Choosing Courage

Repentance and Preparing the Way of Love

Photo by Oliver Cole on Unsplash

You can choose courage or you can choose comfort: but you can’t choose both. Not at the same time.

Brene Brown

Reflection

Advent is a season of both challenge and comfort. In this week’s gospel the challenge comes in the fierce and urgent tones of John the Baptist, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Um... Could we skip that bit and just get to the part when every valley shall be filled… and the rough way made smooth? The call to repentance does not sound very inviting just now. I’m busy trying to process a world in crisis and my sense of helplessness in face of it all. I’d rather be comforted than challenged. Do you think we might place the need for repentance at someone else’s door?

But I suspect, if we were being honest, most of us have an uneasy sense that we may, indeed, have a bit of repenting to do. Further, it’s likely that true comfort is only found on the other side of that change of heart. Change of heart might be one way of translating repentance.

That puts me in mind, by free association, of the word courage. Courage, as some of you will know, comes from the Latin word cor - which means heart. And then, I think about Brene Brown’s work on courage, which draws upon her fundamental belief (documented again and again by her research) that vulnerability is the birthplace of so many of the things that make our life worth living.

Vulnerability, she writes, is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

And so repentance begins to look a bit more approachable, even appealing. We need a change of heart: the courage to be vulnerable. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord…

Prepare the way of Love.

It’s a cry we can no longer afford to ignore. We want comfort and reassuring promises, but unless we choose courage over comfort - at least some of the time - our comfort is in danger of being private, superficial, in denial of the wisdom that can only come from the wilderness.

Hence the quote above: You can choose courage or you can choose comfort but you can’t choose both. Not at the same time. But what exactly might all this mean in practical terms as we enter the second week of Advent, towards the end of another disturbing year?

I’m very far from being an exemplary figure, but for me, this week, choosing courage has meant: saying yes to the difficult conversation that I would rather have shut down; sitting down to meditate before I picked up my work; saying no to the compulsion to numb out most nights on a glass or two of wine or another hour on the internet. It meant letting myself look longer than I wanted to at the heartbreaking image of a face of a child in Gaza and yearn a bit more deeply for her freedom.

Such small things won’t change the world overnight but perhaps they are changing my heart. And I believe that this is the only way to change the world - one courageous heart at a time.

Prepare the way of Love…

I think we choose courage when we begin to understand that cheap, unearned reassurance, is neither truly satisfying nor ultimately healing or helpful to the world. We choose courage when we lean into the discomfort we would rather run away from in order to find a more compassionate connection with ourselves (please do not skip over yourself - it won’t work!) with one another, with nature and with God. Only in places of vulnerability, for which the wilderness is a metaphor, can we make those deep connections.

Prepare the way of Love…

Choosing courage means being curious rather than defensive, kind rather than transactional, creative rather than destructive, drawn rather than driven, grateful rather than greedy, present rather than distracted, sad rather than numb.

Integrity, writes Brene, is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.

Words, even the most eloquent words, are not enough any more. The world needs our repentance. Repentance is the dangerous movement towards integrity, humility and compassion – in even the smallest places. And it’s often only in these private, hidden places, out of public view, that we can receive, give and long most deeply for the Comfort that will embrace us all.

Prepare the way of Love.

A LITURGY OF PRAYER

Opening Prayer

Close your eyes if that feels okay. Name the discomfort in your life right now. Feel where it lands in your body and place a hand on it. Find courage, curiosity and compassion for all that you think or feel. With eyes still closed, let yourself long and pray for true comfort. Maranatha¹.

1st Reading

Luke 3.1-6

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler^a of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler^b of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler^c of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’

A Time of Silence

Suggestion: 20 mins. But take even a few minutes if you can!

Silence is not always easy. The mind is hard to quiet. If you don’t yet have a way, you might find a single prayer word or phrase - and return to it each time you find your mind wandering. Your mind certainly will wander. Don’t worry. Just gently return, repeating the prayer word. Maranatha!

Widening the Circle

Take a moment to give thanks for the grace of silence, and extend that grace to all those people and places on your heart and mind right now.

The Lord’s Prayer

There’s a nice version below.

Second Readings

To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made…

COURAGE Excerpted From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
© 2015 David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Blessing for Courage by John O’Donohue

When the light around lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn
Cold as a stone inside,

When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself
And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,

When one voice commands
Your whole heart,
And it is raven dark,

Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world.

Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,

Know that you are not alone,
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes,
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.

Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.

Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.

A new confidence will come alive
To urge you towards higher ground
Where your imagination
will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!

Blessing

May we choose courage and walk the way of Love: And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us now and always. Amen.

Music:

Question for the Week: for Journal or Comment

What would choosing courage look like for you?

How might you embrace vulnerability in yourself or in another, with compassion this week?

The New Zealand Anglican Lord's Prayer

Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.

Jim Cotter

1. Based on the teachings of John Cassian, John Main recommended the recitation of Maranatha as "the ideal Christian mantra, meaning "Come Lord", repeated silently interiorly as four equally stressed syllables Ma-ra-na-tha: "Not only is this one of the most ancient Christian prayers, in the language Jesus spoke, but it also has a harmonic quality that helps to bring the mind to silence.