Sirach,
Chapter 34, Verse 14-17
14 Living is the spirit of those who fear the Lord, 15 for their hope is in their savior. 16 Whoever fear the Lord are afraid of nothing and are never discouraged, for
he is their hope. 17 Happy
the soul that fears the Lord!
Let His light radiate
through you. Do not let modern living dissuade you from having a spirit of
kindness which is displayed in those who exude grace and courtesy. Our
newspapers, favorite reality shows, twitters and tweets and politicians, all
continually show us the proper response to anyone not seeing things the way
they do is to be rude, crude and socially unacceptable. God's grace is in
courtesy, the devil's disgrace lurks in discourtesy According to the author of
Piers Plowman, discourtesy will be one of the marks of the Antichrist. William
Langland prophesied a terrible falling away from Christ and his Church, and the
sign of that apostasy would be discourtesy. Intellectual arrogance would lead
men into infidelity to Holy Mother Church, contempt for the little and weak,
and depravity of morals--in a word, into what Scripture calls "the pride
of life," the deadly opposite of courtesy.[1]
John McCain in his book
“Character is Destiny”[2]
highlights the life of Aung San Suu Kyi,
who was the Burmese wife of an Oxford professor who came home to free her
people, and oppose the political tyrants who jailed her with courage and
decency and yet despite her mistreatment is for us a modern example of
courtesy. Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988,
after years of living and studying abroad, only to find widespread slaughter of
protesters rallying against the brutal rule of dictator U Ne Win. She
spoke out against him and initiated a nonviolent movement toward achieving
democracy and human rights. In 1989, the government placed Suu Kyi under house
arrest, and she spent 15 of the next 21 years in custody. In 1991, her ongoing
efforts won her the Nobel Prize for Peace, and she was finally released from
house arrest in November 2010. She has since gained a parliamentary seat with
the National League for Democracy party.[3]
McCain says of Aung San
Suu Kyi:
In
Burma, courtesy is a rebellious gesture to a ruling elite that has tried to
terrorize such refined kindness from their culture, and make a world where only
power matters, where there are only the fearsome and the fearful. Suu, as she
asks Western visitors to call her, never reciprocates discourtesy. She is a
practicing Buddhist who refuses to hate those who hate her because, she says,
she cannot fear what she doesn’t hate. In a statement she had smuggled to the
press, she explained her steady, almost cheerful resistance to the regime’s
attempts to frighten her. “It is not power that corrupts but fear,” she wrote.
“Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of
power corrupts those who are subject to it.” She remained unmoved. (One must
never mistake her good manners and delicate beauty for a lack of will and
strength.) She was willing, as always, to show her persecutors every courtesy
and to entertain a polite willingness to consider their concerns as they
discussed the future of their country. “Confrontation,” she told a Time
magazine reporter, “comes about because there is no other way to settle
differences. If there is a channel open for settling differences, there should
be no need for confrontation.” And when she was asked how cruelly she had been
treated by the regime, she responded, “I have never been treated cruelly.” But
the regime, the bullies who are destroying the country and are so afraid of
this one small woman and her implacable determination, would not acquiesce to
any plan that might result in their long-overdue loss of power. Recently,
reports have surfaced that the tyrants are again considering the release of
Burma’s national heroine. Perhaps they will soon knock at the door of her home
again. I have no doubt that when they do she will receive them with perfect
courtesy, not that they deserve it. But she does not extend her courtesy as a
sign of respect for them or their power, but to show, yet again, that they
cannot make her become the only type of person they understand, one of the fearful
or one of the fearsome. She is merely, steadfastly, reaching out to beauty to
banish ugliness from her sight and the lives of her countrymen.
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