July 08, 2026

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.

Tillich wrote this in 1952 as part of his Terry Lectures at Yale, delivered into a Cold War atmosphere thick with anxiety about meaning, survival, and worth. He knew this territory firsthand: in 1933 the Nazis stripped him of his professorship in Germany, forcing him to rebuild a life and a vocation from nothing. This line insists that self-acceptance isn't passive comfort but hard-won courage, and it matters for service because we cannot give freely from a place of self-rejection or constant need for approval. Once we stop performing our worth through our work, we're finally free to offer that work plainly, without keeping score.