The Machine Called Courage
Or How Many Can Have a Roaring Lion for a Heart
(As taught by)
Lou Reed and Jesus.
Walking around NYC, I think of Lou Reed a lot.
He was a mentor of mine and a friend
And beyond that, a rock n’ roll icon of the ages.
One of the greatest and most innovative songwriters of all time.
But I think the quality I most admired about Lou
Was courage.
And the revolution of punk that that courage gave birth to.
Rebellion and What It Is
Why are we attracted to it?
Why are some enraged by it?
And why are courage and rebellion being demonized in our modern era and becoming qualities harder and harder to come by all the time?
2 Samuel 10:12: “Be of good courage, and let us be courageous for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may the Lord do what seems good to him.”
So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand (Isaiah 41:10).
Lou made albums that provoked and subverted expectations.
I believe art for him was
As much about challenging and breaking up people’s comfort zones
As it was providing human connection, nostalgia, and beauty.
Punk rock is abrasive,
Distorted,
Loud,
Harsh,
Deliberately uncomfortable,
And at its core,
Courageous.
What makes something “punk” isn’t so much about genre anymore as it is the fearless ability to thwart expectations,
To push things forward,
And to redefine what is possible or what is allowed.
Beyond art,
These days even giving an opinion about a medication or a political leader requires courage.
As something as simple as that
Can lead to torrents of social shame,
Or a group bully pile-on,
And a subsequent cancellation,
Which is the modern version of being ostracized from the tribe.
Sent off into the wilderness alone,
Where every fiber of our DNA will ring the alarm bell of death,
As indeed, for all of humanity’s history,
Death would very much be the result of that type of ostracization.
So the world will never encourage courage.
Quite the opposite.
The flesh will always opt to fall in line,
Allow things to be what they are,
Go along to get along,
And see those flying in the face of these natural instincts
As crazy and unhinged or even dangerous.
And they are dangerous.
Because they provoke the spirit of us all to live up to the potential of our spirits,
Whose home is outside the control mechanism of society.
A courageous person is dangerous because a courageous person can inspire courage in others,
Which can disrupt society in such a way as to completely throw the status quo out of whack and out of balance.
A courageous person is like throwing a hand grenade in the room of the way things are,
To explode reality into what they can become.
Lou did this with music time and time again,
And each time he did it, he was vilified and hated for it,
Until years past, where the rest of us caught up and then praised and lauded him for it.
But regardless of how time’s corrective measures came to give him flowers,
He had to be willing to be ostracized
And hated.
That’s the price of courage and a price too big for most,
And understandably so.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.” – Thoreau
The price of avoiding courage, though, is even greater than facing it.
A life of quiet desperation with a song still in you is the result of going along to get along,
To be meeting your maker on the cusp of eternity knowing that you caved to fear,
And as a result, had the seed of your potential left to die without blossoming inside you.
That’s a rough fate which at least has the potential to stretch into eternity.
No thank you.
Finding Courage Amidst Rejection
So how do we find courage,
Or the willingness to endure the hatred and rejection of our fellow man?
The answer to that is,
On our own, we can’t really.
If we are merely human, then courage makes no rational sense.
In the immediate, it threatens our survival,
So it flies in the face of rationality.
Courage is irrational.
Courage is unreasonable.
And yet the Bible tells us over and over again to be courageous.
2 Samuel 10:12: “Be of good courage, and let us be courageous for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may the Lord do what seems good to him.”
And not only does the Bible tell us to be courageous,
But there is a calling we all have within that calls for it as well.
So much so that when we ignore this calling,
We fall into escapism and depression.
Our lives become waiting rooms,
Or boring rooms with grueling neon lights in the realm of our spirits,
Where a battle between fear and spirit ensue,
Until we find ourselves on a shrink’s couch begging for medication,
Or at a strip club getting a lap dance,
Or at a bar drinking the night away,
Or on our phone scrolling through the world we are agreeing to not upset.
In short, we are all tasked with either overcoming our fear or being swallowed by it.
Either facing ridicule from the crowd or facing it from within.
You’re either busy being born, or you’re busy dying.
There is no neutral here,
No grey area you can delude yourself into belonging in,
At least not for long.
2
The Cruel Irony of Life’s Journey
And so for many the cruel irony of life,
Or the hysterical in-joke,
Is that by the time you slay the demons courageously
In your version of the hero’s journey,
The very ego that longed for a kind of glory
Is the main dragon you had to slay in order to get there at all.
Turns out the boogeyman was looking at you from the morning mirror.
And no, we aren’t talking about suicide,
(In terms of slaying the self)
Except for of the false ideas of who and what we are.
This little and limited being subject to life and death,
This fear-based sun mongrel,
Looking over shoulders of regret,
Wondering why for years on end he can’t overcome even basic tropes of self-betrayal.
People end their actual lives believing themselves to be their psychic pain and nothing more.
