September 29

Real Courage

Only a very few are born with courage. Most people are weak; it takes a long time for them to build up courage. It takes real courage to understand the truth. Real courage means to give up “I, me, mine.” It’s not courageous to gather things. What we normally call courage is getting gold medals, bronze medals, fighting, winning, gaining. A “courageous” person jumps from a plane with a parachute three thousand feet up in the air. But the real courage is to give up everything and say, “I own nothing.” Very few are courageous enough to renounce everything in the name of God, in the name of service to humanity.

You might call somebody courageous who comes and gives a nice punch to a person and all the person’s teeth fall out. But if the person who got the hit smiles and says, “Is that all you are capable of? It doesn’t matter, don’t worry. Maybe you haven’t learned the lesson yet. I forgive you,” who is courageous then? The one who hit, or the one who smiled and lovingly forgave? It takes more courage to forgive someone. And much more courage to forget. Even after forgiving, you might still remember. But to forget takes a lot of courage, a lot of training of the mind.