Eventually we come to know ourselves.  Like a Unitarian Universalist faith, defined by values, but expressed in a multitude of ways, at our center are our personal principles.  This is the person I will be, whatever the circumstances where I find myself.

We’ve been talking the last few weeks about identity.

Identity is one of the three core spiritual issues that everyone deals with in life.  Identity.  Purpose. And Meaning.  Or as I phrase the three spiritual questions:  Who am I?  What should I do?  Why does it Matter?

The spiritual question of Identity has two dimensions.

First we ask, “Who am I?”  What does it mean to be me?  That’s the personal dimension of identity.  Then we ask, “Who are we?”  What does it mean to be human?

The personal dimension of Identity starts us thinking about theological questions such as, “Is there a stable self within us or is the permanent self an illusion?  How am I the same or different from other people?  Was I created for a reason – like a lesson I needed to learn, or a service I can give to others?  

The corporate dimension of Identity invites theological questions such as, “Are human beings naturally good, or sinful, or neutral?  Are human beings a special creation or are we the unplanned outcome of the same natural forces that produced the rest of the universe and other living things?

In the context of this church, as you prepare to elect a s Search Committee and enter a year of searching for your next settled minister, exploring the issue of identity, will be helpful in answering the question, “Who are we as a congregation?”  What is the character of this church?  What are your unique gifts and your challenges?  What do you care about?  What are you working on?  How is this congregation the same or different from other Unitarian Universalist congregations and what kind of minister would be a good match for the congregation you are?  Who are you?

We will turn to looking at the corporate dimension of identity next month.

Two weeks ago, we began looking at personal identity by considering the aspects of identity that are given to us.  We are born into particular bodies, with particular parents.  We come with a genetic inheritance.  We are born at a particular place, at a particular time.  Part of who we are is defined for us, by our internal biology, and by an external culture that opens some doors for us and closes others.

Last week, I offered the balance to that deterministic view of self.  We are formed by outside forces but we are also the product of our own free choices.  I offered the phrase, “A victor of circumstance”, because we can use our skills and creativity, wisdom and courage to rise above the limitations of our biological and cultural destiny.  Who are you?  Well, partly, you get to choose.

What did you receive from your ancestors?  What did you receive from the culture you were born into?  What of that inheritance did you receive gratefully, made the most of, cling to now, and bring with you into your present and future as a part of who you are?  Like those fairy tales where when the hero begins their journey they are given gifts by a wise old person, gifts that turn out later in the story to be exactly what is required to overcome particular challenges and achieve the goal.  What are the gifts given to you?

And what of who you are today comes from within yourself?  Heroes in fairy tales also depend on their own gifts: their strength and cunning and so on.  What of you today is a response to internal impulses that you discovered on your own, nurtured on your own, and perhaps make a stranger in some way to your parents?

How much of you is the person you were created to be – by others, and how much of you is the person you were meant to be – an internal knowing manifested by your own life choices?

But here’s the deeper, complicating question.

If part of who you are is a self-invention based on what you chose to be, why did you choose what you chose?

If your choosing was in response to some internal impulse, where did that impulse come from?  Wouldn’t that internal impulse also have been given to you, by biology or the culture you found yourself born into?  Can there be some part of ourselves which really is self-determined, independent from any force outside ourselves?

Can there be something in us that is somehow free from prior conditioning?  A push, perhaps, from our parents and early circumstances, but not a determining push?  A general direction that we get to narrow down to a particular path?  Is there something essential that is really us, that allows us to choose for ourselves, to walk a free path?  To be, as we sang in our opening hymn, “Searchers in the soul’s deep yearnings.  Look inside, your soul’s the kindling of the hearth fire pilgrim’s knew.  Find the spirit, always restless, find it in each mind and heart.”

When you look for that soul, that carrier of a truly personal identity, what do you find?

You may have heard me speak before about the three elements of a complete faith:  Beliefs, Values, and Actions.

Usually, when folks think about religion and spirituality, they focus only on the belief element of faith.  What do you believe?  Do you believe in God?  What do you believe about Jesus? Do you believe in heaven or reincarnation or do you believe that consciousness ends when the body dies.  What do you believe?

I also include in this first element of faith the facts about the world that we don’t think of as beliefs but that we say we “know.”  Faith is not just that metaphysical corner of reality where God and the afterlife exist, faith includes everything we believe about the earth and the sun, and men and women, and the history of the world.  Much of that knowledge comes to us from the tool of science.  Beliefs are the totality of our worldview.  When we look out at the world we see both those things that we know objectively and those things we have to surmise based on intuition and feelings.  Beliefs are our description of reality.

But beliefs are not all of faith.

From our description of reality we then derive a set of values.  Because the world is the way it is, to us, then certain principles become important to us.  Life, for instance, is a value, or peace, or justice.  Love is important.  Creativity is important.  Education is important.

You values will differ depending, for instance, on whether you think this is the only life you get, whether there’s a Heaven or Hell waiting for you, or whether you believe you’ll be reincarnated indefinitely until you learn some great wisdom.  Your values will differ depending on whether you believe that human beings are a special creation or whether human beings are the accidental outcome of the same natural forces that created the rest of the world and other forms of life.

