Is Courage Ever Enough?

December 7, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

(Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech words taken from Marianne Williamson)

HOMILY: Is Courage Ever Enough?

This is at least the third time in twenty years that I’ve written a sermon inspired by a famous line from Anais Nin. She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Something about those nine words is wonderfully appealing, and seems profoundly right. You can think of times when fear made you shrink, and courage expanded you in a hundred ways:

— You were afraid to ask someone you really liked for a date, then finally got the courage to do it and now here you are.

–You were afraid to try something – trying out for a team or a play or a choir. If you never got the courage up to try, you may still wonder what you missed, how your memory of yourself might have been enlarged if you had just mustered up the courage.

— You finally applied for the school or the job you wanted, and you got it. Or even if you didn’t get it, you know you did the most you could do, and there’s comfort there: a comfort that wouldn’t be there if you’d never taken the risk.

You can multiply the list from your own life, but we can all think of times when courage absolutely seemed to expand our life, and fear shrank it.

So it’s easy to say Yes, that colorful French woman was right – life certainly does shrink and expand according to our courage.

And that word “courage” is interesting in its own right. It comes from a French word meaning “heart.” Reacting to something from the heart feels like we’re coming from a strong place, and that can expand life too, for ourselves and those whose lives we touch – because we can feel the difference.

We actually just heard a beautiful example of this a few minutes ago, in Benjamin Britten’s lovely Ceremony of Carols. There is a footnote to those carols that appears in many program notes for their performance. Besides being one of the 20th century’s great composers, Britten was also a political radical, a gay man, and a conscientious pacifist, opposed to all war. It was tougher to be those things seventy years ago. When England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Britten and his partner left England and moved to the United States. He had good success here, but two and a half years later it became a matter of principle for him to return to England. He returned home in March and April 1942, in a five-week North Atlantic crossing right in the middle of the war. Britten couldn’t have known what would happen to him on his return. He would at least be met with great hostility, and he could have been put in prison.

I can’t imagine what Britten must have felt like during the five dangerous weeks crossing the North Atlantic to return home to an England, always in danger of being sunk by German U-boats. And he wasn’t traveling in anything like first class, or any class. He was cooped up near some large machines that put out a constant roar, high temperatures, and very noxious smells. Right there is where and when he composed the Ceremony of Carols we’ve just heard. The music is so lovely and lively it sounds like it couldn’t possibly have come from that setting. But it didn’t come from the bowels of a ship; it came from his heart – his “cour,” his courage – as his decision to return home also did. Britten was finally accepted back into his country, and this composition from his heart certainly expanded his life, and the lives of thousands like us, still to come. It is a tribute to our music director Brent Baldwin’s great perspicacity that he chose that music long before I had any idea what I was going to be talking about today.

Now you can see that it would be easy to do riffs on words like “heart” and “courage” all morning. But I want to leave the surface level of those wonderful nine words and look a little deeper, because there is another level at which something is wrong with just saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. Something is wrong, something is missing, it just isn’t that simple, and I think the whole saying is backwards. Courage isn’t enough, and isn’t what really makes life expand. That’s what I want to look at this morning. In fact, I think Anais Nin missed the most important point, or just assumed a much simpler picture than life really offers.

So I want to retrace the steps that led me down this provocative path and bring you along with me.

I first started thinking about our movie superheroes, and that we really create them as people who are so strong that they don’t have to be afraid of anybody. It’s that strength that lets them always do the right thing, as we wish we could too. So we project our need for courage onto them, then identify with them as they run, fly or rocket around battling the forces of evil. We think that if only we had the strength of Superman, or the agility and the wonderful gadgets of Batman or Ironman, then the courage part would be easy. So we think OK, it’s courage plus strength. Or courage plus strength plus a lot of cool gadgets.

But that’s not right either, because what sets these superheroes apart really isn’t their strength, cleverness or courage. After all, the supervillains are always pretty well matched with them. Lex Luthor, The Joker and Ironman’s many enemies were brilliant, also had clever gadgets, and weren’t afraid of anything not even superheroes. They had all the courage and strength you could hope for. But their courage didn’t make life expand.

