so thoroughly emptied, brutally disemboweled by Hollywood and impaled by the machinations of our militarized politic that we are deluded into thinking we know what courage is when all we really are doing is musing vacuously at our own smug self-delusional constructions of "courage."  If we were a bit more impulsive, we put it on Facebook for the world to see, inflating our self-consciousness in our vain adventure to be scavengers of "likes."

What is courage?  Like God, I suppose, to experience courage articulately is to deny your familiarity with it.  The truth is none of us know what it means to be courageous, just like none of us know God with the same familiarity as we know our best friends.  Courage is elusive.  Courage defies our understanding.  Courage is only courageous when we live into it, and when we live into it for the long haul.  It is like marriage; to confuse the married life with the event is a tragic mistake; marriage is the improvisatory life between two people in which there abounds great creativity, physicality, and emotionality.  If you are thinking of sex, you suffer from poor critical thinking abilities and are seriously deficient, you poor soul!  Has the geist of Hollywood thoroughly permeated your cranial passageways that you cannot be liberated from their vices?  Raising children is creative, physical, and emotional!  Working for your family is creative, physical, and emotional!  Married life has to be creative, physical, and emotional!  What else could it be?  Dull, distant, and sober?

Courage is improvisatory, just like marriage.  We must purge our minds and sensibilities of images of Arnold Schwartzenegger, of caricatured idealizations of "Manhood" or "Womanhood," these artificial categories that, when ossified, so thoroughly poisons the fellowship we are ordained to enjoy with fellow human beings.  Indeed, perhaps because we have canonized these traditions, we feel obligated to de-courage ourselves, to rest in the wimpiness of these categories, assuming that these categories can fill the void of our lack of courage.  I am toned, I am buff, I can shoot guns, I am a man.  Or, perhaps, the better term would be that of Nietzsche: the Übermensch, the "man above man" for whom the subjugation of the other by brute force, by brute will, by sheer brutality is a virtue extolled above all others.

However, the truth that haunts, the truth that the Holy Spirit tries to reveal is a quiet "No, my child, that is not it."

Haunt, indeed.  We don't like ghosts.  We don't like them, Holy or Unholy.  Ghosts, they scare us.  They drain us of our self-conceived categories of courage.  We run away, uncomfortable by the very truth that they illumine for us: that we really do not understand courage.  In front of ghosts, manhood and womanhood disappear, our blood runs cold, our faces whiten, life becomes consequential.

We are afraid.

Perhaps the ghost is not a specter, but really a self that we idolize.  I see myself as an Arnold Schwartzenegger, and this image, ontologically self-mapped, becomes a terrifying ghost we reach for.  Perhaps we were former Übermenschen, we were once at the pinnacle of humanity.  We were at the intellectual peak, the horn of physical perfection, the slickwitted sheen of Manhood that Femininity swoons over.  Oh, what perfect deception!  O World, I have no need to attend business school to learn marketing when I have thee!  But then, the ghost of this self-glorification dissipates, as it always does, and we are left to confront our ghostly reality.  Our real selves, naked, is utterly ugly, and its ugliness oppresses us.  Das Schlecht uns schmerzen! 

Thus, it seems to me, true courage places us in front of the mirror, in which we see ourselves, darkly.  It is an uncomfortable place in which only the revelation of God can shine a light.  But when the light shines, we see our ugliness too - let's not think that God's revelation can only in an Osteen-esque fashion, bring health, wealth, beauty, and sexual maturity!  No, no, no!  If anything, God's revelation decrepits us from all that which the world sees as functional!  It confounds sensibilities.  And yet, true courage is not afraid of this confoundation.  It is not afraid of the gray, and not afraid to explore grayness.  It seeks no recognition of the mountains or valleys, but rests on the slopes, despite the unapproving gaze of those vainly climbing to the top, or sliding down the valleys in search of identity there.

Courage rests in the content of the self.  The self rests in the content of the courageous.