January 11, 2026: How We Build Courage

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

What does it mean to be a courageous person and how can we grow our own courage? How can community help us?

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Sermon Text

How We Build Courage

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

January 11, 2026

READING

Our reading is from a teaching from Nepalese Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. It offers a reflection on how we grow our capacity for happiness, freedom, and courage. It is published in the book, Leading with Love: Inspiration for Spiritual Activists.

He writes:

“We extend ourselves only so far as it doesn't intrude upon our comfort zone. As long as we continue to practice in that way, we'll still be disturbed by all sorts of political, economic, and societal challenges as well as by our personal crises.

“If we want to truly be happy, truly be free, we have to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zone, to all beings, in all situations...we have to move beyond considering Dharma practice to be, as one person put it, ‘a self- improvement project’ and recognize that the essence....is the improvement of the welfare of all...

“We develop greater confidence in facing situations that might appear scary, uncomfortable, or inconvenient; we develop the guts to deal with whatever challenges life hands us.”

SERMON How We Build Courage

I shared this story in the January Perspectives - our monthly online newsletter - but it is an important one, so I want to share it here too. When I called Rev. Bill Breeden to interview him as I was considering the ministry position with UUCB, he told me that this was one of the most courageous congregations he'd ever known. This took me by surprise. Remember - I didn't know you all yet, and I didn't ask him about courage. I just asked the open ended question, “tell me about the congregation.” Unprompted, this is one of the first things he mentioned. He said of you, that this congregation is willing to take risks, to show up for what is just, and to do the hard thing when necessary. Well, Bill had me sold with that recommendation - because courage is one of the most important virtues there is.

Maya Angelou, perhaps, said it best. She says, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtues consistently.”

Courage is the necessary ingredient for taking our professed values - and making them our lived values. As Unitarian Universalists, we value love, justice, equity, pluralism - but if we don't have courage, then these are just words we say - not values we live and not realities that we work to bring about in our world. And, amid the devastating injustices and lawlessness we have seen by the President and his administration in just the opening weeks of this New Year, it is clear that we need courage. Because our values, our commitments, and people’s lives are being trampled.

A word about what courage is and what it is not. Courage is not the strong overpowering those who are weaker. Courage and bravery are not a policy that says the strong can do whatever they are able to get away with and the weak must suffer the consequences. This is not courage - it is abusive power and displays a weakness of moral character.

Let us remember that the word “courage” derives from the French word - couer - meaning heart. Courage is rooted in love. Courage is doing the hard thing because you know it is right, even when you are afraid. Courage is the ability to act, despite fear or threat of persecution or loss. I am moved by the courage of ordinary people - ordinary citizens in Minneapolis to take risks to defend their community and their neighbors from the violence of ICE and the federal militarized occupation of their city.

Courage takes many forms. It is the strength that helps us resist injustice and organize for democracy. It is the integrity that helps us hold a position even when we feel alone. It is the risk we take when we try something new even when we don't know how it will turn out. It is the strength we find when we make hard choices, sometimes hard changes in our lives to care for and protect ourselves better.

So as we move into this new year, knowing we will need courage to keep showing up for love, for freedom, for our own dignity, and for each other - how do we build our courage?

Let’s start with a first lesson from the Buddhist teacher and environmental activist, Joanna Macy. It is not true that some people have courage and others do not - that some people are naturally brave and others are not. This is not true. We all have the capacity for courage, we just have to build it. Those who appear to have a lot of courage, were not born that way. They grew those muscles of courage - by doing one hard thing, and then another - one small brave thing and then another. It didn't happen all at once. With time, with practice, they grew their courage.

We build courage by moving into what the theologian Howard Thurman calls “the growing edge.” Howard Thurman describes the growing edge this way: “The growing edge is that sensitive margin which seems always to be pushing forward, to be reaching out beyond the present achievement or the present development…It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavors. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason.” Oh, how in these days we need to be living in the growing edge.