Then I thought, Well OK, but everybody knew the supervillains were wrong. They were just obviously evil characters, like Lone Rangers from the Dark Side: aberrations, Bad Seeds.

But when we push it farther, that simple picture doesn’t hold together either. We have read or seen videos on YouTube of the families of young men or women in Iraq or Palestine who gave their lives to their cause by strapping bombs to their chest then killing themselves and as many strangers as they could. Their families, their communities, often even their religious leaders praise them as martyrs and heroes, not villains. You can say Well, they live in this closed little world where their beliefs are like a house of mirrors, repeating back to them only their own biases, and they’ve been taken in. Their courage has been seduced, we say. But you know they’re saying the same thing about us. It’s complex. It’s about more than courage. Life shrinks and expands not just in proportion to our courage, but also in proportion to the size and inclusiveness of our vision and our heart.

It isn’t courage that makes life expand. It’s courage in the service of high and noble ideals that makes life expand; courage in the service of coming alive, seeking truth, and healing the world.

Courage is the ability to take action. But whether that action expands or shrinks life depends on whether the spirits we serve are good or bad: whether we’re serving the angels of our better nature, or the angels of our worst nature. And how are we to know?

There is no foolproof way, but there’s a famous formula from a third-century theologian I’ve always loved as one of the best guides for people of good heart (Origen, c. 185-254). Our course of action, he said, must always meet two criteria. It must both be useful to us, and at the same time worthy of God. Because life also shrinks and expands in proportion to the size of the god we are serving.

(As a kind of scholastic footnote, Origen used this two-part test to determine whether you were interpreting Scripture rightly, though I think using it to determine whether you’re interpreting life rightly is a fair extension of his intent.)

Now you might want to argue that the families of those human bomb people would say the murder of their enemies was worthy of God. But the most revered thinkers in any religion, including Islam, don’t say that. Only the religious hacks praise murder; the more mature and nuanced say that unless our actions are guided by love and compassion, they are not worthy of God, period. When tactics are brutal or dehumanizing, we have already lost the ability to claim that they were good.

Many of you read a perfect example of this in the national news just two days ago, in a closing chapter to the O.J. Simpson saga that has been going on for fourteen years. On Friday, Las Vegas Judge Jackie Glass sentenced Simpson to a minimum of nine years in prison. Simpson tried to argue that he never meant to hurt anybody, he just wanted to recover his personal things, including his slain wife’s wedding ring. In other words, he was saying that what he did was not only useful to him, but also decent and noble, the sort of thing God would like. The judge pointed out that when he took a gun and accomplices, when he kidnapped and threatened people, his actions put the lie to his words. Once he adopted those tactics, he lost all claim to good intent. If we have a conscience at all, we know the difference. It’s one of the things about us that we have to be able to count on for a legal system to work, for juries to work, for anything to work. We know the difference.

It’s never as simple as saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. In every case – from superheroes and supervillains to suicidal bombers or the latest installment in the O.J. Simpson saga, it’s a similar lesson. Life expands in proportion to our courageous service of healthy and life-giving ideals, nothing less. It’s like another metaphor I’ve used here before, about the two wolves. A boy went to his grandfather for advice, saying he was often torn between wanting to do whatever he thought he could get away with, and what he knew was really right. Yes, the grandfather admitted, he had always had those same two voices in him. He thought of them as two wolves, each fighting to define his soul. One urged him to use his strength, courage and cleverness to get away with whatever he could, and the other would accept only fair and caring actions. All his life, the grandfather said, these two wolves have been fighting to own him, to steer his soul. When the boy asked which wolf wins, the old man said, “The one that I feed, my son – the one that I feed.”

Whether we think of these competing spirits as two wolves or as the angels of our better and worse natures, it matters tremendously which one we choose to feed, because only one of them – only one of them — has the power to expand life.