The Courage to Love Jesus

“… and whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those

who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

Matthew 10:38-39

My dear Family in Christ,

I’d like to share two of my favourite commentaries on this Sunday’s Gospel. I

hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

‘Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the

form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of

mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It

might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of

courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he

will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier

surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living

with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a

coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide,

and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire

life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this

romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has

done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing

the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of

dying.’

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

‘Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is

His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for

Him. Does that sound strange? … The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of

your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find

eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really

yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for

yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and

decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

God love you,

Father Corso