On Courage: Writings and Resources for October 2017
Courage - by Karen Hering, Consulting Literary Minister for Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, Minnesota
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt announced in 1933, evoking a stiff-upper-lip kind of courage meant to assure a nation in the throes of the Depression. And we have repeated this ever
since, as if by banishing fear we could overcome it.
Ask any group of children about courage, though, and they may offer a different wisdom. Courage, they may
say, is an attitude of “anyway.” It’s when you know something will bring trouble or pain or embarrassment and
you do it anyway.
Courage and fear, it turns out, are not opposites. Rather, they define and shape each other. Fear sets a
boundary within which most of us pass most of our days. It separates what we name as safe from what we
deem as threatening – and each of us draws that line differently. Courage, on the other hand, allows us to step
across that boundary when life or love or a higher value demands it. It beckons us to act anyway, knowing full
well we are stepping toward risk or danger, which requires knowing what and where our fears are in the first
place.
Under FDR’s advice, we don’t get close enough to our fears to know them. Whistling our way along, pretending
not to hear fear’s footsteps, we lose a key source of guidance. After all, fear is our built-in warning system. It
taps us on the shoulder and says “Wake up! Pay attention!” It can be critical to survival. “Fear is a natural
reaction to moving closer to the truth,” says the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron. Why would we send it
packing?
The root of the word courage is coeur or “heart.” In Buddhist teachings, the soft spot in the center of our heart
is one of our greatest treasures, the seat of compassion where we find our connection to all other beings. So
the courage of the spiritual warrior is found not in the fearful act of armoring and protecting this tender spot. It
is found by opening the heart up wider.
“You faced the death bombs and bullets,” writes poet Anne Sexton…“with only a hat to cover your heart.”
Now that’s courage. Dropping the armor that shields us from relationship and stepping deeper into the world
anyway.
This is what Unitarians Waitstill and Martha Sharp did in 1939. Leaving home and family behind in
Massachusetts, they traveled to Europe to help over 2,000 Jews escape to safety. For this brave work, in
2005, the Sharps posthumously joined only one other U.S. citizen honored by Israel as “Righteous Among the
Nations,” non-Jews memorialized in Yad Vashem for courageous resistance in the Holocaust.
Lest we consider the Sharps’ courage as some extraordinary gift, their daughter advises us otherwise.
“They were modest and ordinary people,” she said of her parents. “They responded to the suffering and needs
around them as they would have expected everyone to do in a similar situation.”
Courage is not just available to warriors and heroes. Courage has been tucked into every one of us, if we but
learn to tap it. Can we take down our defenses and walk out into the world with only a hat to cover our hearts?
Vulnerable and exposed, we are invited to step over the lines of fear we have drawn around us, to expand our
boundaries ever outward to that place where we might truly and tenderly meet one another.
“God is always revising our boundaries outward,” the Quaker Douglas Steere says. Are we willing to conspire
in such a courageous act of growth and connection?
May this, then, be our ordinary way with courage: May we know where our fears lie and learn to step beyond
them when needed. For each time we cross a line of fear, it breaks open a little more; and with each opening,
the circumference of our lives, and of history itself, is revised outward.
“We have not come into the exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love,” writes Hafiz,
“. . . or to confine our wondrous spirits, but to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom and Light!”
Our friends at Soul Matters Sharing Circle write:
Courageous people change the world. There are so many examples of that this month. October is LGBTQ history month and reminds us of the many who bravely moved (and continue to move) our world toward greater acceptance and affirmation. The revolutionary prophet of peace, Mohandas Gandhi, was born on October 2. Our Christian friends celebrate Reformation Day and Martin Luther’s courage that changed how we all think about religious authority. We rightly honor such giants. The problem is most of us aren’t that tall.
Or are we? Here’s what we have to help each other remember: In addition to the heroic acts that alter history, there are also the daily choices that prevent history from altering us. Battling evil and bending the arc of the universe toward justice deserves praise, but there’s also the ordinary work of integrity and not allowing yourself to be bent. This needs to be noticed as well. There’s the bravery of embracing your beauty even when it doesn’t fit the air-brushed images surrounding you. There’s the courage of calling out the micro-aggressions that happen almost every day at work. And what about resisting the persistent seduction of status and stuff? The list is long: Turning down that drink one day at a time. Making yourself get out of bed when the depression tells you to stay there. Holding your partner’s hand in public. Make no mistake, there are dozens of ordinary acts of bravery we rise up to everyday!
Or maybe we should say there are dozens of ordinary acts of bravery we help each other rise up to every day. Courage is not only noble; it’s contagious. The bravery that makes it into the history books may save the world, but our ordinary courage keeps each other going. Watching someone else make it through another day helps us endure. Witnessing someone else confront bigotry allows us to bravely be more open about who we are. They say that courage is found by digging deep, but most often it is passed on.
So don’t worry so much if you haven’t changed the world yet. And certainly let’s stop comparing ourselves with those giants. Our work rests less in looking up to them and more in looking over at and gaining strength from each other. And remembering that others are looking over at and needing strength from us.
