Words, Words, Words - Issue #2: “Encourage”
Part Two of an Exercise in Amateur Etymology for Practical Use
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
- Peter Jackson's ‘The Two Towers’
"Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing."
- 1 Thessalonians 5:11
I think about that scene from the second “Lord of the Rings” movie a lot. There’s a more complicated version of it in the novel, but the film adaptation really nails its spirit. It’s one of the most profoundly moving things I’ve ever seen and heard. So, I got to thinking about why, and that led me to today’s word: “Encourage”.
The purpose of this series, if you’re new to it, is to take a closer look at the words we commonly use and how we might reclaim some of their original or traditional meaning. This is born of a personal lament at the passing of fine shades of meaning and careful precision in language out of our day-to-day conversation. These days everything is “awesome” or “wonderful” or “incredible” or “the best thing ever”. We “love” things, we “hate” things, and we rarely ever are neutral or even, God forbid, apathetic about anything. As a good friend says, “we live in a 1- or a 5-star world”. That said, I stand by my precise meaning in regard to the movie quote above, and I want to us to take aim at giving “encouragement” back its deserved “5-star” status. Perhaps we’ll choose after this little excursion to use the term more judiciously, and yet apply it in our lives with the utmost liberality.
Digging right in, “encourage” comes to us from Latin by way of Old French, as so many lovely words do. The prefix “en-“ simply means “to put in”, meaning to impart a quality. So, starting with what we are “putting in”, what jumps out as the quality in question is of course “courage”. Speaking literally, “encourage” means to impart courage to another.
Let’s take a look at “courage”. Again from Latin by way of French, courage comes from “corage” which more or less directly translates to “heart”. As is almost always the case, this meaning of “heart” is metaphorical and not the actual organ. Although there is certainly something to the idea of it being the approximate center of our chests. I say this because the heart is generally considered poetically to be the seat of our emotions and desires, and biblically as the location of our Will. And this gets at my aim in exploring “encouragement” as a concept. We’ll have to make a small detour into the concept of courage per se as well, but my plan with these pieces is to tackle words we commonly use and courage and the virtues in general are not given much play these days. This is a sadness, but one we’d be better to address in a more antiquarian fashion elsewhere.
The Cheapness of Modern Encouragement
The way we think commonly of “encouragement” today is as platitudes. Take your pick of any of the bits of motivational garbage strewn across the internet to be used as so much gaudy makeup hiding the tracks of our tears. “You can do it!”. Can you? “All it takes is persistence!” Really? “Six months of focused effort will change your life!” I don’t know. Maybe. Wouldn’t hurt I suppose. “Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything you want!” Doubtful. What on earth does it even mean to believe in yourself? I imagine they mean to have faith in your abilities. Generally, this is a good plan but there is a mountain of nuance, and pitfalls abound.
Now, to be a little less grumpy for a moment, I’d like to say that if a supposedly platitudinous quotation provides you genuine encouragement as I am about to describe, then it is an unqualified good and you should tape that damn thing on your bathroom mirror and recite it every morning. There is in fact wisdom to be had in the “Power of Positive Thinking”. But, it’s not enough, broadly speaking. You’ll hear some say that motivation doesn’t last and that’s why you need discipline. And while I am a lover of the power of discipline rightly applied, discipline is not enough in this case either. I’ll have at least one other piece on discipline so we won’t dive in here, but it’s worth mentioning motivation briefly. Motivation means to provide motive. This is the same word that you’ll see in a word like “automotive”, literally “moving on its own power”. So a motivation is the power to action, essentially. The stated intent of motivational information is to provide reason for movement or action. The “why” that we are often assured will invariably yield the “how”.
Alas, the modern internet-age corporate-culture version of motivation is consistently shallow in my estimation, implying or even stating outright that the ultimate human ends are acquisition of things or a bigger bank balance. Those things are fine in their place, but are certainly the rallying cry of a hollow life should they be the only aspirations. I’ll venture a tangential theory here that the reason most motivational online content doesn’t do much is that it doesn’t give you any reason for living. If you live for money or fame, you live for an abstraction, which is to say in the end, for nothing.
