There’s something about deep water. I’m a good swimmer and enjoy being in a boat. But there’s something about looking down into the water and not being able to see the bottom that elevates my pulse a little. I know that swimming in an 8 foot deep swimming pool is no different than swimming across a lake that’s 50 feet deep, but it feels different. It challenges my courage.
We turn to the fourth cardinal virtue by looking at Peter’s little journey across deep water in Matthew 14:22-33. In this text we can see clearly the need for the old-fashioned term “fortitude” to name this virtue because we might easily think that Peter had plenty of what we ordinarily call courage. He was immediately ready and willing to crawl out of the boat when Jesus called him to come.
Pure physical daring is only one part of the virtue of fortitude. It’s a great and good habit, the kind of character which makes a lifeguard dive into high waves or a firefighter run into a burning building to save a life. But what we may not realize is the need for that sort of courage to be coupled with something longer lasting and more enduring that mere daring. Fortitude is what keeps the lifeguard swimming toward a drowning person in spite of his own fears and what holds the firefighter in that building searching for victims when her heart and mind are crying out for escape and safety.
Fortitude is what Peter lacked when he saw the wind and the waves rising around him on the water. That’s why he began to sink. His fears overcame his courage and his trust in Jesus.
Fortitude applies to more than persistent physical danger. As a man muses beside the sickbed of a dying woman in an old science fiction novel, A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn, he wishes her disease were an actual dragon to slay. But “the real dragons are always quiet, without form.” One needs, he thinks, a courage “against the attack of shadows.” That sort of courage is Christian fortitude.
Only a few of us will be called to rush into an actual battle or risk our bodies to save someone else. But almost all of us will be called to remain courageous against shadows like heartbreak, chronic pain, family strife, dementia, financial loss, death of a loved one, and so on. We need the courage to take yet another step toward Jesus when the wind is howling and the waves are crashing. May our Lord reach out His hand and lift us into that habit of fortitude.