AGAINST THE WIND AND OPEN SKY
UU Church of the Desert
October 20, 2002
Duff Cooper held the
office of First Sea Lord in the British Cabinet under Neville Chamberlain in
1938, a job roughly comparable to the Secretary of the Navy in our system. It is difficult for us, with our knowledge
of the aftermath, to evoke the feelings of the people of Britain and France as
they confronted Hitler in 1938. Duff
Cooper was one of those with Winston Churchill who wanted Britain to rearm and
to stand up to Hitler’s violent demands, but, unlike Churchill, Cooper was in
the Cabinet. The story of Chamberlain’s
weakness in the face of Hitler’s threats and his disinclination to risk war for
the “faraway people of Czechoslovakia, whom we hardly know” is a familiar and
dismaying one. When Chamberlain came
back from Munich with his umbrella, waving a piece of paper and saying, “I
bring peace in our time,” the British cheered wildly. Duff Cooper wrote, “For many days they had been preparing for war
with all the anguish that such preparation inflicts upon the human mind. They had foreseen financial ruin and sudden
death. Those who had survived the first
war felt that it was all to be borne again, with the lives of their children,
instead of their own, at stake.
Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, the clouds dispersed, the sky was
blue, the sun shone. There was to be no
war, neither then nor at any future date.
And the miracle had been performed by one man. The Prime Minister of England had saved the world.” And Duff Cooper felt very lonely in the
midst of so much happiness he could not share.
He resigned from the Cabinet that day; he was the only one to do
so. He explained to the House of Commons:
“The Prime Minister may be right. I can
assure you, Mr. Speaker, with the deepest sincerity, that I hope and pray that
he is right, but I cannot believe what he believes.”
He knew that he might be
ruining his political career. He was
giving up an office that he loved and working with associates whom he
cherished. Some of his old political
friends did snub him after that, but there were others who congratulated him on
his courage and his keen judgment. He
did go through an anxious and uncertain time, for he had really risked his
whole future. Others in political life
have had promising careers terminated as a result of taking a particular stand
at an inopportune moment. What made his
stand courageous? Partly it was because
he stood alone, or almost so. Partly it
was because he put the value of his own reason and his own conscience higher
than the prevailing opinion of the public and his colleagues and his Prime
Minister. Partly it was the very fact
of the risk. Courage always involves
risk, and the risk is not merely success orfailure in the situation at hand,
but some aspect of ultimate risk—death, or non-being, guilt or condemnation,
emptiness or meaninglessness. Walt
Whitman has a call to courage which reflects this risk:
“Sail forth! Steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul,
exploring, I with thee,
And thou with
me;
For we are bound where
mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the
ship, ourselves, and all.”
What, then, is
courage? What is it that enables us
sometimes to “steer for the deep waters only…..to risk the ship, ourselves, and
all.”? The deep water may be a new job,
or a relationship, r trying to do something we have not done before. Courage seems to have something to do with
going against our fears and anxieties, against the threatening, the hostile,
the unknown. How do we do it? Whence comes our courage?
`Mary Daly said, “You
become courageous by doing courageous acts…….Courage is a habit.” And the actress Ruth Gordon said of courage:
“Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.”
The writer Anais Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands according to your
courage.” Someone else, “Courage is
what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down
and listen.” And finally, Winston Churchill
said, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because…it is
the one quality which guarantees all the others.” That is a nice description, but it does not really tell us what
courage is.
When I want a good
definition of a basic word like courage, I usually try the dictionary first,
and then I go to Paul Tillich. My
Oxford Dictionary says that courage is “Spirit, mind, disposition,
nature.” That does not help much. Random House says it is “the quality of mind
or spirit that enables one to face difficulty, danger, or pain with firmness
and without fear.” I could accept that
a bit better if it said “without the appearance of fear.” Someone named Corrs Harris said, “the
bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act
accordingly.” I like that: if you are
not brave, act bravely. But what really
is courage and where do we get it?
