Courage

January 15, 2006

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

Rev. Paul Beckel

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anais Nin

You become courageous by doing courageous acts. ...Courage is a habit. Mary Daly

It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In true courage there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish, and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself. Brenda Ueland

“You are out of danger,” he said. I laughed and said,

“How can I be? I don’t feel dead yet.” Margaret Laurence

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. Winston Churchill

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract but not enough for the concrete. Helen Keller

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking on the form of a readiness to die. G.K. Chesterton

Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved. Courage is worth ten times more than any answers that claim to be total. George Buttrick

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like. Lemony Snicket

Sometimes we express ourselves through ideas. Sometimes we express ourselves through actions. But neither our ideas, by themselves, nor our actions, by themselves, can convey the fullness, the wholeness, the complexity of our lives. Ideas / actions. Faith / works. Principles / accomplishments. Who knows what makes it possible, sometimes, for these seemingly opposing powers to unite. For lack of a better word, let’s call it, “courage” when they come together.

The nineteen men who hijacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into a field in rural Pennsylvania, were men of principle and they were men of action. They were believers and they were doers. They were men of faith and men of works. In their quest to fulfill the will of Allah…and in their drive toward what they saw as salvation, they fit this definition of courage.

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Salvation is a dog, white on one side and black on the other, and this dog walks through our town, goes straight down the middle of the road, and continues out the other side of town. Some of us would swear we’d seen a black dog and some of us would insist that the same dog was white. To complicate matters, on one side the dog has shaved into her fur the word “faith” and on the other side is shaved, “works.” So how many dogs walked through the town?

Oh that’s such a convoluted image, I’m sorry, let’s try something more tangible – let’s say salvation is a coin flipped and spinning in the air. One side of the coin reads, “principle.” The other reads, “action.”

Or, one final image: instead of a dog or a coin, let’s say salvation is a rug. A rug woven, of course, with interlaced threads… the warp being “ideas or thoughts or feelings,” and the weft being “deeds.”

I’m suggesting three ways of seeing the same thing. A dog, a coin, or a rug… each is a single unit made up of opposing but integral components: one aspect is faith/belief/ideas/thoughts/feelings/principles/hopes/cares and the other part is

works/deeds/action/doing/accomplishment

The debate over whether salvation is a function of faith OR action is a silly debate. Perhaps I say this because I’m not interested in the notion of salvation as a state of being beyond the grave. But if by salvation I mean a state of being here and now, for me, and for all of us, then yes I’m interested in salvation.

Hell if I know what happens after we die. But regarding salvation in the here and now, there is no dilemma. If we, here and now, individually or collectively, have principles but no deeds, we’re damned. If we have deeds but no principles, we’re damned.

Some of us are people of faith, or belief, or principle. We’re convinced – somewhere – maybe we call it in our hearts or in our minds or in our souls… we’re committed to certain ideas. That’s what it takes to be a person of principle, or belief, or faith.

Some of us are people of action. We go. We move. We make things happen. Our actions may be at cross purposes with yesterday’s actions, but there is no stopping us.

Some people (or maybe lots of us, some of the time) are people of courage. Our actions and our principles are congruent. Inseparable.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a person of courage. He had ideas but he knew they were by themselves insufficient. He acted – both as an individual and eventually as a leader of millions. But he knew this raw power of action was also insufficient. Only when the ideas and the power of action were woven into a congruent whole, woven together through courage, only then did Martin Luther King Jr. march toward salvation.

So, what’s the difference between MLK and the highjackers? What’s to celebrate about “courage” if it puts those who risked their lives in the civil rights movement in the same boat with Al Queda?

Martin Luther King Jr. was committed to different principles and different methods. His action was non-violent civil disobedience. His ideal was a free society based on a liberal constitutional democracy.

But that was a long time ago. His ideals might be out of date.