Finally, from our values, we then choose actions in the world that further our values and make them manifest in our lives and in the world.  If we value peace we will work for peace.  If we value love, we will seek love.  What you do with your religion is at least as important as what you say about your religion.  That’s why the glaring hypocrisy of evangelical Christians who support President Trump despite his personal immorality and his policies on immigration and race and so on are so mind-boggling.

Faith isn’t merely holding beliefs, intellectually.  Faith is also the values that flow from those beliefs, and the actions we take in line with those values.  And that’s true for the personal spirituality of every person in this room, as well as for those people who follow a name brand religion.  Your faith is your Beliefs, your Values and your Actions.

Now one more little detail.

Faith is beliefs leading to values, leading to actions.  But where do our beliefs come from?

Our beliefs, which is everything that we hold to be true about the world, our “description of reality”, are formed by our experiences throughout life.  We believe reality is the way we believe it is, because we were taught about reality in school, or we learned it from our parents, or we experienced it for ourselves.  Our beliefs flow from our experience.

Now this might start to sound a little familiar.

Some of our experiences in the world are given to us by the body we were born into and the particular time and place we grew up in.  Some of our experiences are determined for us, by our parents, and by what’s available in the culture around us.

And then some of our experiences, increasingly as we get older, we choose for ourselves.  We decide to have certain experiences and seek them out.  We choose this class in high school.  We hang out with these friends.  We read that book, or watch that movie.

Our experiences are both given to us, and also chosen by us.

Thus, if you think of the line of faith, starting with experiences, leading to beliefs, leading to values, leading to actions, then at the bottom you see that our actions create new experiences.  And thus the bottom of the faith line circles back to the top and the cycle starts again.  Experiences.  Beliefs.  Values.  Actions.  Experiences.  Beliefs.  Values.  Actions.  Experiences.  And so on.

The faith line begins with experiences given to us.  No one imagines themselves to be self-created as an infant.  No one imagines that the world they discover around them as they begin to explore the world was created by themselves.  At first, everything is given to us, so it seems.  We emerge entirely from the world.  Everything was already here before we arrived and we are entirely the product of that givenness. 

But the faith line ends with experiences also.  At the end of the line of the “given to us” self of world and biology and culture that leads to valuing some principles in the world more highly than others and then making choices about the kind of world we want to create for ourselves and others, we then arrive at experience.

Doesn’t this then make experience the essential piece of the loop?

Experience of one reality leading to a new experience and then another in an endlessly recreating series.  Experience after experience.  Experience in this moment creating the next.  New experiences created from the ground of “what was” (the reality of what actually is, even if only partially understood) and informed by our collective hopes, desires, cares and concerns and longings (our values); then creating through our choices and actions in the next moment a new reality that starts the cycle again.

In this metaphysics, which is called Process Theology.  There is a real world, constantly ending and being re-created moment by moment, and there are free choice-makers guiding the ongoing re-creation of the world, meaning you and me and every other conscious individual, as we apply our values to shape what comes next, moment by moment.

The irreducible ground of this metaphysics is not material things, but moments of conscious experience.  A moment that begins with the givenness of the past, experienced by a conscious individual such as all of us but other forms of life as well to varying degrees, applying a value judgment to give a direction, and then making a free choice, which creates the next moment.

At the moment that you became a conscious individual you joined this community of co-creators of ongoing reality.  At first your choices were limited and highly influenced by the givenness of reality you felt around you.  But gradually, a stronger and stronger self emerged and your choices became more independent and more powerful.  You exercised a freedom always latent in you and your choice-making became more powerful.  You became more and more responsible for creating your own life and shared greater responsibility for what we all choose to make of the world we share.

Because I believe this description of reality that includes radical freedom and a constantly flickering world that flows and changes from one moment to the next, I strongly value freedom, and individual responsibility.  Because I believe that reality is created by the combined choices of billions of individuals, I believe that my actions must not be just for my own health and happiness, but that I must use my choices for the good of all.

So what am I?

I am not a lasting, permanent self, but like all reality I am a constantly flickering moment of conscious experience, constantly changing from one moment to the next, influenced by the past, but not determined; recreating much of who I was, but always enjoying the opportunity for an ever-new creation as well.

I am not a passive participant in a pre-determined reality.  I am a conscious individual with great, shared, power to shape my world.  My reality is capable of transformation and does transform, in part by my choices.  As reality changes, so too, do my beliefs, values and actions.  There are better and worse possibilities for the future and my value judgments and actions that I take in response to those values moves the future in purposeful directions.

With Thoreau, “I wish to live deliberately…  I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived….  I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to know it by experience.”

And then to let those experiences create a new reality, to leave behind the old reality when necessary, to learn new values, to re-examine my judgment of what could be the next best possible future based on what really is, to add my choice, to take my action, to create a new world with all conscious individuals participating and then, each new moment, step together into what we choose to make.