The Courage to Be

I read Tillich for the first time just a few years ago, and I was struck that he was writing about courage, um, back in the middle part of the century as, you know, corporations were becoming mechanized, and he felt like people were becoming interchangeable.

And he wrote a book called The Courage to Be.

Mm-hmm.

You know, the courage to be is just kind of an existential courage to, to, to show up and affirm existence and the goodness of being, the goodness of the people around you, you know, even when it's hard.

You know, just to, to kind of show up.

We don't often talk about courage that way, you know? Usually, when courage is mentioned in the public square, we're talking about soldiers.

You know, we're talking about a whistleblower.

But he, he wrote about courage as really kind of a daily thing, right? As, as a, as a daily thing to exercise, and I don't think we...

Every experience we have.

Even when I say, this is a book.

What I'm really saying is, how can I even make the statement that this is a book? Only because saying, I perceive this object and I think of it as a book.

So every statement, every thought, every knowledge, every piece of information we have, it has this I connected with it.

When this I is absent temporarily, it's in deep sleep, we don't have any knowledge, we don't have any information, we don't have any thoughts.

It's the earth that is going around the sun.

So things that are not exactly obvious, those of us who are literate enough to accept that, accept that that's the reality, although that's not how things appear.

In exactly the same way, we have these other sets of books, other sets of research, and that's we generally speak about as scriptures, The scriptures are not books written by a committee of scholars.

And so that's one of the places we begin to read in this particular institution, which I teach, and also in the context of theology in general, because it's important to me.

Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be.

I don't know if you've ever looked at this, but do you know Paul Tillich at all? Yeah,

yeah.