The Hidden Faces of Courage: Inspirational Stories About the Courage of Ordinary People

By Peter C. Wilcox

Mother Teresa said, "to have courage for whatever comes in life--everything lies in that." When people think about courage, they often think about those who put their lives on the line for us every day, like first responders, firefighters, or police officers. But there are so many others who quietly endure, with steadfast courage, whatever comes their way in life. These people are like the anawhim in the Old Testament--the good, kind people whom very few know about, but who trust in the Lord. He is their strength. It is because of their faith in him that they live their lives with courage to face whatever comes their way.
In over thirty years as a psychotherapist and spiritual director, Wilcox has often been amazed at the strength and courage of so many of his clients. Some have faced physical disabilities; others struggle with mental, emotional, or psychological problems; still others with personal, family or career issues.
These people are what he calls "the hidden faces of courage." Often, they are not well-known. They certainly receive no notoriety or press. Yet, they are always there, doing the best they can each day. This book is an invitation to understand and appreciate the unnoticed courage and strength of ordinary people. If we can "walk in their shoes," it will help us to be courageous for whatever comes to us in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532674754

Peter C. Wilcox

Peter C. Wilcox, a psychotherapist and spiritual director for over thirty years, holds a doctorate in theology from The Catholic University of America and has taught at the Washington Theological Union; Loyola University, Maryland; and St. Bonaventure University, New York. He has directed retreats and conducted seminars on personality development and spiritual growth. The most recent of his seven books, I was Gone Long Before I Left, was published in 2020. For further information on his publications, visit his website at www.petercwilcox.com.

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The Hidden Faces of Courage

Inspirational Stories About the Courage of Ordinary People

Peter C. Wilcox

5791.png

The Hidden Faces of Courage

Inspirational Stories About the Courage of Ordinary People

Copyright ©

2019

Peter C. Wilcox. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7473-0

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ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7475-4

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09/17/15

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Importance of Courage

A. Heroic Acts of Courage

B. The Quiet Life of Courage

C. Stories of Ordinary Courage

Chapter 2: Courage and our Personalities

A. The Courage to Live Authentically

B. The Courage to Accept and Love Ourselves

C. The Courage to Accept and Love People Who are Different from Us

D. The Courage to Face into Our Fears

E. The Courage to Face Our Limitations

F. The Courage To Forgive

G. The Courage To Grieve

H. The Courage to Become Angry

I. The Courage to Follow Our Dreams

J. The Courage to Live with Mystery

K. The Courage to Age Gracefully

Chapter 3: The Courage to Let Go

A. The Courage to Let Go of Our False Selves and Embrace Who We Are

B. The Courage to Let Go of our Need for Approval

C. The Courage to Let Go of Comparison

D. The Courage to Let Go of Achievement as the Basis of our Self Worth

E. The Courage to Let Go of the Lone Ranger Syndrome

F. The Courage to Let Go of Our Need to be Right

Chapter 4: Courage and the Challenges of Life

A. The Courage to Live with Chronic Illness

B. The Courage of People Struggling with Mental Illness

C. The Courage of the Poor

D. The Courage to Live a Chaste Life

E. The Courage to Give The More

Conclusion

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to Mary, my mother, who died several years ago. Her quiet life of courage has allowed me to have a better understanding of this virtue and its importance in our lives. It is also dedicated to the many people I have worked with in my counseling career who have shown me the beauty and challenges of living a courageous life.

Introduction

My mother died from Alzheimers disease several years ago. She was 92. As is often the case, it was a constant, insidious, slow moving disease, robbing her almost completely of her mental abilities at the end. For fifteen of the last seventeen years of her life, she lived with us. As her health and abilities slowly deteriorated over the years, we took care of her. I will always be eternally grateful to Margaret, my wife, for the love and care she gave to my mother. She took care of her like she was her own mother. Although she was still working full time, she always took care of my mother first. Bathing her, getting her dressed, feeding her, praying the rosary with her, were all part of the way she took care of her every day. For approximately the last two years, my mother’s condition deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t be left alone and needed twenty-four hour care. Although we tried to avoid this for as long as we could, my sister, brother and I finally decided she would receive the care she needed in a nursing home. Fortunately, we found one about four miles from our home, which allowed us to see her very often. Throughout these last two years, we always felt very blessed that my mother was somehow able to recognize us, probably up until the week before she died.

