• Home
• » Take Courage

Take Courage

What can men do against such reckless hate?

Ride out! Ride out with me!

Courage Behind Glass

Everything worth anything in life requires courage. Getting out of bed in the morning, ending the slave trade, loving your spouse, giving more than you can afford, adopting a child, resisting corruption, facing corporate bullying. Courage takes us where we need to go. It's the courageous who change the world.

Box office sales tell us that there is nothing so attractive to the human heart than courage. It is captured and preserved in books and movies like a rare butterfly in a case. It may be beautiful, but held captive in the silver screen, courage is as dead as the butterfly. Unless, that is, it inspires the living to live it.

Cornered in a conquered citadel, the movie characters of Tolkien's The Two Towers, face what we face everyday; a desperate and hopeless situation. Three dynamics present themselves; cynicism, fear and courage.

The Monsters and the Cynics

As in reality, it is not fear that overwhelms courage, it's cynicism that undermines it. For courage to exist there first needs to be a fear to overcome, they exist in tension. But cynicism destroys courage by destroying the value of the prize. It tells a man that he cannot change and a woman that she cannot change anything.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

A courageous soul, doesn't need the assurance of success to risk everything. For they know there are things more valuable than success. The Lord of the Rings is a tale of epic courage, not because success is a likely option, but because fighting evil is. The King in his fallen fortress, is paralyzed by cynicism in the final moments of battle. “What can men do?” he asks in despair. What he fails to realize is that men can always fight evil while they can still breathe. His comrade challenges the remaining men to 'ride out' into certain death. He not only overcomes fear, he does not allow cynicism a place in his heart. He values values, not only success.

Fear Factor

Unlike cynicism, which defeats courage, fear just obstructs it. It is the force that courage pushes against. Courage, is doing it, but doing it afraid. It's just not brave if you're not scared. Simple. Real heroes don't wait to be fearless before doing something heroic. They just are heroes despite the fear. In southern England there is a woman who is completely blind. She ran towards a bomb screaming for everyone to run when it went off. She was brave, courageous, heroic and scared. She saved every life that day and it cost her. That's real courage.

Fear is never appeased. It is not a static force, but one that either advances or retreats. Fear is either empowered or diempowered by what we do with it. Fear defines the limits to our freedom. Every time we confront fear, we push back that limit and create more freedom. Every time we yield to it, it comes closer still. We don't always have opportunity to succeed, but we always have the opportunity to succeed over fear.

It's a lifetime of appeasement that ends in the statement 'I used to be so brave'. I am most scared of being fearful and of my world getting smaller. So I always aim to do things that scare me, even if they are silly and especially if they are costly. It's only then that I safeguard my courage.

He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed; out distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end.

Henri Frédéric Amiel

Take courage.

Back