When We Want to Be Courageous, a Bishop Stands Up

The nation watched with surprised shock back on January 21^st at the sight of a national religious leader actually standing up for those she understands her Bible says to treat with mercy in a public rebuke to Donald Trump while he sat in a front row pew.

Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. in a 15 minute sermon at a national prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral showed a seldom seen courage by looking toward the new President while saying:

"Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives…."

"The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors…." 

"I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land."

On the other hand, it was no surprise at all that she was immediately attacked by Donald and his usual sycophants for doing so with their usual lies, slurs, and name calling. One right-wing US Rep even responded, “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”

Most of them just continued to support the human cruelty she referenced. But she wasn’t naïve enough to expect change from those who’ve attained their power and riches through such inhumanity – her motivation was to do the courageous thing at that moment out of the depth of her calling.

Bishop Budde is no stranger to the cause of justice, and in her 2023 book How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, she shares personally out of her own faith what learning to be courageous is, how often in life it’s needed publicly and privately, and how she has learned through sometimes very public trial and error to be courageous.

She writes that our own courage can be required at times and in many ways when we need to decide to start something, come out for something, step up in public, or to just stay put or persevere in what we’re already doing.

Quoting Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte:

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.”

One problem with judging whether we ourselves have done the courageous thing is that the cultural, media-driven, corporate-profitable models of “courage” that we’re supposed to applaud represent spectacular, even click-bait, actions. They’re framed by our dominant institutions as so “courageous” that they make the brave decisions we every-day people are called to make look routine and weak and, hence, convince us that we don’t have such courage within us.

Bishop Budde includes stories of courage in her own life that are private, “small” by comparison to her public stands, sometimes apparent failures, and as down-to-earth as our own everyday living. As she puts it: “we learn to be brave over the course of a lifetime, and in all aspects of life, especially when the courageous decisions we make are known only to God.”

Courage is about making decisions based on the best information we have at the time as well as an analysis of what values we want to affirm for ourselves. Sometimes that’s a decision to “come out” as a liberal person or an LGBTQ+ person, but sometimes it’s brave to stay in.

Courage also means admitting our mistakes: “We need to be honest with ourselves and others when we make a mistake or are brought to our knees. It’s a way of living and leading with an undefended heart, truly open to others, and with a spine strong enough to withstand the experience, learn from it, and carry on”

And though we might decide to be brave in spite of our fears, that isn’t the same as being brave only to assuage our guilt. That’s why we need to remember that courage rests in decisive moments whether we choose to go or stay, change or persevere. 

No one needs any additional guilt from otherwise well-meaning people added to any they already have. As I’ve argued before: “Guilt, a seemingly noble expression of justice, is a useful control mechanism for those protecting their power and prejudice. And even for the less powerful, dwelling on one’s own guilt helps us feel that we’re in control of what we probably are not.”

Maybe, then, our courage is expressed in starting a private group of individuals who are too vulnerable or afraid in this truly scary time to do any more than to meet to support each other. Maybe our courage means seeing that a charity we love continues. 

Maybe it will be something like standing up in a meeting and just saying, “No, I disagree” and sitting down. Maybe it’s the courage to keep still.

But for many in our society, courage is expressed by just making it through another day, another week, another presidency.