Reflecting back on these years, I have often wondered what my mother must have felt during these days. With the initial onset of this disease and during the earlier years when she could still talk, she would often say how difficult it was for her to cope. It was so frustrating for her to be losing her memory, to lose her ability to drive, to not remember people, and ultimately, to be unable to care for herself. As the disease progressed, she became more and more fearful and anxious.

However, during these years, I was also amazed at her strength and courage. The effort she put forth to remember things and do things for herself was nothing short of heroic. Her desire not to be a burden to us motivated her to try all the more.

There are so many people like my mother. They endure quietly, and with steadfast courage whatever comes their way in life. They are like the anawim in the Old Testament— the simple, good, kind people whom very few other people know about but who trust in the Lord. He is their strength. It is because of their faith in Him, that they live their lives with courage to face whatever comes their way. In over thirty-five years as a psychotherapist, I have often been amazed at the strength and courage of so many of my clients. Some have faced physical disabilities; others have struggled with mental, emotional, or psychological problems; still others with personal, family, or career issues. Some of their lives have been broken as they struggle each day with addiction issues. So often, their daily lives demand courage from them to face the reality of living each day.

These people are what I call the hidden faces of courage. These are the courageous people I see every day. Often, not many people know of their struggles and courage. They certainly receive no notoriety or press. Yet they are always there, like my mother, doing the best they can each day, no matter what the challenge. It is for these people that I write these words. This book is dedicated to them. My hope is that they will know that their strength and courage are seen and appreciated, and that they will know that their daily struggles are meaningful and life-giving. And, if more of us could understand the courage of others, if we could simply walk in their shoes, the more we could, hopefully, appreciate the people around us who might struggle with issues that we might not ever know about.

1

The Importance of Courage

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow. Mary Ann Radmacher

We become brave by doing brave acts, observed Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Dispositions of character, virtues and vices, are progressively fixed in us through practice. Thus, by being habituated to despise things that are terrible and to stand our ground against them we become brave, and it is when we have become so that we shall be most able to stand our ground against them.¹

A. Heroic Acts of Courage

The brave person is not one who is never afraid. Being afraid is a perfectly appropriate emotion when confronted with fearful things. The great American novelist Herman Melville makes the Aristotelian point beautifully in a telling passage in Moby Dick, when Starbuck, the chief mate of the Pequod, first addresses the crew. I will have no man in my boat, said Starbuck, who is not afraid of a whale.²

For most people, it is relatively easy to recognize heroic acts of courage which continue to inspire us. Take for example, Rosa Parks, refusing to give up her seat on the bus; Harriett Tubman, leading slaves to freedom on the underground railroad; Martin Luther King Jr., standing up for civil rights; the police, firefighters, and citizens who rushed into buildings to save lives on September 11, 2001; those on flight 93, who stormed the cockpit of the airplane on that same day and sent it crashing in a field in PA, rather than allow it to head back to Washington, D.C. These acts, and so many similar ones, demand a tremendous amount of courage to stand up for a moral principle.

The late John McCain, in his book Why Courage Matters, tells the story of special forces master sergeant Roy Benavidez, whose bravery is almost too difficult to comprehend. Roy was the son of a Texas sharecropper and orphaned at a young age. He was a quiet boy who was mistaken as slow, and teased as a dumb Mexican by his classmates. He left school in the eighth grade to work in the cotton fields. At nineteen, he joined the army. On his first tour in Vietnam, in 1964, he stepped on a land mine. Army doctors thought the wound would be permanently crippling. It wasn’t. He recovered and became a Green Beret.

During his second combat tour, in the early morning of May 2, 1968, in Loc Ninh, Vietnam, sergeant Benavidez monitored by radio a twelve man reconnaissance patrol. Three Green Berets, friends of his, and nine Montagnard tribesmen had been dropped in the dense jungle west of Loc Ninh, just inside Cambodia. No man aboard the low-flying helicopters beating noisily toward the landing zone that morning could have been aware of how dangerous the assignment was. Considered an enemy sanctuary, the area was known to be vigilantly patrolled by a sizable force of the North Vietnamese army. Once on the ground, the twelve men were almost immediately engaged by the enemy and soon surrounded by a large force that grew to a battalion.

The mission had been a mistake, and three helicopters were ordered to evacuate the besieged patrol. Fierce small arms and antiaircraft fire, wounding several crew members, forced the helicopters to return to their base. Listening on the radio, Benavidez heard one of his friends scream, get us out of here. He jumped into one of the returning helicopters, volunteering for a second evacuation attempt. When he arrived at the scene, he found that none of the patrol had made it to the landing zone. Four were already dead, including the team leader, and the other eight were wounded and unable to move. Carrying a knife and a medic bag, Benavidez made the sign of the cross, leapt from the helicopter hovering ten feet off the ground, and ran seventy yards to his injured comrades. Before he reached them, he was shot in the leg, face, and head. He got up and kept moving.

