Chapel Speech 2 - Heros and Courage (Rachel Corrie)

The last time I spoke in chapel, I said that my understanding of who God is comes from my understanding of joy and love. Today I will speak of the courage that we are each given through God’s love.

To be courageous, we must be brave. Yet not all bravery comes from God. Thieves may show bravery when they steal. Murders may show bravery when they attack their victims. This is not courage. In my mind, courage is an act of bravery undertaken out of love. And it is this courage that makes heroes.

When I first think of the word hero, I think of movie stars and action. In my mind I see Bruce Willis blowing things up and Arnold Schwarzenegger saving the day. Mainly I think of someone who is very different from me. A person like me could never be a real hero.

But, movie stars aren’t really my heroes. My heroes are people like Vincent Van Gogh because he followed his dream of being a painter, even though he had to live poor and everyone told him that his paintings were terrible. Another one of my heroes is a woman author from India named Arundhati Roy. She wrote a book called “The God of Small Things” that is so powerful and smart and loving that I wish I wrote it myself.

But even these heroes don’t really seem real to me. They seem like characters too.

But I have known one true hero – someone who acted with great bravery and love

Three years ago when I was in college, a student came to lead my class in a big project. Her name was Rachel Corrie. She didn’t seem special or different, but liked her. She was easy to talk to and smart and friendly. We were very similar; she was even the same age as me. The class ended and I said good-bye. I didn’t know that just a few short months later, she would be dead.

When the term was over, Rachel traveled to the Gaza strip. That’s the border between Israel and Palestine. There is a war there that has been going on a very long time. Rachel went with a group to protest the Israelis bulldozing the homes of Palestinian citizens. The group she was with believed that they could act as human shields. Because they were Americans, because they have the privilege and protection of my powerful country, they believed they could stand guard against the Israelis bulldozers.

Rachel has never experienced anything like the Gaza strip. She wrote emails home to her mom, telling her about the families that she was staying with, about the bullet holes in the walls of their houses, about the children that played in the street next to tanks and soldiers. She told her mother that she was very scared. She was having nightmares about tanks and bulldozers and machine guns. She said that she missed her life in America – she wanted to dance around to music in her bedroom and have a boyfriend and draw comics for her friends. But she did not go home. Rachel stayed in Gaza even though she was scared and missed home because she believed she had important work to do.

On March 16, 2003, Rachel went to protect the house of a physician that the Israeli soldiers were planning to demolish. The bulldozers were already there when she arrived, huge super-sized bulldozers with added armor and shielding to protect them from gunfire and rockets. Rachel stood in front of the house, right in the path of the bulldozer. She was wearing a bright neon-orange jacket with Day-Glo striping to make herself more visible. She held a megaphone. When the bulldozer advanced, she waved her arms and yelled at the driver. She wanted to stop him. She thought that by placing herself in his way, she could save the home of the doctor. The bulldozer advanced and backed up many times, but Rachel would not move. Then it drove forward again.

The bulldozer came right at her. It moved slowly. She could have stepped out of the way.

She did not move.

The earth the bulldozer was pushing touched her feet and AGAIN she could have stepped aside. She did not move.

She rose up on the pile of earth so that she was eye-level with the driver. He did not stop and she would not move.

She fell to her knees and the bulldozer ran right over her body.

When she was underneath the machine, he reversed and drove over her again.

Rachel lay on the ground crushed and bleeding. Her friends rushed to her and called an ambulance. She died at the hospital a few hours later.

My teacher called me on my cell phone to tell me the news. I was driving. I had to pull over to the side of the road so that I could cry and cry. We held a memorial for Rachel in Olympia that night. But we weren’t the only ones. People all over the world heard about Rachel. There was a march in her honor in Rafa, the city where she died, but also one in India and London and France. My father, who lived a few hours away from me, called to tell me that a woman had knocked on his door while collecting funds for Rachel’s cause. My father told her that I had been Rachel’s school mate, and the woman cried and hugged him, even though he was a stranger to her. I saw Rachel’s face all over the news and hard about her on the radio. They made her sound like such an extraordinary person. I kept thinking of the girl I knew. Rachel was not extraordinary. She was very normal. She grew up in my hometown, she went to my college, she wanted boyfriends and liked music – she was just like me. It was Rachel’s actions, inspired by love and empathy, that were extraordinary.

The politics behind the war in Gaza are very complicated. I don’t understand them fully. Some people believe that Rachel wasted her life. Some people think the driver just didn’t see her, or that there was a justifiable reason for him to be working there. But all that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Rachel imagined a world where everyone lives in freedom, peace, equality and justice. Regardless of whether or not this was truly the right action, this is what she felt she must do to fight for a better world.

Rachel was brave when she left her safe, comfortable home in America to go to a war area to stand up for her beliefs. She was brave when she stayed in Gaza even though she was scared. When she stood in front of the bulldozer, she still would have been brave even if she had stepped aside. But even though she knew the risk of losing her life and had the ability to give up her stance, she stood firm. She had the kind of courage that can only come through God.

Rachel did not stop the war. She did not bring peace. She didn’t even stop the demolition of the houses – most the neighborhoods where she stood are gone. Yet. the hope for peace that she inspired ripples through hearts around the world like waves in a pool.

She was one girl – one normal, ordinary girl. Yet, her act of love has touched so many people. If Rachel could be a true hero, so can I. So can you.