I don’t really have a method of picking a Word of the Year, something I have done for a few years now, except to think and pray and look for something that grabs my imagination. After loving Onward so much, I ordered Russell Moore’s latest book, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul for Christmas. Inspired by that title and the themes of several of the books I want to read this year, as well as new roles and responsibilities in my own life that are out of my “comfort zone”, I chose Courage as my Word of the Year for 2021. It’s a quality I know I need to grow in, and that the Church in general needs to demonstrate in these days.
I’ve already ordered Josef Pieper’s Four Cardinal Virtues (found cheaper on Thriftbooks) after Moore quoted him in Chapter 2! And I may be ordering something by an author completely new to me after reading this wonderful insight into courage:
Poet David Whyte rightly observes that real courage is rooted in what he calls “robust vulnerability,” and thus rarely feels like courage at the time. “From the inside, it can feel like confusion, only slowly do we learn what we really care about, and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull; with maturity that robust vulnerability comes to feel like the only necessary way forward, the only real invitation, and the surest, safest ground from which to step,” he writes. “On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside and only by looking back, does it look like courage.” (Quoting from Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
Also read/listened to recently:
- Hubby: Deep in the very long audiobook of Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (he’s enjoying it!)
- Me: Finished my first book of 2021 yesterday: A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie (fun fact: my dad had a collection of Christie mysteries when I was a girl, and I would scare myself by looking at the covers :D)
- Miss A: Listening to the Cinder books, which she’s read before
- Mr. D: he’s also been listening to Musashi during break
- Mr. E: one of the Hardy Boys books – someone gave us the entire series years ago!
- Mr. L: he’s reading Little House on the Prairie to R! ♥
- Mr. R: lots of comics – caught him with our well-loved copy of The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes today. I think they’ve really boosted his reading progress over the past 6 months!
