Courage! Courage! Courage!

I remember when I was a teenager seeing a picture of Michael Stipe from REM wearing a T-shirt on which he had scrawled with a Jiffy Marker "Courage! COURAGE! Courage!" At his inspiration, I wrote these same words out on a piece of paper with a black oil pastel and taped it to the inside of my bedroom door. (Not that outside my door was a ferocious lion or anything). It was simply so that whenever I would leave my room, particularly each morning, I was always reminded of the need for courage in life, and in the world.

But before I say more about courage I have to say a little bit about our Sunday afternoon. And I have to laugh. Krista and I have been wanting to watch the whole Godfather trilogy for some time, as she has not seen them all, and I haven't for a long time. I have often been moved by this brooding family drama to think about courage and nobility and love that characterizes the Corleone family, but at the same time is subjugated to the family's 'business' - and the tragic violence that goes along with it. Al Pacino as Michael Corleone has always been one of my favourite characters in movies, period. So we watched Part 1 last Sunday, and then we watched the first part of part 2 on Saturday night. We watched it on VHS because the Mighty Parkallan didn't have the sequels on DVD. And wouldn't you know it, when we went to start the second tape Godfather 2 on Sunday afternoon it was doing this weird thing where it would stop every five minutes and shut off the power on our brand-new VCR. We thought this was mildly annoying, but just kept restarting it. Then all of a sudden it just froze on one scene... and the tape would not eject from our VCR. So we called BLOCKBUSTER and they told us not to worry about the tape because it was faulty and they gave us a credit on our account. But this doesn't change the fact that we have a copy of Godfather 2 still jammed in our VCR! We called Krista's Dad, who has had some experience with this kind of thing, and he told us that it is is probably not too hard to fix, so we might crack open our VCR to try this out. Sounds exciting, and no doubt requires a fair dose of courage in and of itself. Nevertheless, we felt like watching a movie still so we decided to go to Parkallan to get one. I went over there and picked one up, and came home, and it turned out to be not our cup of tea at all, so we went back together to get another (thankfully the video store is about a minute walk from our back yard). As soon as we walk out the back door and I hear it click shut, I say to Krista, "did you bring your keys?" And she says "I thought you had yours." And so we realized, at that very moment, that we were locked out of our house with no wallet and no keys (you can trade DVD's for free if you're a member at Parkallan Video). So we go over there and pick out a new movie, and the hospitable proprietor, Jeff, lets us use his phone to call Krista's parents to come let us back into our house with their extra key. So, in the meantime, Krista and I went and huddled on our front steps, and actually that was kind of fun to just sit there and enjoy it, and I mentioned that we should sit out there in the summer sometime.

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I have always been heartened by the etymological origins of this word "courage", which relates to the "heart," coeur . That bravery or strength of character is something deeply rooted in the heart, that permeates all possibile human interactions. Be of good courage!


And this leads me to the part of it all that I am most deeply affected by... a line from one of our hymns from Church - the "Dogmatic of Vespers for Tone 1" to be specific, which lauds Mary the Mother of God - a tremendous model of personal courage herself. The line simply says, "Courage, courage, O People of God!"
And somehow this sums up the need, I think, of so many of us in the world today. We need to have something happen in our coeurs... something has to shift, to break, to bleed, to grow in our hearts. My own (and perhaps all of our) grinchy old tickers need to move up a few sizes... until they have expanded enough to take in the love that is truly all around (hidden in the broken VCRs and homes we may be currently locked out of).

"Courage, courage, O People of God!"