Safety Last

One of my hobbies, as I often mention, is to collect and to read popular magazines published from around 1875-1910. I have about fifteen years of The Century, my favorite, another five or six of Scribner’s, five or six of Harper’s, and this or that of several others. Wherever I go in these, I am impressed by the adventuresomeness of people who did not enjoy our high-tech health care, who had no police forces armed to the teeth, and who yet commonly engaged in enterprises that demanded boldness, and often considerable physical hardship and courage.

Here are some examples: a young British man, hardly more than a boy, leads an exploratory expedition into the heart of Borneo; John Muir gives an account of how a camp dog, Stickeen, helped him find his way back in the fog from a needle-like spur of a glacier, several miles long and bounded by a sheer precipice one thousand feet deep; workers underground dig and blast and shore up a conduit of twenty miles to bring water from the Croton Dam to New York City; the Plains Indians celebrate the ritual “Sun Dance”—which a youth must pass, with hours of protracted pain and loss of blood, to be admitted among the braves; children play all through the night after a snowstorm has turned New York City into a winter spree; John Joseph Jefferson, 13 years old, plies his nine years of experience as an actor to help support the family after his father dies; Herbert Hoover, with his wife Lou Henry Hoover, both of them mining engineers and both of them pacifists, in Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion, defend their camp against the rebels; and on and on it goes.  

The Congo, the Antarctic, steam engines, hot air balloons, railroads, fishing off the Grand Banks, sailing the high seas, traveling to foreign lands, hunting big game—and adventures, too, of the mind and soul; a scientist describing the Crab Nebula, next to a theologian painstakingly and fearlessly dismantling the materialism of Herbert Spencer.

Courage, says Thomas Aquinas, is essential to the practice of all the virtues. You may know what the just or the prudent thing to do is, but without courage, you will not do it, or you will do it only when you risk very little, probably because the situation is not critical. Anyone can enter a house that is not on fire. Anyone can tell the truth when he knows that everyone around him will praise him for it. I am not speaking here about people who enjoy telling the truth in awkward situations because they know it will hurt or offend others; that is a perverse sort of courage, and the speaker risks nothing that he values.

A desire to be safe and secure above all cannot be reconciled with the Christian life. Salvation is what Jesus offers, not the impostor safety. Confidence in God is what St. Paul models for us, not personal security. In a fallen world, love cannot be otherwise. “He who would save his life must lose it,” says Jesus. He tells us to set out into deep waters, not to paddle about the shore. He commands his people to “go forth and make disciples of all nations.” He sends the seventy-two on their commission without bag or scrip. The merchant seeking goodly pearls sells all he has to obtain the pearl of great price.

Christian poets have said the same. “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,” reads the leaden casket in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and that is the casket that the wise suitor Bassanio chooses, to win the hand of Portia. Milton’s Adam must woo Eve, indeed must run after her, crying, “Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim / My other half.” Spenser’s persona, in the Amoretti, gives up all, especially whatever selfishness remains in his love, and then his beloved herself responds in kind. Sonnet 67, immediately preceding the great sonnet that celebrates Easter, and echoing Psalm 42, “As the deer longs for the running streams,” presents the beloved as a deer willing to be bound forever:

There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

In La Vita Nuova, the majestic figure in Dante’s dream, representing Love, says to him, in Latin, “Ego dominus tuus”—“I am your Lord.” It means that nothing in his life can remain the same; he must leave the common crowd; devotion to Love demands all.

For love is not tame and safe. How can it be? Nor has God promised us a dull low-throbbing life of no adventure, of inconsequential trivialities, a padded cell, a playroom with soft toys. Consider the heroes who loved God more than they loved their lives, and who found life in that love. Moses ascends the terrible mountain, alone, and he is there so long that the people below believe he is dead. Elijah must retreat to Mount Horeb from the pursuing Jezebel, who seeks his life. Jesus asks Peter whether he loves Him, and when Peter replies three times that he does love Him, reversing the three-time denial on the night when Jesus was condemned, the Lord predicts the manner of death that Peter is to die: he is to be crucified. Martyrs are flinted out in each day’s forge. For love is not tame and safe. How can it be? Nor has God promised us a dull low-throbbing life of no adventure, of inconsequential trivialities, a padded cell, a playroom with soft toys.Tweet This

It is with a powerful amatory force that Hopkins’ heroine, the chief of the nuns in exile from Germany, sailing upon the Deutschland, cries out in the storm and the shipwreck that will make martyrs of them all:

She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
Was calling “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best.

This is not to reduce Jesus to a pseudo-lover, a pleasant undemanding little boyfriend, or a great cuddly smiley face in the sky. John Donne cries out to God to batter his heart, because only such battery can break through the walls of a heart given over to the enemy. “Dearly I love you and would be loved fain,” says he, “But am betrothed unto your enemy.”

If, with open minds and hearts, we were to return to the old hymnals and the books of sermons and popular articles on the Christian faith, we would be struck by the call to Christian courage. The YMCA movement was unashamedly inspired by it. Missionaries were still going forth into hostile lands (including some parts of the United States), putting their lives on the line. Fr. Damien of Molokai got to Hawaii by stowing himself away on a ship. Yet how few Catholics in our time have even once in their lives sung such words as these:

Rise up, O men of God,
The Church for you doth wait,
Her strength unequal to the task;
Rise up, and make her great!

To encounter it is like seeing a primary color that has somehow been missing from your palette—red, let us say. Imagine a world and a moral life in which the beating heart of courage, red, does not exist, but all is blue and yellow and (my favorite color) green, in all their shades and combinations, mingled with white and gray and black, but no red.

That would be unreal, you say. Precisely.