November 11, 2001

A group of people were talking about heroes. They spoke of valiant soldiers, rugged explorers, and famed sports figures. As they discussed the practice of heroism, one of the young men turned to an elderly woman. He did not know that life had not been good to her. He did not know of the countless tragedies she had endured. He figured her to be merely ordinary and plain. As a joke, he remarked, "Ma'am, what kind of heroism do you practice?" She looked at the young man with piercing eyes and said, "I practice the heroism of going on!"

The greatest examples of courage, bravery, and heroism are often found among ordinary people who somehow manage to keep on living despite the misery, the tragedy, and the poverty that surround them.

In "To Kill A Mockingbird," Atticus Finch, a county lawyer in a small Alabama town, sends his son, Jem, to read every afternoon to a neighbor, Mrs. Dubose, who is dying of cancer. She is in horrible pain but refuses to take the morphine the doctor ordered because she wanted to die "beholden to nothing and nobody."

On the evening of the day that she dies, Atticus explains to Jem why he had sent him to read to her. "I wanted you to see something about her. I wanted you to see real courage, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when your licked before you begin, but you begin anyway. It's when you're in pain, when you are suffering and you keep going on. That's real courage. Mrs. Dubose was the most courageous and bravest person I had ever known."

When we go looking for heroes, for bravery, and for courage, we often look in all the wrong places. Its practitioners are simple and ordinary folk who carry on in the midst of life's most horrible and difficult circumstances.

In our First Reading, we hear of the heroism of seven brothers and their mother. Rather than violate God's law, they willingly suffer torture and death – not all at once, but one by one with the rest of the family standing by. Their courage rests not just in the endurance of their own pain and suffering, but also in enduring the pain and suffering of the people they love. We may not be able to match their degree of bravery and heroism, but we can be brave and heroic just the same by going on and carrying on when no one in their right mind would do so.

SO THE QUESTION: PROVIDE EXAMPLES OF HEROISM GOING ON TODAY.

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