Christian Courage

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5

I’m not given to panic.  I may not be the coolest head in the room in any crisis, but I’ve had enough experience handling medical emergencies that I can usually quell the panic response.  In these cases emotions have to be stilled so that right decisions can be made.  For the sake of calm, I can also put on a smile and explain why the situation isn’t as bad as it seems, or at least explain what actions we are going to take in the face of the disaster.  This is what I do.  At least, it’s what I imagine is happening on the exterior.

I found myself confronted with a familiar feeling this week.  I like to call it a baseline anxiety—as if the base part of a musical score had become erratic and accelerated while the higher parts continue to confidently sing out the melody and harmony in steady, sure time.  Or like when the soundtrack of a movie switches to something ominous, and yet the scene continues to play out tranquilly.  There is a dissonance between inner feeling and outward reality.  It is an emotion with nowhere to go.

While I tried to reassure myself and others that the Ebola case, which arrived in the country a week ago, was still quite far away and that the response was timely, the more the story was revealed, the scarier the situation became.  Unlike America, we do not have a strong health infrastructure that can quickly mobilize to contain these things. (But hats off to the efforts that have been made here! I’m truly impressed and proud.)  And again unlike what happened in America, the case here was actually infectious while traveling in a cramped bus.  The more we discussed the situation and our response to it, the more erratic and accelerated that base part became.

With that baseline churning and frothing, I went into work and… worked on the nursing schedule for next month.  It could not have been a more absurd combination—a feeling that said the world was ending tomorrow and outward actions that were planning, in meticulous detail, for all of next month.

In the past few years, this has happened more than I care to mention.  As we went through a coup d’état and then a rebel insurgence, we were repeatedly exposed to potential threats.  The threats were real and serious, just not imminent.  They were potential and not actual.  So we could neither run away, nor turn and fight.  The “fight or flight” response was fully activated but with nowhere to go and nothing to fight.  It has been hard to know what courage looks like in these situations.

Truly, if Ebola was in our hospital, we’d kick into one of those two modes, and, at least on an emotional level, it would be easier.  Plunge me into full crisis, give me the gear, and I’ll go fight.  I, and I know this to be true of my coworkers as well, am the type that, when adrenaline has kicked in, could go into combat full-tilt and stay at it for weeks.  But don’t hang a potential danger over my head and tell me to go grade papers.  All those emotions with nowhere to go.

I used to think that courage was choosing “fight” over “flight”.  Now I’m not sure.  What if the situation calls for neither?  I wonder if there is a sense in which courage is staying the course when everything cries out for a change.  Perhaps this courage demands that we continue singing out the melody, absurd and unexciting as it may be, until the baseline calms and comes back into harmony.  A Christian courage, it would seem more times than not, is staying still in the face of all that encourages movement—a waiting on the Lord when emotion cries that there is no time.

As I’ve reflected on this situation, I have come to realize that, in a different sense, this refusal to abide the whims of emotion is a common Christian experience.  This ought to be a common human experience, but the spirit of our age is to embrace emotions and act on them.  To do otherwise is to be inauthentic, which has become THE taboo in a world which has thrown out all other restraints. 

This week I’m thankful for a background in Christian courage.  I’m thankful that though I’m a man with all sorts of emotions and desires that wish to be expressed and put into action, I’m learning to wait, to stay the course, as dissonant as that might be.  I’m not required to deny the existence of these feelings—indeed there is something quite authentic and healing in speaking the truth about them—but I’m not required to obey them either.

Interestingly, Christian courage may be most identifiable as meekness.  Jesus promises that the meek will inherit the earth, which seems, if we are honest, to be utter nonsense.  Our modern connotation of meek is someone who goes along with whatever a stronger voice expresses, which is exactly the kind of person who would obey whatever strong emotion that comes along.  However, the meekness Jesus is talking about is a gentleness that comes from humility.  The common usage of the word at the time was for a horse that would accept a rider.  Somewhere, I heard it expressed as “bridled strength.” 

Christian courage calls us to bridle our strength, to hold back the fury of our emotions, and to humbly await a solution other than the one we would have naturally chosen.  Christian meekness authentically admits all the voices to the contrary, but chooses to put them aside in order to listen to the voice of One who is stronger than them all.  At the behest of this voice, and this voice alone, we go, or stay, or jump into action.

Rummaging around in my desk a few weeks back, I recovered a post-it note from my senior year of college, on which I had scrawled a poem from Christina Rossetti (1800s):

“God harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease and rest and joy.

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road I go.”

I must have liked (and still like) what this poem has to say about disciplining all the voices and emotions within, in order to pursue something higher.  However, at first blush, it might be considered old-fashioned self-hatred or a simple denial of what is authentically on the inside.  Happily, I looked up the whole poem and found the last verse:

“Yet One there is can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling load from me

Break off the yoke and set me free.”

Courageously, we admit truthfully the war of emotions that is happening on the interior; meekly, we accept that One greater than ourselves is more capable of leading the way; and this is how we inherit the earth.