So motivation itself isn’t bad but it doesn’t imply a direction of any kind in itself. One must be motivated toward something and this is the “heart” of the matter, if you’ll permit me a little word play. We have these saying like, “he had his heart set on it”. What does this mean? It means our deep desires are fixated on something or some outcome or experience. This behavior has no inherent moral valence. It can be good or bad. It is simply something we do as human beings.
Setting aside the form of modern “encouraging” sayings, which usually leaves much to be desired in terms of artfulness, the content of such sayings is typically too superficial and impersonal to be of any real lasting effect in our lives. If you want the content of cheap modern motivation with a good deal of artfulness you can read Henley’s Invictus, a rousing poem with an utterly misguided message. I suggest as antidote Donne’s No Man is an Island. But I digress. The point is that for encouragement to really do anything for us it has to touch our hearts, and do so in a way that can actually affect change. This requires of us a basic understanding of the parts of the human self and the way in which they function. Time for a little spiritual anatomy.
Heart, Head, Ears, Eyes, Tongue
Our hearts are what drive us. The things we desire most are what we actually spend our time pursuing regardless of what we say. However, you’ll notice the common phrase I mentioned, “set your heart on it”, implies that there is faculty by which we might do that. Throughout the history of philosophy this is done by way of Reason, or the mind through thought. There’s a famous Hume quotation in which he claims, “reason only ever is and should be the slave of the passions”. Or something like that. Every time I hear it or see it cited I want to scream “NO! NO! NO!” This is perhaps descriptive of how many live but to state it as a fact or fate or, God forbid, a sort of romantic aspiration is a road to untold suffering. People whose lives are ruled by desire only are what we refer to as “addicts”, and this not something we want to be. Perhaps some of us are addicts now (I have been, and I leave it at that), but we should desire to move out of the cycle of pain avoidance and pleasure seeking and determine what is Good and Right. Then we set our hearts on it.
But I want to reiterate emphatically that desire is not bad. Should we be without it, we’d simply waste away from apathy. The key is to set our hearts on what is Good. We do this by Truth and Knowledge, which come to us in the form of our thoughts. The head, speaking metaphorically, is the faculty by which the heart is changed. In a paradigm I’ve shamelessly stolen (because I think it is so thoroughly True) from the late great Dallas Willard, human change occurs by a hierarchical process of Vision, Intention, and Means, in that order. This is for the purposes of analysis and of course there is overlap and synchronicity here. But the Vision for the future of who you are to be and how the world is to be is indispensable, and comes to us each through our patterns of thinking. Now, Intention is determined by the heart. Do you really want what is in the Vision? For instance, a woman who stays with a man who batters her may have a sane and Good vision of life away from him, but her heart may be so set on being with him that she has no overwhelming motive to pursue that vision. Her intention is to stay. This is why we must understand that desire and passion are such overwhelming forces in our own lives. And if you but read any great drama of passion you will see what chaos is wrought from following through on our untethered desires. But, this paradigm is hierarchical in that a strong enough Vision will override both your Intentions and provide the Means to a large degree. We have to really see and understand the transcendent Vision of the Good and our hearts will often immediately and irresistibly desire it.
Now the way we receive knowledge from others is largely by hearing or seeing, or reading which is a technologically extended version of these two processes. This is the primary way that we are able to change our own thoughts and cultivate a new Vision. Simply stated, we listen to and observe others who have wisdom. You’ll notice in common speech how we have an admixture of these processes. Someone will tell you something factual and innocently mind-changing and you’ll reply, “I see”. Well, actually you heard it, but what you’re describing is what I’m getting at here. Essentially you receive new thoughts through your sense faculties. Now, the faculty of speech is how others communicate the ideas in question to us (and through writing, which is of course technologically extended speech).
Having laid the groundwork now, speech in particular, and by extension behavior, is where we want to focus our attention while we dive in to all the beautiful potential for real encouragement.
