Intrepid

in . trep . id/ adjective/ fearless, adventurous, unafraid, undaunted. unflinching, bold, daring, indomitable

Somewhere among the wide range of meanings for this week’s word lies at least one quality with which  most of us could identify and claim as our own. Facing the crush of life’s inevitables, we have at one time or another been forced to stand resolutely against a particular challenge or  unfavorable circumstance and, without even realizing it,  demonstrate a measure of fearlessness. In our own way, we can claim to be intrepid.

The strong synonyms for the word intrepid may unsettle us somewhat because we don’t want to seem too self-assured, as if we think we are in total command of our destiny. After all, most of us have been socialized to call for help when we’re in difficulty, and when that help is slow in coming, we often  feel dejected, let-down, weak. We may even blame ourselves for not having what it takes to face life successfully. Could  that be the chink through which depression  enters one’s life?

Intrepidity is powerful. It sends explorers to the South Pole and mountain climbers to the heights of the Himalayas, but this quality can be  exhibited in more close-to-home places. In the wake of recent natural disasters, there has been more than enough occasion for people to be intrepid.  Hurricanes have marched, one after the other, across the Atlantic and brought their devastation to land.  It was only  a few weeks ago that  Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 hurricane, left 17 people dead and tens of  millions of dollars  worth of destruction in its path. An NPR reporter on the scene  gave a first-hand picture of what she saw and catalogued the damage done.  Then she said, “They are beginning to rebuild.” That’s intrepidity–moving forward undaunted, in spite of the temporary setback.

The searing images on the television screen a few days ago are fresh in our minds.  The violence had occurred  in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Jewish synagogue where eleven individuals were gunned down. The city and the nation suffered shockwaves from the horrific act. At a news conference and in personal interviews, individuals repeated the same resolve many times. A Pittsburgh police officer said, “We’re going to get through this.”  The head of the Jewish Community there spoke through  his pain:  “We’ll get past this and be a strong community.”  The mayor of the city  echoed that  sentiment, “Pittsburgh will get through this darkest day in Pittsburgh’s history.” And one woman told a reporter, “I’m  gonna part these clouds and show them that I’m still  here.” Their  indomitable will to carry on surfaced.

Psychologists call this ability to get up after being knocked down and stand firmly on one’s feet resilience. What is resilience? Is it as simple as deciding to make lemonade when life gives us lemons? The late Andy Rooney of CBS’s “60 Minutes” fame once said, “Life is tough, but I’m tougher.”  Is  Andy Rooney’s declaration  merely   forceful speech?  We are told that everyone has resilience. It is the ability to recover from adversity, and it all depends on how much of it  each person has  and whether it is put to good use. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?  Yet some situations test our resilience to the limit.

One writer whose work and life I admire is Catherine Marshall. She was devastated when her famous husband, the Reverend Peter Marshall, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, died suddenly of a heart  attack.  Life for her seemed to stop, but as she tells in her memoir,  To Live Again,  she came through the dark passage of her life stronger and with a new passion. She was not known as a writer before the death of her husband, but she found her talent and began to write, first putting together Peter Marshall’s much-admired, moving sermons into what became  an enormously popular book, A Man Called Peter.  She wrote  many more  successful books, including the classic  Christy. Catherine Marshall wasn’t just feeling her way through the dark. Her resilience had a solid grounding  in her faith.

The listeners couldn’t see whether an embarrassed look crept over  the face of the man in the radio interview as he told the interviewer about his early life.  “I didn’t know my father’s name until I was in the 6th grade,” he said. He followed up this revelation with a hard bit of personal history, revealing that he was in the 4th grade when he learned from his grandmother that his mother was a heroin addict and was in jail, the reason she hadn’t been there for him. He lived with his grandmother, and when his classmates asked  why his parents were never around, he made up stories, lots of believable stories,  to tell them. The very week of the interview,  that man was on the radio program because he was one of the nominees for the 2018 prestigious  National Book Awards. His intrepidity had led him to find his place in stories.

Sometimes individuals experience rejection of one kind or another,  and their resilience seems to sag; they become bowed down and  discouraged, but this need not be. Ask any writer about rejection. They seem to  have something of a corner on  being rejected. “Your story has merit, but we are not able to use it at this time.” They get used to reading these words on official stationery. Some famous fiction writers can document the multiple times they received rejections for a particular  manuscript, but undaunted, they pressed  on, and that rejected manuscript became a major success. Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick was turned down by four publishers, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which is now studied from middle school to college, was rejected 20 times before being published. Louisa May Alcott, author of the beloved Little Women, was  told “to stick to teaching.”  William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and analyzing in graduate school, was considered unpublishable. These intrepid writers pressed on in the face of rejection letters and achieved resounding success.

We humans can handle disaster, loss, and rejection, bolstered by our God-endowed resilience. Made in His image, we have the capacity to be intrepid.  We  can exhibit the spirit of the refugees who have been knocked about on seas and from one port of entry to another before finally finding a settling place. Poet Maya Angelou’s words shout the spirit of persistence that gets results:  “And still I rise!”   We become intrepid as  God provides us with the coping mechanism of resilience to walk us over the difficult paths.

Blessings,

Judith

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“But it is forever true that when the storms of life are savage, it is the tree that

    bends  with the wind  that survives.”

Catherine Marshall