This week marks the culmination of this year’s edition of the Saint Ignatius Summer Enrichment Program (SEP), a three-week experience for rising eighth graders in which they get a taste of classes, an opportunity to engage in sports, and have an experience with other young men with whom they may well spend four of their most formative years.
Somewhere north of 400 middle-schoolers arrived in the Breen Center a few Mondays ago from all over northeast Ohio. Some were loud, gregarious, and confident—no doubt a result of spending a good part of their childhoods watching their older brothers on campus playing football or lacrosse on Wasmer Field, taking Saturday morning Latin classes in the Main Building, or being dragged around campus by dads who told them stories of their exploits as students at W. 30th and Lorain. But others came in wide-eyed and a little afraid.
I have a special regard for the latter group of campers. Perhaps it is the concern for all kids that comes with being a dad, or perhaps it is the memory of being similarly nervous when I first entered Saint Ignatius as a freshman. Either way, these are the young men who impress me most during the first day of camp, because these are the young men who exemplify—I suspect without knowing it—the meaning of courage.
Courage is, as many of us recall, the virtue that enables us to do what is right in the face of danger, whatever form that danger may take. Courage helps us do good when doing good comes at a cost.
Aristotle held that a virtue was a means between extremes of deficiency and excess. The virtue of courage lies between cowardice (a deficiency) and rashness (an excess). Moreover, it is—along with prudence, temperance, and justice—one of the cardinal virtues. As such it is a habit, inherent in human nature, that can be perfected in all people through its deliberate practice. In other words, we can all be courageous.
But how does one become courageous? By acting courageously. Like tying a shoe or speaking, one develops the skill by jumping into its practice with both feet. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle noted “it is by habituating ourselves to make light of alarming situations and to face them that we become brave, and it is when we have become brave that we shall be most able to face an alarming situation.”
This is where SEP for our rising eighth graders comes into play. Those young men who came to the program with quickened pulses and lumps in their throats nonetheless came. And they returned. At times they were asked to get up in front of classmates—most of whom they didn’t know—and talk about themselves, sometimes with shaking hands. Courage isn’t fearlessness. By definition, in fact, if there is no fear in a situation, there can be no courage: no one wins a medal for taking out the garbage. America’s most decorated hero, Audie Murphy, admitted that when the fighting began on the battlefields of WWII Europe, he always “felt a wave of panic rise in [his] body.”
But every camper I taught overcame whatever nerves he had, and in doing so grew “more able to face [other] alarming situations.”
Those who will come to Saint Ignatius will be asked to be brave more often than many realize. They will be asked to reach out in friendship to those who live on the streets, or are grieving, or who have developmental disabilities—and it will be awkward at first. They will play in big games and/or perform complex choreography or musical movements. In doing so, they will be able to at once develop and showcase their talents, but they will also be in the spotlight—and the nerves they will feel come from the recognition and fear that they might just fail. But whether they fail or succeed, they will have faced those fears and as adults they will be better prepared to do what is right amid challenges of the workplace, the voting booth, and the hospital room.
To live a Christian life has never been easy—but to do so today, especially for our young, runs the risk of being “canceled”—a terrifying prospect for even the most self-confident.
Burning buildings and battlefields aren’t the only domains of the courageous.
This is why C.S. Lewis, found it to be the most important of the virtues:
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky. (Screwtape Letters)
The rising eighth graders who came to SEP a bit apprehensive were never in any danger. As history—and this class—have proved, they would all make friends and have a great time. But being 13 and surrounded by 400+ strangers in a situation they’ve never experienced, they didn’t know that on day one. But they came.
And in its own way, that makes them heroes.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.