When he reached their position, he armed himself with an enemy rifle, began to treat the wounded, reposition them, distribute ammunition, and call in air strikes. He threw smoke grenades to indicate their location and ordered the helicopter pilot to come in close to pick up the wounded. He dragged four of the wounded aboard, and then, while under intense fire and returning fire with his captured weapon, he ran alongside the helicopter as it flew just a few feet off the ground toward the others. He got the rest of the wounded aboard, as well as the dead, except for the fallen team leader. As he raced to retrIeve his body, and the classified documents the dead soldier had carried, he was shot in the stomach and grenade fragments cut into his back.

Before he could make his way back toward the helicopter, the pilot was fatally wounded and the aircraft crashed upside down. He helped the wounded escape the burning wreckage and organized them in a defensive perimeter. He called for air strikes and fire from circling gunships to suppress the ever increasing enemy fire enough to allow another evacuation attempt. Critically wounded, Benavidez moved constantly along the perimeter, bringing water and ammunition to the defenders, treating their wounds, encouraging them to hold on. He sustained several more gunshot wounds, but he continued to fight. For six hours.

When another helicopter landed, he helped the wounded toward it, one and two at a time. On his second trip, an enemy soldier ran up behind him and struck him with his rifle butt. Sergeant Benavidez turned and fought the man with his bayonet, hand to hand, to the death. Wounded again, he then made his way back to collect the classified documents before at last climbing aboard and collapsing, apparently dead.

The army doctor back at the base thought he was dead anyway. Bleeding profusely, his intestines spilling from his stomach wounds, completely immobile, and unable to speak, they flew him back to Saigon for surgery, where he began a year in hospitals recovering from seven serious gunshot wounds, twenty-eight shrapnel wounds, and bayonet wounds in both arms.³

Hard to believe, isn’t it, what this one man did? What kind of training prepares you to do that? What kind of unit solidarity, how great the love and trust for the man to your right and your left, inspires you to the superhuman heroics of Roy Benavidez? How does one ever acquire this kind of courage?

The great English statesman, Winston Churchill, said that courage is the first of human qualities because it guarantees all the others.⁴ Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pointed out that courage isn’t the absence of despair and fear but the capacity to move ahead in spite of them.⁵

Sometimes courage involves standing up for your beliefs and convictions. This is the way it was for Sir Thomas More. It was July 6, 1535. He had been a prisoner in the tower of London for over a year. It was now time for his execution. When he came out to mount the steps to the scaffold, he said to the officials, in a rather humorous way, I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself. While he was on the scaffold, More said that he died, the king’s good servant, but God’s first.⁶

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), was an English lawyer, author, statesman, and councillor to Henry VIII. More opposed the king’s separation from the Catholic Church and refused to acknowledge him as supreme head of the Church of England. He also refused to acknowledge Henry’s marriage annulment from Catherine of Aragon and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. Tried for treason for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy which would have made the king the supreme head of the English Church, he was convicted and beheaded. Sir Thomas More was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1933 and today is the patron saint of lawyers.

Mother Teresa said, to have courage for whatever comes in life—everything lies in that.⁷ Fortunately, most of us don’t have to face the reality of risking our lives like Sergeant Roy Benavidez or have the kind of courage that enabled Sir Thomas More to give his life for a moral principle. We might not even have the kind of courage that is needed that will have a huge impact on the lives of others. But if what Mother Teresa said is true, and I think that it is, then each of us will have many opportunities to be courageous our own ways. These people and their heroic acts of courage can inspire us to be courageous when our opportunities arise.

B. The Quiet Life of Courage

When I was a young boy, I remember being scared at times because in the bedroom I shared with my brother, there was a closet. Sometimes, the closet door would be left open at night and our clothes hanging up on a hook. For some reason, our clothes at times would be shaped in such a way that they looked like very scary monsters to me. I can remember crying and calling out for my mother. She would come to me, comfort me and show me there were no monsters. There was no need to be afraid.

Each of us can be afraid of things in life in our own way. For some, it can be clothes looking like monsters in a closet. Or, the fear of failure or standing up for our convictions. For others, it might be the fear of illness or dying. For still others, it might be our fear of speaking up to our