If, as some of us believe, our country is becoming more militarized, if more people carry guns and feel encouraged to use them, if civil protest is treated as terrorism, if refugees, immigrants and Muslims are targeted for deportation and worse and those who shelter or support them subject to increased surveillance, if more whistleblowers are imprisoned and more prisons are run for profit, even those of us who think we’re ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens and people of good will and good faith may need to tap new veins of courage.
Living a life of faith and moral clarity has always required some measure of courage; the way of the world has always been to protect privilege, marginalize those who threaten the powerful and scapegoat some to preserve the status quo for others. Jesus warned his followers that they would be persecuted, and they have been, as have Jews and ethnic minorities and people everywhere who have tried to remain faithful to a higher calling than that of power and profit. We need stories of people like Joseph, David, Peter and Paul, the first-century martyrs, of St. Catherine chastising the pope, of Jan Hus praying from the burning stake, of Harriet Tubman and those who ran the Underground Railroad, of women who protected the poor and refused to be disenfranchised, of Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer witnessing from death camp and prison, of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, of the peace teams who show up with supplies in combat zones, of doctors without borders and of the “ordinary” people who occasionally come to public attention for their quiet courage in the face of oppression or ignorance or aggressive fear. Stories are our equipment for living, and we should not go unequipped into the coming decade.
Faith teaches us to live in a larger story than the one woven by newsmakers and political pundits or even by historians. It calls us to live not only as rational animals with “enlightened self-interest,” but also, and sometimes otherwise, as people whose hearts are capable of wideneng beyond self-interest and even survival. “What might you be willing to die for?” is a sobering question and clarifying, though I suspect none of us knows what we would actually die for, if put to the test. There are related questions there are related questions that might be more immediately pertinent: Who needs your protection? Whose efforts, interests, are you willing to support? At what cost? At what risk?
I am under no illusion that I can answer these questions any more courageously than anyone else, nor have my good intentions been put to any very severe tests. I think it’s good and right to pray as even Jesus did to let those more severe tests “pass from us,” but even as we do, to prepare ourselves for courage by keeping our hearts and eyes wide open. The only real preparation for courage is compassion. And compassion cannot simply be willed; it is a gift given to those who ask from the God of all compassion, who knows our suffering, enters into it, and promises, in the very midst of it, peace and hope that pass understanding.
Image: Harriet Tubman, abolitionist
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