Worship Theme Resources
- with gratitude to Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, Minnesota for these resources…
Books
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich’s classic work on how we can confront the anxiety which drives our lives. He writes of the courage
it takes to be part of a larger whole, the courage to stand alone and the courage to accept the fact that we are
carried by “the creative power of being.”
The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer
This is an inspirational book for teachers and also for those who love actually and learn actively. The Courage
to Teach argues that good teaching comes from the integrity of the teacher. This is true, of course, for all of us.
We are asked to turn our minds inward to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to fulfill one’s
calling. As actual teachers and as active learners, we weave a complex web of connections among our
subjects, our students and ourselves.
The Human Line by Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass is a wonderful poet. The author of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child
Sexual Abuse, Bass muses to ”pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray.”
Through poetry (and humor), she embodies her great love of this world…
…When I get home,
my son has a headache, and though he’s
almost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
We lie together on the lumpy couch
and I warble out the old show tunes, Night and Day...
They Can’t Take That Away from Me . . . A cheap
silver chain shimmers across his throat
rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
anything else. Only these excruciatingly
insignificant creatures we love.
The Strength to Love by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Coretta Scott King wrote: If there is one book Martin Luther King, Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is The Strength to Love. I believe it is because this book best explains the central
element of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence: his belief in a divine, loving presence that binds all life. By reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent moral ethic of love, we shall
overcome these evils.
In short meditations, Dr. King articulates his commitment to justice and to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual conversion that makes his work timelessly powerful.
Films
Stand by Me (1986). “Do you think Mighty Mouse can beat up Superman?” “Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman is a real guy. No way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.” “In all our lives, there is a fall from innocence, a time after which we are never the same. It happened in the summer of 1959…a long time ago.” Stand by Me is a story of beauty and becoming. A group of young boys set out on the adventure of their lives. And they sure find it, with courage, in one another.
The River Wild (1994). Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon star in a thriller. Gail Hartman (Streep) is struggling through what seems like the last stages of a marriage. She decides to dust off her old skills and take the family on a rafting trip. When her adolescent son is abducted by other rafters, the adventure begins for real. Gail must navigate dangerous rapids and even worse, her own fear.
I Am Sam (2001). Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) loves Starbucks coffee. He loves The Beatles. Most importantly, he loves his daughter who is seven years old. Her name is Lucy Diamond, as in Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The problem is that Sam Dawson has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old boy. He fights courageously to keep his family together.
What films would you add to the list?
Courage - by Karen Hering, Consulting Literary Minister for Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, Minnesota
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt announced in 1933, evoking a stiff-upper-lip kind of courage meant to assure a nation in the throes of the Depression. And we have repeated this ever
since, as if by banishing fear we could overcome it.
Ask any group of children about courage, though, and they may offer a different wisdom. Courage, they may
say, is an attitude of “anyway.” It’s when you know something will bring trouble or pain or embarrassment and
you do it anyway.
Courage and fear, it turns out, are not opposites. Rather, they define and shape each other. Fear sets a
boundary within which most of us pass most of our days. It separates what we name as safe from what we
deem as threatening – and each of us draws that line differently. Courage, on the other hand, allows us to step
across that boundary when life or love or a higher value demands it. It beckons us to act anyway, knowing full
well we are stepping toward risk or danger, which requires knowing what and where our fears are in the first
place.
Under FDR’s advice, we don’t get close enough to our fears to know them. Whistling our way along, pretending
not to hear fear’s footsteps, we lose a key source of guidance. After all, fear is our built-in warning system. It
taps us on the shoulder and says “Wake up! Pay attention!” It can be critical to survival. “Fear is a natural
reaction to moving closer to the truth,” says the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron. Why would we send it
packing?
The root of the word courage is coeur or “heart.” In Buddhist teachings, the soft spot in the center of our heart
is one of our greatest treasures, the seat of compassion where we find our connection to all other beings. So
the courage of the spiritual warrior is found not in the fearful act of armoring and protecting this tender spot. It
is found by opening the heart up wider.
“You faced the death bombs and bullets,” writes poet Anne Sexton…“with only a hat to cover your heart.”
Now that’s courage. Dropping the armor that shields us from relationship and stepping deeper into the world
anyway.
This is what Unitarians Waitstill and Martha Sharp did in 1939. Leaving home and family behind in
Massachusetts, they traveled to Europe to help over 2,000 Jews escape to safety. For this brave work, in
2005, the Sharps posthumously joined only one other U.S. citizen honored by Israel as “Righteous Among the
Nations,” non-Jews memorialized in Yad Vashem for courageous resistance in the Holocaust.
Lest we consider the Sharps’ courage as some extraordinary gift, their daughter advises us otherwise.
“They were modest and ordinary people,” she said of her parents. “They responded to the suffering and needs
around them as they would have expected everyone to do in a similar situation.”
