Lent 2026 - Reading #18 - Fortitude
Reading
G.K. Chesterton, in his masterwork Orthodoxy, reflects on courage as a paradox, a balance of seemingly contradictory qualities: "Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers." Chesterton continues: "A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine." For Chesterton, this paradox is not peculiar to military valor but runs through all of life. The parent who sacrifices sleep for a sick child, the artist who risks rejection to speak the truth, the penitent who faces their own failures honestly, all participate in this strange courage that holds opposites together.
Reflection
Eighteen days deep in our Lenten journey, Chesterton arrives with his characteristic paradox, and it illuminates something about both fortitude and Lent itself. We have been walking through the virtues week by week, building from prudence through justice to fortitude, and at each turn we discover that the Christian virtues are not what the world expects. They are stranger, wilder, more demanding, and more freeing. Chesterton's soldier who must combine a love of life with a readiness to die captures the Lenten spirit exactly. Lent is not a grim death march; it is a school of freedom. We fast not because food is bad but because we love life too much to be enslaved by our appetites. We pray not because the world is worthless but because it is so precious that we want to receive it rightly. We give alms not because money is evil but because generosity is the only posture worthy of creatures who have received everything as gift. This is the fortitude Chesterton celebrates, not the grim-jawed stoicism that endures by suppressing feeling, but the wild, joyful courage that loves life so fiercely it is willing to risk it. As Lent continues, resist the temptation to make it dreary. The Christian who fasts with a long face has missed the point. Carry your disciplines with Chestertonian lightness: furiously indifferent to comfort, wildly in love with the good. That is the fortitude the saints possessed, and it is the fortitude this season is trying to give you.