On The Blessedness Of Courage

I’ve been going through an important rite of passage, and through it all I have often found myself frightened. No, let me be honest with you, let me always lead with my vulnerability with you, dear ones: I have been terrified. I have been forced, by the currents I myself set into motion, to either alter or abandon entire ways of being that I have cultivated and practiced most of my life. And throughout this time of change, of death and rebirth, there is one virtue that has helped me more than any other, and it is upon that virtue I am moved to speak today.

Let us speak of the virtue of courage.

Fear is inevitable. Fear is one of the great constants of existence and it can be a great boon to our basic survival. Fear is what tells us to walk faster when that strange man is behind us, fear is what tells us to put on the oven mitts before grabbing the hot dish fresh from the oven, and fear is one of the three primary emotions (the other two being anger and disgust) that tell us when something is just not okay. So in many ways fear is our friend. It gives us important information about the world and protects us from many dangers. Fear is a gift.

But fear can paralyze us.

As I have said, I wish to lead with my vulnerability with you, dear ones. I wish to always be as authentic and honest with you as possible. So I will confess, I have often let my life be ruled by fear. For many years, I have experienced great anxiety in social situations and when leaving the house. Every time I have to run an errand or even go live on camera in a Zoom meeting, my body pours sweat, my heartbeat races, and I want nothing more than to run away and hide. Fear is one of my oldest friends and worst enemies, both protecting and imprisoning me. There is a part of my mind that tells me that the world isn’t safe, and honestly, as a queer, transgender, disabled, neurodivergent woman in a modern USA filled with hate crimes and mass shootings, the world isn’t safe. My mind isn’t lying to me and my fears are not irrational. I can’t make myself leave the house by telling myself that I am being silly and that the world is safe, because it just isn’t.

So how do I leave the house? How do I make myself do all the things a modern priestess and occultist has to do to make her life work? How do I bring myself to pour out my heart and soul every week on this blog, even though I know that my earnestness is largely considered  “cringe” in our culture and that most people are just going to laugh at me (or worse)? Hell, how do I get groceries?

In a word, courage.

Courage is what allows me to go to the grocery store. Courage is what allows me to go to the constant cycle of doctor’s appointments and trips to the pharmacy that is the life of a disabled person. Courage is what allowed me to transition and to walk in a hostile world as a transgender woman. Courage is just as much my constant friend as fear, and courage is what ends up rebutting most of the arguments my fearful mind throws up to stop me from doing the things I need to do.

But what, truly, is courage?

Many people think that courage is the absence of fear. They think that if one feels fear at all that one is a coward. But the philosopher Aristotle and many other people who have thought very hard about the issue since have generally agreed that courage is not the absence of fear at all. In fact, courage is defined (as are all virtues) as a mean between two extremes. Fear lays on a spectrum. On one end of the fear spectrum, we have cowardice, which is indulgence in fear to the point that it paralyzes you and prevents you from doing what you need to do. On the other end we have foolhardiness, which is ignoring fear to the degree that you ignore danger entirely, even to the point of actually seeking it out. Notice that both ends of this spectrum are an indulgence—it is tempting to go to either extreme—and that true courage is neither extreme, but a place of dialogue between them. We must seek and find the place that acknowledges and accounts for danger while also doing what we must to accomplish our missions in life. We have a right and responsibility to protect ourselves, but we must also be willing to take risks in order to do what must be done.

Now, how does the virtue of courage apply to my primary topic on this blog, the living of the spiritual life? Well, the spiritual life is scary. We are constantly being pushed past our old limits, constantly being asked by the Divine to change and grow beyond ourselves, and constantly being held responsible for both ourselves and our actions in the sight of both the Divine and our communities. We are asked to go down into the Underworld to die and be reborn, again and again, every year, every month, and every night. Yes, the Great Work, the ongoing theophoric relationship with the Divine that heals us and helps us grow, is the most important thing we can do with our lives…and it is terrifying.

So what can we do? How can we bring ourselves to challenge our fear and to live in courage, even when our world makes it very difficult? Well, as mages and mystics we have options that many people do not. We have our relationships with our deities and ally spirits and our relationship with the Divine as a whole. We also have our relationships with others in our spiritual communities, which can be so important both as a comfort and as a part of our growth. And, perhaps most importantly, we have our relationship with ourselves, the constant awareness of ourselves as embodied spiritual beings who must make choices that have meaning.

Yes, each and every one of these different types of relationship can bring us difficult moments. After all, we have to live up to all of those relationships and do right by all of those people, including ourselves. But those relationships are also at the heart of what motivates the spiritual life. We want to see and be seen, to know and to be known. It is this primal urge that brought our ancestors to reach out to the world around them, to reach out and discover the deities and spirits around us, and it is this same primal urge that we must trust to bring us through the fear, through our moments of death and rebirth, and finally take us to the other side.

It is also a blessing that we may join together and find courage, that we can hold each others hands in the dark. I take great refuge in my marriage, my spiritual community (that’s you, dear ones), and my relationships with my deities and ally spirits. It is thanks to these people (yes, deities and spirits are people, too) that I can find my way through the dark and back into the light.

So let us reach out to the Divine, dear siblings, to our deities and allies. Let us reach out to each other in love. Let us look out at that big, scary world and find within ourselves the strength to reach out, even when we are terrified. Let us have faith in ourselves and each other.

Let us have courage.

Happy Full Moon.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: John Everett Millais, “Joan Of Arc”, (1865)