The devil is a convincing and conniving attorney in the courtroom of your soul,
And his speech about your guilt and shame is laced with enough actual evidence that it’s hard to overcome unless you are willing to overcome and engage with the courage of repentance.
And so the birthplace of our courageous selves
Is on the spot of the death of our former selves,
Our enslaved selves,
Our limited selves,
Or our selves that are of the world rather than just in it.
“I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. ‘I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.’ (John 17:11, 14–15).”
Here Jesus says it all and then some with a box of chocolates.
He tells us point blank that the world will hate us if we are to engage our courage here.
It makes practical sense as well,
In that who wants a reminder that their comfort zone ain’t it,
Which you will be a blinding example of if you’re out here being all courageous and living your purpose out loud and fully.
No one likes the teacher’s pet,
And in the devil’s world,
God’s teacher’s pet is handled with mocking disdain indeed.
And I’m not talking about being an over-religious Bible-thumping lunatic here,
But rather any form of speaking truth to power,
Or subverting expectations across whatever field you happen to be in.
If you are doing it right, it won’t bring you the praise of the crowd but rather sneers and jeers, and if you are doing it really right,
Total excommunication.
Of course, the ego also is aware of these basic realities,
And how the heroes of old were hated in their day,
Only to reap the rewards later,
Perhaps even in their lifetimes if they were amongst the lucky.
And so there are dumb egos out there that will ape courage even though it will lead to their own shattering.
They will be courageous before they are actually ready or know the full ramifications of what that actually means.
They become fortunate sons, however, if they can survive it,
Because ego destruction is always a positive thing if it doesn’t actually kill you.
I say this because I feel like I fall into this category of fool.
I went wild with courage before my ego really knew the hiding it was in for.
And yes, the end result is self-respect and even the growing respect of your fellows.
But not until after you are cast out into the wilderness and pushed to the very brink of your survival.
Where your entire life becomes a kind of internal humiliation ritual.
(I like that sentence, so I’m leaving it in, but it’s more like you are humbled into ego death or, to put it another way, you only have God left to turn to, and so your soul goes into a kind of hibernation/healing, which is a blessing, of course, but nobody’s idea of a good time.)
There will be some lean years,
Perhaps many.
The phone won’t ring,
The glories of your past will seem unreachable,
You will recognize how spoiled you were,
How unappreciative you were of the blessings of the past, and you won’t believe that you felt like it was never enough.
It’s a brutal time of self-reflection.
The dark night of the soul.
But if you can weather it,
It gives way to a foundation beyond ego,
To where courage becomes second nature and actual.
To where you truly are only in the world and not of it.
Where your center and source of strength isn’t coming from the world’s reflections at all but rather an internal and eternal one beyond the ego.
Rooted in presence, you become an actual warrior of light.
But the irony is,
Is the old you who needed and longed for the approval of others
Isn’t actually there anymore.
If and when that approval comes,
You merely enjoy it from a place of casual indifference.
It beats a thunderstorm,
But it’s only the sun shining.
And it’s got nothing to do with you.
Your center is your center is your center,
And unchanging and unaffected by external realities.
No one can touch your place of internal communion with God, which is where all of the love and all of the light reside.
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“I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. ‘I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.’ (John 17:11, 14–15).”
Jesus prays for the courageous,
That they should be protected from evil.
That’s heavy, brothers and sisters.
You have the weight of Jesus’s prayers behind you on the other side of the Rubicon of your eternal fears.
And so it’s good to consider when crossing the line from within a deep moral urging to do so,
You signing up for an adventure,
For an evolution,
For a birthing process from an idea about life
Into actual life.
And you aren’t alone when you do that,
You captivate the attention of the Almighty.
And the demonic alike,
You put yourself on the front lines of a spiritual battle that’s been going on since time began.
And you best believe that you will be ruffling the feathers of all the angels both fallen and otherwise of the spirit world.
Good luck with that, but it beats distracting yourself with weed and Netflix by a long way.
And when Jesus himself is praying for your protection against evil,
We can assume many things:
That evil is real and it will be making moves against you.
The stakes increase and things you could get away with in the past become less appealing and more dangerous.
Everything amps up, including your relationship with sin.
Jesus is praying for you. Not just a man but the son of God. Imagine the power of that prayer, unfettered by any sin at all. Completely in line with God’s will. Yes, Satan is no joke, but compared to God, he is.
We are human beings living for now a very limited and temporary life on a planet called earth.
Our physical death is an inevitability and will come to most of us before we are ready to let go,
Especially if we haven’t answered the call of courageous action.
Final Analysis
In the final analysis,
All of life could be an exercise in finding that courageous place from which to operate.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” – Shakespeare
It’s ok if you’ve been a coward and died many times already.
If you still have breath in you, it can all be a preparation
To your true heart of courage.
It need not all be in vain,
But rather one long extended birthing pang
To deliver yourself from insane to sane,
As Jesus prays that your soul remain.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity but of power, love, and self-discipline (Timothy 1:7).
