Building Walls of Courage

Although I like to consider myself to be an optimist, a tough-minded and hopeful soul who strives to find the silver lining in even the darkest of life’s storms, I found myself seeing the proverbial glass of water as half-empty lately. Let’s face it, clinging to hope in the midst of life’s difficulties is no easy task; especially in the wake of constant news footage of unending racial strife and looting in Baltimore, murderous rampages, the stoning to death of young women in Africa, senseless shootings in Texas, and the tragic loss of thousands of lives in Nepal. Yet, even as I found myself gradually becoming enveloped by the dark clouds of the world’s pain, suffering, and brokenness, I discovered a glimmer of hope in the most unexpected of places — an antidote to the “sky is falling” mentality that was doing its best to get a hold of me. Hope that came my way in a long forgotten quote that I unexpectedly found earlier today buried in a pile of notes. Words of wisdom once spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. during a turbulent era of racial inequality, violence at home, a war in Vietnam; a time of unending strife and fear. A dark period in history when people of goodwill began to lose hope, to fear that the forces of darkness and evil might prevail. In the face of darkness, Reverend King advised, “We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”

Building dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear is no easy task. The process begins, it seems, by letting go of the things we cannot change – the ghosts from our past that haunt us, the fact that people will act in cruel and dehumanizing ways, and the unexplainable loss of life that inevitably follows earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons; the forces of chaos and disorder at work in a fragile world. Instead, of surrendering to defeatism or apathy; however, we have a choice. We can surrender or we can take charge of our attitudes. No matter what happens to us, we ultimately have the capacity to choose how we will respond in any situation. And, while it might be easier to play the blame game and to hunt for scapegoats to castigate, ultimately we are in charge of our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions. Perhaps that what was Martin Luther King, Jr. was hinting at. We can choose to build dikes of courage in the face of life’s storms or we can choose to surrender control to the forces of darkness and fear. Either way, the choice is ours to make.

Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning and a Holocaust survivor, believed that the power to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances was “the last of human freedoms.” In fact, everything may be taken away from us at a moment’s notice, but our attitudes belong to us. We own them.

Though the clouds of darkness continue to break into my reality, I choose to build walls of courage, feeble though they may be this week, to hold back the flood of fear that is sweeping through our communities, nation, and world. I, like the Norwegian pastor Eivind Josef Berggrav who spoke to a frightened nation less than eighteen hours following the Nazi occupation of Norway in November 1941, choose to believe that “God is God even when the forces of evil are preponderant, whether in physical pain, in spiritual distress, or in the darkness of despair or destruction. By this faith in God, the soul can be kept healthy despite all, and can retain its independence under all circumstances.”

Understanding the reality that attitude is a choice requires courage; a willingness to build walls of courage even in the midst of the torrential floods of fear. Paul Tillich, a German theologian and philosopher, would agree. In his book Courage to Be (1952) Tillich writes, “It takes courage to see in the reality around us and in us something ultimately positive and meaningful and to live with it, even love it. Loving life is perhaps the highest form of the courage to be.”