Chestertonian + Lewisian Musings: The Ball and the Cross, Courage, and Friendship

(I wrote this post over the summer, and thought I'd post it now, because I reread the draft, and it was a good reminder to myself. Coming back to school, a lot of the anxiety I talk about in the post is resurfacing, and pretty much everything I write about in this post is something that I need to re-remember to practice and re-ground myself in. So, I thought it might be useful to others, as well.)

It's been a while, but I've written another Chestertonian Musing! (It turns out it's easier to write Chestertonian Musings when I'm actually reading Chesterton on a regular basis.) And somehow, it turned into a hybrid Chestertonian-Lewisian Musing, which I really quite like. 

I've been thinking quite a lot about Courage this year. It's actually my word of the year, a concept that never made much sense to me...until this past December/January, when I was clobbered over the head with "Courage". It's been very applicable to my year so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what God does with it for the remainder of the year.

But because of that, I've become very aware of the word 'courage' and anything written about that concept pretty much everywhere. One of the most recently interesting examples was a phrase I came across in my reread of The Ball and the Cross. 

"Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the atheist"

(Of course, this is referring to Turnbull, and comes from one of the points when he's confronting the enemy.) However, the word 'mirthless' made me wonder what, then is Catholic courage. Is it different from atheistic courage? How is it different? 

The Ball and the Cross contains an example of Catholic courage when Father Michael climbs down from the ball and the cross at the beginning of the book. (It's just occurred to me that perhaps Michael is meant to be a type or representation of the Archangel Michael, and I'm metaphorically head-desking over how obvious that is.) Chesterton says: 

"He realized; with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it...his one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe." 

Or, as Chesterton says in Orthodoxy (and which is one of my favorite quotes from Orthodoxy, although there are many of those): 

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage."

I think it can be kind of hard to see from these quotes, however good a definition of courage they give, how the courage of a Catholic can differ from the courage of an atheist. But, if it's not too presumptuous, I hope you'll permit me to offer my own thoughts, from my own experience. 

I am obviously exercising my courage most of the time in ways that are much less truly perilous than dangling from the ball and the cross at the top of St. Paul's. But I do hike and mountaineer, a little, so there is that. 

But the venues in my real life in which I most often exercise courage are in making decisions about trips and life things and whatnot, and in social interactions. Because, y'see, although I may seem rather extraverted and talkative on my blog, I can be rather socially anxious in real life. I've learned to cope as I've gotten older, but in trying to make friends at the Newman Center, some of that anxiety resurfaced. (In fact, a fair bit of it.) 

But what I've found in this past semester and parts of the summer is that a) reminding myself that courage is needed in social situations, too, helps and b) what Chesterton says about courage is exactly applicable in social situations, and it actually meshes quite well with something that Lewis says about friendship. 

Because, in a social situation, very much like Chesterton says about bodily courage, one must have a strong desire to be friends with someone, and, at the same time, a willingness to not be friends with them. One must not be afraid of losing their friendship as if it was the worst thing in the world. That's paralyzing. Instead, one must realize that friendship is a good, but if one doesn't have things in common with or doesn't get on well with a certain person, that friendship is unlikely to flourish. One true friend is worth five acquaintances, and a friendship can never move past the acquaintance stage without the courage which allows one to try to draw someone into friendship while accepting that this may mean losing their companionship. 

(I don't know if I'm making sense, but that's the best way I can describe it.) 

As Lewis says in The Four Loves (and I'm paraphrasing a little): 

"when the question 'what truth do you see' meets the answer 'I don't see any truth, I only want a friend', true friendship cannot arise, though certainly affection may." 

Asking the question "what truth do you see?" (although it may take on a different form, of course, and perhaps the form of many conversations) is an essentially perilous question, and one may not like the answer, but one must ask it, and express "a strong desire for friendship taking the form of the readiness to lose companionship", in a way, in order to gain friends. 

And what I've realized in all of this, in my time practicing and thinking about courage, so far, is that in order for me to display true courage, I must have a strong grounding in trust. I must know that if I lose something, whether it be my life, or merely an acquaintance (so far, I don't think I've lost any acquaintances, but there are certainly ones for whom I have set aside the possibility of building a deeper friendship), it will not be the end of the world, and I will gain more things in the future. 

In other words, I must put both my life and my social life in the hands of God, make a prayer along the lines of "Lord, I know that this [whatever I am trying to gain] is not the greatest good, because You are, and so I'm going to go into this with courage, knowing that if I lose, there will still be You, and You have many more good things in store for me." It's hard to explain, and it is still mysterious to me, but that's the best way I can express it.

Knowing that whatever it is I am being courageous about (to the best of my ability) is not the most important thing, and is in the hands of God, I do have a certain levity about it. The weight of worry lightens. Whatever it is, it's truly not very important, compared to the things that really are important, and so I'm able to not spend time obsessing over it. For instance, I can just be with my friends without analyzing every transaction, because our friendship is in God's hands.

Trust transforms courage. It changes it from something that is somewhat hopeless and mechanical and difficult to something that is joyful, even exciting. In my experience, at least. 

And that is why I think it makes sense to me that atheistic courage would be 'mirthless', whereas Catholic courage can be 'mirthful', and even light. Because there is more to life than whatever it is that we might be afraid of losing, whether it's life, or a job, or friends. And if we can trust in that, the fear recedes. Or at least, becomes more manageable, in my (limited) experience. It's almost not fair to the atheists. 

Okay, I feel like I've not made a lot of sense in this post, but I hope that you have maybe gleaned something! XD 

And now I'm very curious about your thoughts...what has your experience been with courage? Am I totally off-base about how trust transforms courage? Have you read The Ball and the Cross?