Be of Good Courage!

I Really Mean It!

Over the past few years, I have been learning what it means to be courageous. I have never thought of myself as a particularly courageous person. I do not, as a rule, tend to stand my ground, if standing my ground means that someone will be mad at me. I have had a very strong sense of wishing to please, wishing to be whatever people have expected of me. I have seen rocking the boat as something like impoliteness. You can do it, but why should you?

People will say at this point that it's been easy for me not to rock any boats and not to stand my ground, because I haven't lost anything by capitulating, if, in fact, I have capitulated. We run up against this as Christians all the time. When is going along with the prevailing hegemony just being "normal," and when is it actively succumbing to something to which, as Christians, we should not succumb? There seem to be two major camps in this respect. These could also extend to people who are not Christian, I think. The first camp sees itself as open to new ideas, not stuck in the past, willing to change with the times. The second camp sees itself as holding fast to cherished traditions, staying away from current cultural norms because they are somehow injurious to the soul or to The Church or even, in some sense, to God. For people in the second camp, the minute you step out of the Christian bubble you have built against the influences of the age in which you find yourself, you're lost. You have betrayed God and therefore, so the implication seems to go at any rate, He has no more use for you.

I think you can tell that I tend to err on the side of the first camp. However, I think I only came to know this for sure very recently, and the realization finally struck home because of the notion of courage. In the second camp, courage seems to mean being steadfast in terms of tradition, opposition to anything which does not belong to that tradition, and some notion of being "a real Christian" in the face of rampant rot and watering-down of the faith. Courage, for instance, involved not wearing a mask during the height of Covid, because by not wearing the mask, you were standing up with courage against a government or world forces who wanted you to be weak. They wanted you to be afraid, and the sign that you were afraid was that you wore a mask. Wearing a mask was not seen as sacrificing comfort for the sake of someone else who might get Covid from you, but as a bowing to pressure from the world. The other message given was that Covid was nothing to God's power to protect "His chosen people." So, a "true Christian" would never countenance the wearing of a mask in the face of a little thing like a virus! Look at Daniel! He never wore protective clothing when facing the lions, nor did the three youths wear fireproof suits in the furnace! They were "Men," while most humans nowadays are "boys." This time of testing was supposed to sift the wheat from the chaff, the "fake Christians" from the "real." The only hitch here is that the same people advocating masks as a sign of weakness or of a lack of faith in God's ability to protect His people from harm also believed that Covid was not harmful, and in some cases, actually called it fake. So, in that way, they used the idea of being courageous, but then took it away again, because you had nothing in the face of which to stand fast and be true, save perhaps government oppression or something, I suppose.

As a result of this messaging, I became very demoralized. I wore masks, yes, even in church, and I took vaccines even when the government wasn't making me do it. I apparently betrayed God and was unable to withstand even these small things. So how could I call myself a Christian? I was not courageous. I was weak and deserved to be thrown out without a second thought. Take a Covid vaccine? That's a sin. Wear a mask in church or in any public place? Well, you can, but the great thing is to get around the bylaw by claiming you have a medical exemption. This is clearly permitted, because by bearing false witness to the world, you are being true to God. I think this is a very dangerous logic to follow. There are, in saint stories, such things as "holy tricks," which often involve women disguising themselves as men in order to enter monasteries, rather than submitting to marriages which they do not want. But to invoke that sort of logic here, especially for such a small thing as wearing a medical mask for a while, seems very weird to me.

I still don't know if I was courageous, not courageous, or perhaps neither by taking the vaccine or wearing masks, but what I have come to learn is that this idea of being a "hardcore" Christian just isn't on! Christ is not a marine drill-sergeant! He isn't looking for a few good men! In fact, he's precisely looking for many pretty ordinary people! He's not so much asking you to stand up and be counted as a "real Christian" as He is saying: "I'm here! Just open your door! I'll come in!" Nothing we do can prove our love for God. He says again and again that to love Him means keeping His commandments, but all our keeping of commandments are not so He will love us! In fact, He knows we will stumble again and again. We love Him because He loved us first. He loved humans in all our superfluity and unusefulness. He gave us stuff to do and we messed it up, but even so, He is still giving us stuff to do. He permits us to be of use to Him, though in Himself, He is complete and beyond complete. We are His manifestation, though Christ is His manifestation in its fullness. So what do we have to do? We have to walk through the world and learn to be more and more like Christ and less and less like what we come to think of as ourselves. In doing this, the promise is, we will become more and more ourselves by stripping away all the crap that tends to accumulate and get in the way.

This is what we need courage for. We must have courage to trust in His trustworthiness. We must have courage to trust that He will not cast us out over every bump in the road that we may encounter. Whether churches are closed or opened, whether all the outward trappings are taken away from our faith, so long as there is a voice to pray and another to respond with "amen," then all will be well! Now, does this mean that all our outward trappings and traditions don't matter? No! We must treasure them and use them while we have them. We must take the medicine we are given with joy, and we must, in the last analysis, be of good courage! He has overcome the world and conquered death!

This was what I had come to believe during Covid. So, to walk into church afterward and hear all this about how doing all the Covid-mitigating things we were told to do was a sign of a lack of faith in God quite literally destroyed me for a time. I was worthless. I was useless as a Christian. All my old negative voices came back and would not let me sleep. I was dross. I was garbage to God and should just leave the church now because I was failing the test. I was a stupid little girl who did not know the stakes and was willing to throw away her hard-won closeness to Christ, (because, you see, it has to be earned! There's no such thing as a free Eucharist!) Okay. I know I'm being facetious. In many ways, we do have to do things to be Christian, but only to let our faith be a living thing and not just words. God doesn't need all our doing! We need it! The tiny spark of God-ness in us needs it, or it will go out. Our job is to grow that spark, which has been given to us pretty-much for free! There is no tariff on salvation! It's there waiting for us!

So, this is my new motto: "Be of good courage! Take heart! Be comforted!" If God is really God, He will set things right. He will figure everything out. We have to take heed to ourselves, to watch and to do things that will fan the inner divine fire rather than extinguish it, but jumping off a building and hoping that an angel will catch you is not courage! it's foolhardiness! Living into God is what we must do, knowing full well that we will disappoint Him and betray that inner Divine fire a hell of a lot! But courage comes in kneeling at His feet and saying: "Dad, I got lost again! Please help me find my way back to the right road!" That's what life's all about! The gift is always there. We just have to learn to walk in joy of that gift. This doesn't mean being heedless, but in fact, it means taking a stronger line in some ways, because though God will never remove His love from any human person, we have the ability to keep the door closed against it, or to erect barriers of inordinate fear, anger, envy, pride, false humility and hatred against it. If the God-fire is continually being drowned by the ashes of self-at-all-costs, then it will make a smoke powerful enough to darken the entire world. If, however, that self-at-all-costs stuff is slowly burned away, the true self can be spent aright in love and hope, and can stand as the light of the world.

So, I say again, as much to myself as to any reader for whom this makes sense: Take heart! Be comforted, and by all means, be of good courage! Darkness abounds, but it is in darkness where the light may best be descried! All, somehow, will be well!