Jesus taught us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love the neighbor as yourself. And he also said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Remember the context (John 15): Jesus was about to lay down his life for his actual and potential friends. There is a fullness of love that comes with the willingness to lay down one’s life.
How shall we prepare to lay down our lives like Jesus?
Watch the 10:18 video or listen to the audio file.
Today I will focus on a few ideas and a couple of stories. We can distinguish physical courage, intellectual courage, and spiritual courage. We can be stronger in some areas and weaker in others. There is training on each level; but training on any level ideally calls for mobilizing all the powers of mind, soul, and body on the task immediately at hand.
In an ethics course, I was speaking with a student, a young veteran, about his course project, what he would focus on to apply what we were discussing in class. He told me that, having been a soldier, he was ready at a moment’s notice to lay down his life for a fellow veteran. I challenged him to take that courage to the next level, to apply it to any stranger, not just soldiers and veterans. He took me up on the challenge and started by looking for a person he could help in a big way. The first person who came to mind was an elderly woman who lived near him; she was alone, had serious health problems; and her house was a mess. He cleaned it up for her. It took a lot of work; he didn’t enjoy it; but he did it. Then he started looking for more people to help. He began to notice them, and helping them got easier. He began to like doing major things for others. By the end of the project period, he was ready to lay down his life for anyone.
The woman whose picture is featured in this blogpost is Lee Yoon-Hye. In July of 2013, she was an experienced flight attendant on an Asiana Airlines flight which landed very badly and caught on fire. She repeatedly went back into the burning plane, and carried out passengers on her back. The CNN report emphasized the 180 hour training program that the flight crew had been through, with 22 hours of training in emergency evacuation. https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-flight-attendant/
There are training programs for groups that want to prepare for the possibility of an active shooter. https://www.alicetraining.com/
Intellectual training includes the study of Aristotle on courage: Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, chapters 6-8. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/-384_-322,_Aristoteles,_Nicomachean_Ethics,_EN.pdf
Aristotle distinguishes true courage from actions that may outwardly resemble courage but are motivated by ignorance of the danger, being forced into battle, desire for honor and fear of dishonor, acting well simply based on skill gained from experience, or acting based on the altered state of passion or being in the zone. Here’s the overview of Aristotle’s ethics that I used in class: https://sites.google.com/a/kent.edu/jwattles/home/ethics/aristotles-nicomachean-ethics
Spiritual training includes devoting your entire life to living the will of God; studying the New Testament Gospels, especially John, chapters 13-17; and doing the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/
One place to begin with this start making and repeating something like the following decision. A situation may arise in which the will of God is for me to lay down my life. In such a case, I’m ready.
