Courage

When we talk about courage what comes to mind most often are our soldiers, police officers, firefighters, rescue workers and those who put their lives on the line for our safety every day. Those heroes who, when asked, simply say they are doing their job are right, they are doing what they chose to do, choices that took courage and jobs that take courage to complete. While I take great pride in the fact that many of these courageous people are my friends and family, there is another brand of courage I witnessed last week that is not a courage of choice but of circumstances.

I had the privilege of attending a meeting last week of a community of people who live and work together. A small community that looked from the outside like any other with the generations intermingled, the children smiling and itching to get outside on an unusually warm late winter day, the elders smiling, the parents shushing while the presentations of accomplishment continued. The awards were greeted as all are, with smiles, enthusiasm, congratulations, support and applause, lots of applause. As always happens at events such as this, there is pride that runs through the room, contagious in its palpability, its presence.

Present also in this room and among the people of this community was courage. Initially I didn't see it, I missed it because I didn't expect it to be there (how easily our assumptions lead us from seeing the obvious), I didn't expect to find it there, I didn't know how much this community held itself together with courage. I'm not certain they even realize it, but it is there.

It was there in the award given to the man who had just entered this community and for the first time made his pledge for one day of sobriety. It was there in the award given to the woman who completed one week of sobriety and the man and woman who made it two weeks, the others who had survived thirty days, sixty days and even one hundred days clean and sober. One man told us he had not ever had more than five consecutive days clean and sober since he was twelve years old but now he stood in the midst of his community with one hundred days without drugs or alcohol. His friends and neighbors cheered for him and I admired his courage.

The stories I heard from this community are not the usual stories of courage. They were not the stories of rushing into a burning building to rescue a child or leaving a family behind to deploy to a war zone or even those of responding to a call for help. They were instead stories of individual courage, courage of a different kind. These stories were the stories of lives lived on the edge, lives lived immersed in risk, lives lived in danger, lives lived in fear.

Everyone knows we have a problem with homelessness in our country but when viewed from a distance, a comfortable distance, the image that comes to mind is not an image of courage. We do not see, perhaps we do not choose to see, the courage that it takes to survive in the homeless world. The courage of a person choosing to join a community when all they have known from communities is rejection. The courage of a parent to escape violence and bring their child to a community when communities have not been safe for them. The courage of a person who has been in this community before and left, to return and be welcomed. The courage to reach out to a community when all you have reached is the bottom. The courage to hope.

This is the courage I saw in this community. It was raw. It was painful. It was humbling. But it was there and I was grateful to be in their presence. My definition of courage has been altered.