Captain Courages

Captain Courageous
Orlando Lujan martinez

I walked up to my dying fathers hospital bed, took his hand and said hello father and was surprised when, from his gaunt face came the clear innocent voice of a young boy. The boy who herded sheep with his father. I was astonished and listened with wonder, eyes filling with tears and a small grasp of wonder almost escaped my lips. The light in the room became pure and bright and a stunning summer day lay in Gods splendor outside my fathers hospital room. It was a lovely day.
A Tsunami survivor said he fled with many people up a hillside to escape the Tsunami. They were frightened and he was standing alone on a hillside, desperately worried about his brother, who disappeared during the Tsunami, when a man detached himself from his wife and three children, walked over and invited him to be part of his family. He said that in spite of the devastation, carnage, tragedy, grief and the death of people, friends and family there was, “a exhilarating feeling of love between the survivors.” Who was the creator of this moment?
In the old 1930s movie Captain Courageous, the captain, played by Spencer Tracy, is pinned against the side of his sailing ship by the rigging of a sail that broke off during the storm. The waves are crashing against the ship and will eventually pull Captain Courageous to his death. Suddenly the cabin boy, played by nine year old Freddie Bartholomew, rushes up and desperately clutches the captains hand, he loves the captain, and does not want him to die. He is sobbing and begging the captain not to die. The captain, who is in terrible pain, tells the cabin boy, in a gentle voice, “Don’t worry about me. It’s okay. I am ready. You don’t cry to much about me. Have a happy life.” As he assures the boy he shows no fear and his eyes are full of concern for the sobbing boy.
The great transformation day is here for Captain courageous, he has faced death and won several times before, but now he knows death is inevitable and is using his death as a way to teach the young lad how to die with courage. With Gods grace the captain is showing the young boy that death can be bravely met and can be defeated, and is not just just a sorrow but also revelation. Death is nothing life is everything he is teaching. So that in the distant years, the young boy will remember this shinning moment, as a beautiful but tragic memory and will, at the time of his death, use it to give him the courage, to be like Captain Courageous.
The broken rigging creaks, a grimace of pain crosses the captains face, and the sea rises in fury. Several of the ships crew rush up, pulling the sobbing cabin boy away just as the sea takes the captain to his death.
Love and God is there In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestlers book about the Spanish Civil War. He writes about a member of the International Brigades who discovers Gods love in a barren cell of a prison where the fascist dictator Francisco Franco has put him to be executed.
The prisoner stands, in the dark, head tipped listening intently, in a aura of peace, with love and sadness to the voices of his doomed communist comrades coming across the inner yard of the prison, bravely singing The International, the anthem of International Communism and the Proletarian, the noble cause of the martyrs. In death the martyrs says to others: What I believe in is so important that it is worth dying for.

Note: Thus the German protestant theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (executed by the Nazi’s in 1945) can write in The Cost of Discipline: “Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not use and persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, as long as we pray for them. For if we pray for them, we are taking their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition, upon ourselves, and pleading to God for them. We are doing vicariously what they can not do for themselves. Every insult that they mutter only binds us more closer to God and them. Their persecution of us only serves to bring them nearer to reconciliation with God and further the triumphs of love.”