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Two hundred years ago we learned that a small ragtag band of insurgents could undermine the world’s most powerful military. The colonial American revolutionaries are generally (thoughtlessly) referred to as heroic, patriotic, courageous. But the context has changed. European Americans are no longer pilgrims at the edge of survival. Here and now, European Americans are wealthy and powerful and capable of pressuring other nations to follow our will. We who defied empire now flirt with being empire. We who made the radical experiment with government based on individual liberties… we who have struggled over centuries to improve in our practice of this ideal… gradually and imperfectly extending civil liberties to non-Europeans, to women, to those without property... We who still like to imagine ourselves as champions of this ideal, of civil liberties... might need to give it up.

Because our perspective has changed. So, perhaps our interests have changed. Perhaps social equality and civil liberties for all are no longer of utmost value. Perhaps, with our material wealth and comparative security – we now have more to lose.

Maybe freedom just isn’t as important any more. Or maybe, as nice as it is, it’s just not possible any more. Perhaps – in a world where any one of us could walk around carrying a briefcase with enough microbes to wipe out a city – the only way to preserve order and security is to gradually crackdown on briefcases, crack down on carrying things, crack down on walking around.

This realignment of our ideals may be necessary. If so, we are headed in the right direction. If not, it will take immense courage to resist the social and political momentum.

In his 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau writes: “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.” That is, Thoreau promoted the free expression of political ideas. He also promoted the expression of political action. He went to jail for refusing to pay a tax which he felt entangled him with the evil that his government was perpetuating in slavery.

Thoreau suggested that those who, 75 years earlier, fought to extract themselves from British taxation, were resisting a comparatively small evil, an inconvenience really. Sadly, those who fought in the name of freedom in the American Revolution continued now to perpetuate a much graver evil in the institution of slavery. Thoreau and his ilk spoke and acted to destroy slavery and to change the U.S. Constitution.

By the time of Martin Luther King Jr., 100 years later, the Constitution still made oppression legal, respectable, and ordinary. Due to the courage of King and his ilk it is now largely illegal. Perhaps, in the here and now, it is our role to eliminate the “respectable” and “ordinary” aspects of oppression.

Or maybe not. Obviously the Constitution changes. And it’s interpretation changes. Some would suggest that it should change only as a result of our understanding of the original intent of the framers. Some will argue that we should follow the Constitution exactly as it was written, or at least do everything we can to fulfill the intentions of the guys with white powdered wigs who pieced it together (as if they all had the same intentions).

Others suggest that the Constitution should evolve with changing social values. I would suggest another approach. In one of the defining sermons of Unitarianism, Theodore Parker, who was a contemporary of Thoreau, spoke of “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” He suggested that the forms of religion – our rituals, our words, our music, our organizational structures… all of these things, these forms change; they are transient. But something endures which we cannot put our finger on. It was not the words or the personalities or the actions of people long ago, but a truth that transcends human attempts to form religion.

I would suggest that our changing interpretation of the U.S. Constitution must be approached in the same way. The original words, the original acts, the original intentions, they are important, but they are ultimately indecipherable. We need to follow the path of truth and right to the constitution, but then further yet, further upstream.

That is, the enduring principles cannot be pinned down to a document or an era or even a personality. The UU principles we referred to in our reading earlier today are of tremendous value, but as expressed in those particular words, they are only transient forms of the transcending principles that precede our attempts to articulate them.

So we’re still at square one. And we always will be. Day one. Today, we still have to figure out what we believe in, and we still have to act. We still need incredible tenacity and courage to tie this all together. We still have to decide, once again in this new context here and now, whether these values are worth preserving: privacy, limits to executive power, fiscal responsibility, non-establishment of state religion; freedom of religious expression; fair and open elections; innocent until proven guilty; warrants required for search and seizure; the rights to speak, publish, travel, and assemble. Are these worth preserving?

All of these refer to a faith in human rights. Yes, this is a kind of faith. These are values – meaning their worth is arguable but not ultimately provable. We can never be sure about them. So to uphold them requires a decision, judgment, and risk.

To enact a faith in human rights requires our individual and collective courage. Because to allow people to act freely is to allow them to act with malice.