Another way of articulating this growing edge is from the jazz musician, Miles Davis, who famously said, “Play what you know and then play above that.” When we work on building or growing our courage, we cannot throw ourselves into the deep end. Because we can get hurt there - lose our way, lose hope - feel defeated. We may even lose ground in the area we are trying to grow. It is important that we don't put ourselves in high risk situations without training and skill. Instead, the path to build courage means moving to the edge of what you know, of your skills and your experience, and then just take one step beyond that. Then the next time, you can go up to that new edge and take one more step beyond that. Bit by bit, action by action, we grow our skills, we expand what we know and what is possible. And each of those steps beyond what we know, that is a courageous step.

This is really important because times are tense and dangerous. And the work of creating justice, resisting oppression, defending and expanding democracy in the face of the violence of the state requires discipline, practice, and a commitment to non-violence.

This too is where Tsoknyi Rinpoche's teaching calls us. The growing edge is the place beyond our comfort zone. As he writes, if “we extend ourselves only so far as it doesn't intrude upon our comfort zone, we'll still be disturbed by all sorts of political, economic, and societal challenges as well as by our personal crises.”

Even with all the best practices in the world, we can still be disturbed by what is happening in our country, our world - and with the losses and struggles we experience in our own lives. But what Tsoknyi Rinpoche points to is a way beyond just being disturbed - or being stuck in that place.

He writes, “If we want to truly be happy, truly be free, we have to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zone, to all beings, in all situations...We develop greater confidence in facing situations that might appear scary, uncomfortable, or inconvenient; we develop the guts to deal with whatever challenges life hands us.”

Yes, we may still experience the anger, heartbreak, fear of what we are experiencing, but by living and practicing in a way that continually calls us beyond our comfort zone to the growing edge, we find ways to free ourselves to act, to respond, to be courageous, to not just sit in the helplessness, but to keep showing up in our lives and in the ways we can for not only our own dignity, but as he names the welfare of all.

In his teaching, he also names the importance of not just understanding our journey and practice - whether that is Dharma practice, or our spiritual practice, or our religious life and faith journey - as a “self-improvement project” but recognize that the essence of it all is the “improvement of the welfare of all.”

Let's tease this out a bit, for in truth it is both/and. When it comes to extending ourselves beyond our comfort zone, every person's comfort zone is a different size and shape with different edges. What is the next small step in your growing edge that you can take? For some the next step might be more personal. Some of us have inner journeys that need tending - of healing, of grief, of addiction and recovery, of self-esteem and self-worth, of acceptance and forgiveness, and we need to start our journey here - growing our care for the self. Growth in this journey still means moving beyond our comfort zone to find a deeper place of acceptance, self knowledge - and even pushing ourselves to address things we have avoided. This journey matters.

It just also matters that we know the journey doesn't end there. The inner work that takes courage can help us lead others in their work, or accompany them in the challenges they face. And the internal strength we develop becomes a foundation for greater courage in our public lives and for our neighbors and communities. As Tsoknyi Rinpoche says, “We develop the guts to deal with whatever challenges life hands us.”

Friends, I want to end by returning to Ai Weiwei's words, knowing that having the guts to deal with whatever challenges life hands us can be quite daunting. And when we are in the midst of challenges - whether it is trying to figure out how to get ICE off our streets, or facing a long fight against cancer, or living with a terminal or degenerative diagnosis, or beginning a journey of recovery or healing - let's be honest that courage is not about being without fear or doubt, it is not always about feeling strong. In fact, those that we celebrate for their courage - people like Ai Weiwei - their courage and their power may not even feel powerful.

Ai Weiwei writes, “I don't feel powerful at all....Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.”

Our greatest courage often grows in those times when we feel most vulnerable, most fragile. Because courage isn't the absence of vulnerability, it is the willingness to keep showing up in our lives, for our ourselves and our loved ones, for our values especially in those times - because that is when our presence, our love is most tested and most needed.

May we all - individually and as a community - continue to grow our courage from these places of being able to be fragile, to be loving, to live beyond our comfort zone, but to do so together, in community, committed to one another and to the love that is the center of our faith.