42! The Real Courage Within

Gandhi said it....
                     Jackie lived it!  

Yesterday's post heralded Gandhi's famous line that real strength is forgiveness...and that weakness is the inability to forgive.  In a very real way, Jackie Robinson in the movie 42 heard the same message from his coach played by Harrison Ford--"I want somebody with the courage NOT to fight back."  Coach was also speaking for himself--to find non-violent ways to assert justice by speaking power to powers.

The scene in which Coach talks of real courage

The good news of our lives is that we live by our scripts also....usually they are very old ones! We've always done it that way...can be the motto just as insidious as racism.  It is the blindness that fails to recognize the indifference to others, the pain intentionally meted out--because we do not have the courage to step out of our scripts and rewrite them.  Voltaire wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living.  Yet we do it all the time!  Aren't our lives worth the time to step back and consider the things we have "left undone and those things we should not have done" as the prayer says?  It takes courage from within for the cowardly lion within to roar in quiet ways of real courage.