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How far back do these principles go? Certainly prior to Theodore Parker, prior to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to the Koran and prior to the Bible. The ancient Greeks who were known as the Stoics promoted a way of being that Martin Luther King Jr. would have appreciated. The Stoics worshipped the gods of reason and conscience. They basically said: do what you believe to be right and take the consequences. In this sense Jesus was a stoic. And Thoreau, Parker, Tolstoy, Tagore, Gandhi, and of course, King. To some degree their ideals are traceable through one another: Resist evil; do it publicly; state up front what you’re doing; take the consequences. This is obviously very different from the current president’s approach to wiretapping.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.[1] I’m not so sure. But it doesn’t really matter if this is true or if this is false. It’s poetry; it’s theology, and theological images are not provable. What matters is that IF the arc of the universe is going to bend toward justice, it’s not just going to happen on it’s own. It will require courage, long term ethical thinking and, above all, long term ethical living in order to move the arc toward justice.

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The 9-11 hijackers had faith and works, conviction and power, beliefs and action. They wedded these things together with courage. Sadly, religiously, they had a serious lack of perspective. The faith that they held so dear, what they believed to be true, was only a partial truth.

They believed that they were fulfilling the will of Allah. But they did not know the will of Allah. They only saw that dog from one side of the street. They believed that they were following the truth of the Koran. The problem is, the Koran is a channel of the truth, but not the truth itself.

Christians can make the same mistake. They can make the mistake of believing in the Bible as Truth. The problem is, the Bible is a channel for Truth, but not truth itself.

The truth is not the Bible or the Koran or the Constitution. No matter how hard you whack someone across the face with these documents, no matter how subtly you infuse your children with these documents’ charms, no matter how cleverly you teach your protégés to manipulate the words to your advantage, the truth will not be pinned down within human words.

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I am a religious humanist. I believe the Bible is divinely inspired, as is the Koran, as is the U.S. Constitution, as are our imperfect attempts to understand what each of these documents and their traditions might best mean for us in the here and now. As a humanist I certainly do not mean to suggest that human beings are the ultimate creators of truth. On the contrary, I believe that something transcends us, always has, and always will. We get a glimmer of this divinity through our awkward and imperfect attempts to connect with it. So by humanist I mean, ultimately, a stoic humility, an acknowledgement that the transcendent will never be fully grasped by my limited abilities of perception… or even by our collective human abilities. Even through all of the great and ordinary philosophers and activists.

So the difference, as I see it, the difference between the 9-11 highjackers and Martin Luther King Jr. was not a difference of courage, but a difference of humanity. The highjackers were unwilling to acknowledge their humanness. They were convinced that they knew the will of God… in essence that they had become extensions of Allah himself.

Martin Luther King Jr., as I understand him, could have been a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Hindu. Certainly there were Muslims, Christians, and Hindus among those by whom he was most deeply influenced. King appreciated the words and deeds of prophetic women and men who challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. But ultimately he knew not only that his society was imperfect, but that he too was imperfect. So he was unwilling to conspire in the evil he might perpetuate by acting with violence.

In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau writes that actions and principles divide us. They divide families, they divide nations. They even divide us, internally, by “separating the diabolical… from the divine.”

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As you go, take courage. Do not be afraid. Have fear – certainly – prudent fear and caution, but do not be those fears. Meld your convictions with the things you do, today. Always knowing that there is deeper understanding yet to be had.

Thoreau, again: “They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced truth up its stream no higher, stand…by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at the stream there with reverence and humanity [so be it]; but they who behold, where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward the fountainhead.” Up toward the source, transcending us, transcending anything we have yet known, transcending anything we are yet to know. Seek the source, let it flow through you, be not afraid.

Closing Hymn We’ll Build a Land #121

Benediction by Rabindranath Tagore

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield, but to my own strength.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved, but hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

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[1] He was, perhaps unknowingly, carrying forward an idea of Theodore Parker from a century earlier. But it may not be fruitful to argue about ultimate sources....