NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "A" - COURAGE

NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Nineteenth Sunday of Year “A” 

  “Take courage !  It is I.” (Mt 14, 27)

   “Take courage ! It is I,” said our dear Lord Jesus to Peter as he was terrified of the swirling waters all around him, and, mature man as he was, he cried out in fear. And Jesus assured him, “Courage, I’m here.” As the Psalmist says, “When the Lord is near what have I to fear?” We need to develop a deeper and deeper consciousness of the presence of the Lord.

Talking about courage. Courage is not the same as fearlessness. It is not the absence of fear, but the control of it. “Grace under pressure,” as Earnest Hemingway said. Courage gets above fear; it is, so to say, “fear that has said its prayers” (General Pershine). The great storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson, was always plagued by ill health, and though he filled his novels with exciting characters and exotic places, he was more interested in man’s inner spirit. He said that everyone needed to possess courage, even those who outwardly lived less adventurous lives. According to him, the ordinary person is no less noble because no drum beats before him when he goes out to his daily battlefields and no crowds shout his arrival when he returns from victory or defeat. 

COURAGE: No quality has even so much as addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages as courage. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life….shall save it” (Mark 8, 35) is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers, for that matter for anyone crossing the streets of Calcutta or going to work daily in crowded buses or trains. These words of Jesus might be printed on a mountaineering guidebook or the drill manual of an army camp. “He that shall lose his life shall save it.” This paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the edge of the mountain. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. Rather, he must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it. He must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. There is a vast difference between the grave of a hero and the grave of a suicide. The hero dies for the sake of living; the suicide dies for the sake of dying. Christian courage is a disdain of death. Confucian courage is a disdain of life.

    Life is a tough haul for many people some of the time and for some people most of the time. This is very true for committed people trying to live out Christian values everyday. They sometimes feel they have set out in life alone into the headwinds of poverty and pain, unemployment, injustice, loneliness and limitation. They feel unable to make much progress. Maybe we need to invite our Lord into our lives more realistically, asking his wisdom and courage. We must believe that we can change; we can be better and help others become better too.

G. K. Chesterton once remarked, “If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?”

We too will encounter and recognise the Lord even in the most trying and distressing situations when we cannot cope, despite our best human resources. God may speak loud and clear in power. But more often than not in the still small voice of an intimate personal experience. Like Peter, we waver and hesitate when we look at the threatening waves of difficulties, failure or opposition. It is only when we keep our gaze steadily on Jesus, the “Unsinkable One”, in persevering prayer, that we find new strength and an unexpected power, which can keep us in peace even in the midst of the greatest storms and stresses of life.

Courage is not something we need rarely, but what we need on a daily basis: to live, to suffer, to struggle and die. Winston Churchill ranked courage as “the first of the human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”

            The famed aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, who went down with her aircraft over the Pacific and was never found again, understood that without courage, personal contentment is not possible: “courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”

PRAYER:  (Ulrich Schafer)

God, here I will stand to fulfil what your faith in me expects. I will take the desert upon myself, the absence of your answers, your multifaceted, eloquent silence, to allow the fruit of solitude to ripen in me as nourishment for others.  I will not run away, even when I am afraid of the endless sand, of the senselessness; you silent one, because you are never far.  Amen.