Courage is not just available to warriors and heroes. Courage has been tucked into every one of us, if we but
learn to tap it. Can we take down our defenses and walk out into the world with only a hat to cover our hearts?
Vulnerable and exposed, we are invited to step over the lines of fear we have drawn around us, to expand our
boundaries ever outward to that place where we might truly and tenderly meet one another.
“God is always revising our boundaries outward,” the Quaker Douglas Steere says. Are we willing to conspire
in such a courageous act of growth and connection?
May this, then, be our ordinary way with courage: May we know where our fears lie and learn to step beyond
them when needed. For each time we cross a line of fear, it breaks open a little more; and with each opening,
the circumference of our lives, and of history itself, is revised outward.
“We have not come into the exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love,” writes Hafiz,
“. . . or to confine our wondrous spirits, but to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom and Light!”
Our friends at Soul Matters Sharing Circle write:
Courageous people change the world. There are so many examples of that this month. October is LGBTQ history month and reminds us of the many who bravely moved (and continue to move) our world toward greater acceptance and affirmation. The revolutionary prophet of peace, Mohandas Gandhi, was born on October 2. Our Christian friends celebrate Reformation Day and Martin Luther’s courage that changed how we all think about religious authority. We rightly honor such giants. The problem is most of us aren’t that tall.
Or are we? Here’s what we have to help each other remember: In addition to the heroic acts that alter history, there are also the daily choices that prevent history from altering us. Battling evil and bending the arc of the universe toward justice deserves praise, but there’s also the ordinary work of integrity and not allowing yourself to be bent. This needs to be noticed as well. There’s the bravery of embracing your beauty even when it doesn’t fit the air-brushed images surrounding you. There’s the courage of calling out the micro-aggressions that happen almost every day at work. And what about resisting the persistent seduction of status and stuff? The list is long: Turning down that drink one day at a time. Making yourself get out of bed when the depression tells you to stay there. Holding your partner’s hand in public. Make no mistake, there are dozens of ordinary acts of bravery we rise up to everyday!
Or maybe we should say there are dozens of ordinary acts of bravery we help each other rise up to every day. Courage is not only noble; it’s contagious. The bravery that makes it into the history books may save the world, but our ordinary courage keeps each other going. Watching someone else make it through another day helps us endure. Witnessing someone else confront bigotry allows us to bravely be more open about who we are. They say that courage is found by digging deep, but most often it is passed on.
So don’t worry so much if you haven’t changed the world yet. And certainly let’s stop comparing ourselves with those giants. Our work rests less in looking up to them and more in looking over at and gaining strength from each other. And remembering that others are looking over at and needing strength from us.
Worship Theme Resources
- with gratitude to Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, Minnesota for these resources…
Books
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich’s classic work on how we can confront the anxiety which drives our lives. He writes of the courage
it takes to be part of a larger whole, the courage to stand alone and the courage to accept the fact that we are
carried by “the creative power of being.”
The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer
This is an inspirational book for teachers and also for those who love actually and learn actively. The Courage
to Teach argues that good teaching comes from the integrity of the teacher. This is true, of course, for all of us.
We are asked to turn our minds inward to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to fulfill one’s
calling. As actual teachers and as active learners, we weave a complex web of connections among our
subjects, our students and ourselves.
The Human Line by Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass is a wonderful poet. The author of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child
Sexual Abuse, Bass muses to ”pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray.”
Through poetry (and humor), she embodies her great love of this world…
…When I get home,
my son has a headache, and though he’s
almost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
We lie together on the lumpy couch
and I warble out the old show tunes, Night and Day...
They Can’t Take That Away from Me . . . A cheap
silver chain shimmers across his throat
rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
anything else. Only these excruciatingly
insignificant creatures we love.
The Strength to Love by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Coretta Scott King wrote: If there is one book Martin Luther King, Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is The Strength to Love. I believe it is because this book best explains the central
element of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence: his belief in a divine, loving presence that binds all life. By reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent moral ethic of love, we shall
overcome these evils.
In short meditations, Dr. King articulates his commitment to justice and to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual conversion that makes his work timelessly powerful.
Films
Stand by Me (1986). “Do you think Mighty Mouse can beat up Superman?” “Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman is a real guy. No way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.” “In all our lives, there is a fall from innocence, a time after which we are never the same. It happened in the summer of 1959…a long time ago.” Stand by Me is a story of beauty and becoming. A group of young boys set out on the adventure of their lives. And they sure find it, with courage, in one another.
The River Wild (1994). Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon star in a thriller. Gail Hartman (Streep) is struggling through what seems like the last stages of a marriage. She decides to dust off her old skills and take the family on a rafting trip. When her adolescent son is abducted by other rafters, the adventure begins for real. Gail must navigate dangerous rapids and even worse, her own fear.
I Am Sam (2001). Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) loves Starbucks coffee. He loves The Beatles. Most importantly, he loves his daughter who is seven years old. Her name is Lucy Diamond, as in Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The problem is that Sam Dawson has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old boy. He fights courageously to keep his family together.
What films would you add to the list?