Tillich says courage is
“self-affirmation in spite of….the fact of non-being.” What he is pointing to here is the ultimate
anxiety we all face. We affirm
ourselves in spite of that. The whole
ancient world took courage from the image of the dying Socrates, and Plato’s
account attempts to interpret the courage of Socrates. Here was a man who knew his own value and
was able to act in a way that was consistent with what he had believed and
taught all along. When he was sentenced
to death his friends wanted him to escape, to flee from Athens so that he could
continue to live and thwart his judges.
Socrates pointed out that he had always taught respect for the law and
for those who administered it, and if he were to flee he would be denying his
own creed and making himself guilty of the crimes they charged him with. Socrates is certain that there is something
about him which his executioners cannot destroy, and this is what he affirms.
But we face other basic
threats to our being. One is the
knowledge of our guilt. There are so
many ways in which we fail to measure up to what we expect of ourselves. Hans Hofmann says that one of the hardest
things about growing up is discovering that we cannot be as good as we thought
we had to be. Sometimes we do terrible
things. We hurt the people we love the
most; we hurt innocent strangers. We neglect
and fail in some of our duties and we lie to ourselves and to others. It would be easy for us to be so consumed in
the knowledge of what we have done wrong that there would be nothing left to
confirm; no joy in life, because we don’t deserve it, and no satisfaction in
our accomplishments, because they do not erase our sins. Courage is the ability to affirm ourselves
in spite of whatever we have done that is unacceptable. We are still accepted.
The third basic anxiety
is emptiness and meaninglessness. It
comes and it goes; some people are aware of it only indirectly. What’s the use? Why do I bother? What
does it matter, anyway? I knock myself
out for my family. I work; I slave; I
buy them color television. And what
thanks do I get? What do they care what
I put up with, what I go through?
Or, there is nobody who
is really in my life, nobody who really cares about me. I don’t know why I am living, or for
what. Courage is finding a way to
affirm one’s being even in the moments of emptiness and discouragement. How does courage do it? How do we do it? Here is how we do it: we don’t evade or avoid the burdens. We pick them up and take them into ourselves
as part of our lives, and, as we are able, we carry them. We will not live forever, but there is
something about us which cannot be destroyed.
We do not always do the best that is in us, but we can carry the guilt
that is ours and try to do better.
There are times when the whole of life seems empty, absurd, without
meaning; but we can take the very absurdity into ourselves and build our own
paradoxical meaning. We can refuse to
be defined by the things we are afraid of, and this is a step toward affirming
ourselves. And once we make this basic
affirmation, then our lives grow in power; it is easier for us to open them up
to all sorts of new possibilities, because if we can cope with the biggest
threats to our lives, why should we be afraid of the everyday ones?
Ruth Gordon entered the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1914, and one year later, she flunked
out. They said she did not show any
promise as an actress. Fifty years
later, as a very successful actress and playwright, she was invited back to
speak to the student body. She told the
young aspiring students: “the one thing I learned here is don’t give up! So some rainy afternoon when somebody says
to you, ‘you’re not pretty enough.
You’re too tall. You’re too
short. Your personality is not what
we’re looking for’—DON’T GIVE UP! Think
it over.”
And Duff Cooper, writing
the concluding chapter of his memoirs:
“life has been good to me, and I am grateful. My delight in it is as keen as ever, and I will thankfully accept
as many more years as may be granted.
But I am fond of change and have welcomed it even when uncertain whether
it would be for the better; so although I am very glad to be where I am, I shall
not be distressed when the summons comes to go away. Autumn has always been my favorite season and evening has been
for me the pleasantest time of day. I
love the sunlight, but I cannot fear the coming of the dark.”
Let my friend, Violet Turner, have the last
word. She calls it
“Old Woman’s Song.”
I may be old, unlovely to the eye
Of one who looks for pointed breast,
Smooth cheek, inviting thigh,
But what of that!
My mouth was honey and my taste was sweet
To more than one when I was young
And love my heart’s own beat.
And what of that!
I’ve lived my life and loved it.
What I had
Was worth each bit of what I paid.
And should I now be sad
Because of that?
I’ll not cry because no bright tomorrows
Repeat my yesterdays. I’ve
found
Old joys appease new sorrows.
And that is that!