In the movies, strength is portrayed as the absence of anxiety. In my life, I see that strength includes courage but human strength is built on anxiety, not the absence of it.

Fear and insecurity take a lot of different forms, at least with me. I have a split personality I am not one thing but a number of different things. Sometimes I am strong, sometimes I am not.

In my life, fear is a powerful fuel.

Without fear, courage would have no meaning. I believe that courage is the overcoming of fear, of acting and moving forward and taking risks that are frightening. For me, strength and anxiety are the Siamese twins of emotions, one is joined to the other, and neither can live without the other.

I always look for different definitions of strength and courage, there are thousands. I like to pick and choose among them and think about them. St. Paul defined the strong personality in this way: a courageous, watchful hero, firm in faith, worthy of great praise.

But Paul has a great qualifier: “Let all that you do be done in love.” It takes a great deal of courage and strength to do that. How much love do we see on the news?

Theologians who have studied Paul have said that what he had in mind was based on something beyond courage and faith and watchfulness.

Courage is not the strength of a hero. It is strength of him or her foregoes the praise and recognition  as a hero to the humility of love.

“Without love, ” writes Paul Tillich in The Eternal Now, “he who is strong becomes a law for the weak. And the law makes those who are weak even weaker.” Strength without love destroys, he writes, it drives people into despair, or rebellion, or indifference.

Love, says Tillich, cannot be added to strength, love is strength. It is, said the mystics in the Kabbalah and early Christian preaching, the blood of life.

The strongest person I know is named Maya, that is not her real name. She lived in Afghanistan with her husband, who she loved dearly, and their three children. Her husband was killed in a roadside bombing, she list an eye and one of her sons lost an arm. A second was permanently deafened.

Left suddenly alone, with no resources, and in great danger, she snuck out of her village at night and spent 26 days traveling only at night to get to Pakistan and an overcrowded U.N. refugee camp there.

Along the way, she was threatened and robbed and pursued and raped, she begged and foraged for food for herself and her traumatized children. They endured heat and cold and great and unbroken terror. By light, she hid in the woods.

By night, she walked under the protection of the moon, she says.

Maya led her children through forests and over mountains with ragged clothes, no shoes and no supply of food or water. She begged and stole and foraged for her children. I asked her how she survived and she said she knew she would live enough to get her children to America.

She made it with her family to Pakistan, and she and her  children spent the next 11 years in a refugee camp, overcrowded, also dangerous,  gangs and thieves were in control. She endured many horrors in order to survive and feed her children.

Today, she and her family live in a small apartment in Albany, N.Y., in sight of the great towers of the state government. She still has a patch, she can’t afford the eye surgery that might help repair her eye, she has no health care beyond some Medicaid.

She makes $8 an hour cleaning hotel rooms downtown. In the summer, when the legislature is gone, she is laid off. She has a part-time job hosing down city busses when they come into the garage at night.

Twice a day, she prays for the spirit of her dead husband, she prays for him to be in peace. Once a week, she forages in church clothing bins to clothe her family.

How does she get through all this? I asked (I have been helping her once or twice with groceries and clothes.)

She lived, she said, so her children could have a safer and better life. Everything they suffer – the poverty, bigotry, uncertainty, loneliness – is for that. For her children to have a better life.

I asked her if she is frightened here, and she said yes, of course, she is frightened every minute of every day. America is a fearful place, she said, full of mysterious rules and needs, and she sometimes encounters hatred and cruelty and jeers from drivers and men on the streets – she wears the Hijab.

She is in dread of going to the Department of Motor Vehicles for a driving test. Her English is spotty.

She never drove a car in her life back in Afghanistan. To survive here, she said – she has to get to hotels outside of the city – she has to learn to drive and somehow get a car.

Her fear, she said, is her food, it makes her strong and proud and determined. She always looks down the path, she looks for her children.

Courage, I think, is built on fear and would starve and wither without it.

Fear has made me stronger too. And I appreciate what Paul Tillich wrote, because it is what I have come to see and believe: love is strength, it is built on anxiety, love is the blood of life.