The Power of Real Encouragement
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue” – Proverbs 18:21
Our words and actions have the potential to be life-giving to others. The opposite potential of course exists, as expressed in the proverb. However, I want us to understand that this really is a power. A genuine force in the world. It is not empirical of course, at least not at its genesis point, but if you’re a strict materialist and still reading my work, I don’t know what to tell you.
With that inherent responsibility in mind we can go deeper on what exactly we are doing when we properly encourage each other. By the process I described above, our words and observable actions can serve to change the thought-life of those in our circle of influence and thus potentially change their hearts. And in encouragement properly practiced we are indeed enabling others to set their hearts on something Good. Something worth pursuing. We are literally “giving heart” as the words etymology suggests.
Now, before Jesus was to be crucified He told His little band of friends this: “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (NLT). He was literally “en-couraging” them. He used His presence and His speech to change their vision of life and thereby gave them “heart” to eventually become totally reborn people. They desired something different and better than before as a result of His actions and His words. We have this same power. That’s the power of encouragement.
Blessed to be a Blessing
On a personal level, I’ve been having a rough time of late. I don’t say this to garner any sympathy or in the bizarre spirit of performative suffering I see online these days. I tell you in order to give a concrete display of encouragement’s power and how that power can suffuse the world through us.
There’s a book by Paul Tillich called “The Courage to Be”. It’s a good book but heavy with philosophical jargon. At the core of the book is the idea that human beings, being the only self-reflective species, can choose to stop engaging with life. In short, we can use our will to commit suicide. I mean this literally. We have the ability to kill ourselves. Therefore, facing the suffering inherent to life by choosing to continue living is an act of courage. A disposition of the heart to go on living and striving for Good. I add to Tillich that this attitude of the heart can be emboldened by the support of our fellow man through the type of encouragement we’ve been discussing. This is what my friends have been doing for me lately. I don’t want to overdramatize or cast any aspersion on anyone struggling with suicidal ideation. It’s something I’ve faced in the past and it is a stormy sea. Please seek help if you need it.
I’m not in that place right now, but life has been undeniably hard. My friends have encouraged me by enlarging my vision of life, giving me real motivation and purpose by the power of their words and their presence with me. That is what Sam does for Frodo in the speech I quoted in the epigraph. Frodo can’t see the purpose in anything they are doing. He can’t see a reason to live and doubts his ability to go on. Sam acknowledges the darkness in their quest, but then he tells Frodo of the Good for which they are fighting. And of course I don’t doubt Tolkien was inspired by the words of Christ to His friends.
This is what real encouragement does. It doesn’t shy away from the darkness. It doesn’t pretend everything is great and we’re all going to reach our dreams and be happy all the time and have perfect white teeth. That’s what advertising tells us. And that’s what platitudes tell us. Fake modern encouragement is selling us a bill of goods. But the genuine article changes the disposition of our hearts. It lifts our desires to the grand horizon of pure Goodness. To light that shines in the darkness.
And once our brothers and sisters have lifted our hearts and set our deepest desires on Goodness, we can offer this same blessing to others. We only half glimpse our true power for Good in the world. And this noble calling begins with using our words and actions to lift up those who are struggling and maybe even losing the fight for the “courage to be”. We can encourage them. I pray sincerely that I can encourage you to keep going. To stare darkness in the face and maybe even laugh at it.
I deeply believe that everything will work out in the end. This is what used to be considered the virtue of Hope and it’s what I want to bring to you with all my work. If you’re lost in the mess of this world, I want to be your Sam. To tell you there’s Good and it’s worth the fight. To help you see and to set your heart on what is so unspeakably Good that it’s worth any price that may be required of us. Because there is such a thing. I hope you’ll seek it. If you do, you’ll find it. And it will lift you to a place you can’t dream of yet.
May it be so.
Hi Brady, I really enjoyed your essay and the meaning within. Thanks for sharing your story. Been through challenging times lately, but i'm grateful for it, and I know that better times are ahead and i'll be more appreciative of them. Re-reading the paragraph from the Two Towers after reading your essay had such a more powerful message. Thanks, Simon.