Lately, we’ve all gotten to learn what it feels like to wear a mask: uncomfortable, constricting, distancing. But even without a health pandemic, we wear invisible “masks” to protect sensitive parts of ourselves and to construct a version of ourselves we want to present to the world. LGBTQ persons know this strategy very well.
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In choosing my sermon topic for today, I was thinking that yesterday we would be celebrating Bakersfield Pride. I was excited to be with you for the pride event. There were plans for a festival in a park. We were going to have a table and new tee shirts to wear promoting our Fellowship. I was looking forward to sharing our UU faith’s long-standing commitment to the rights of sexual minorities to fully be who we gloriously are, and to spread the word that even as some religious communities preach a narrow God who can only bless a single way of being in the world, at this Fellowship, from this pulpit, we preach God’s expansive, embracing love for the entire rainbow of humanity and the worth and dignity of every person.
Sharing that message would have been a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
And I imagined that it might be possible that our little exercise of evangelism in the park might result in one or two persons joining us for worship for the first time this morning, wondering whether we really preach at church on Sunday what we claim in the park on Saturday.
So, in choosing my topic a few weeks ago for my sermon today I thought some aspect of living as a sexual minority might be appropriate. And as a gay man myself, I thought such a sermon topic might give me a chance to talk a little about myself, as I’m still new to the Fellowship and you might be curious about me.
Unfortunately, as you know, due to the health pandemic, the pride festival was canceled. So, we didn’t have that event yesterday. But my sermon topic had already been announced. And in the meantime, I’d already begun to think about the topic and to draw some connections between a common experience of living as a sexual minority and an important spiritual theme that we all deal with.
So let me draw together several connecting threads.
Because we live in a world where most people are heterosexual, it’s natural to assume that everyone is heterosexual until stated otherwise (I do it, too). That assumption of heterosexuality makes it a common experience for people who aren’t heterosexual to experience an uncomfortable time in our lives between the time when we discover the truth of who we are and the later time when we inform the rest of the world about our truth.
It’s a feeling that Sophia Fahs described in our Call to Worship this morning.
“The wonder of being together, so close yet so apart
Each hidden in our own secret chamber
Each listening, each trying to speak”
But that’s an experience we all have, not just sexual minorities. We know a truth about ourselves. But the rest of the world doesn’t know that truth. Sometimes we let people continue to make a false assumption about ourselves, because it’s easier than telling the truth, or it doesn’t seem important enough to correct them. Other times, we hide our truth deliberately to save ourselves from aggravation, or potential danger. Keeping an important truth of our identity secret, what we call being “in the closet”, can be spiritually harmful, but it can also serve a purpose. So we use it strategically. We’re out here, to these people. We’re not out over here, to these other people. And maybe we even lie about our truth when that’s the safest option.
Even in a perfect world, of perfect, radical acceptance, there will still be the experience of being in the closet. Because there’s always a gap, at least a little space, between discovering a truth about ourselves, and choosing to share that truth with the world.
So that’s why every year we celebrate National Coming Out Day on October 11, which was another reason I thought today would be a good occasion for this sermon.
Coming out doesn’t happen just once, it happens every year, or more often. We need an annual holiday for people who are coming out for the first time, or for the hundredth time, or to demonstrate our solidarity with people who are still waiting for the right time to come out.
As we sang in our gathering hymn, every year, we need to…
Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul
Return to who you are, return to what you are, return to where you are
Born and re-born again.
In 1987, I attended the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Speakers at the rally included Jesse Jackson, Cesar Chavez, and Whoopi Goldberg. We demanded legal recognition of same-sex relationships. A friend of mine and I participated in a mass marriage ceremony with 100s of other couples on the steps of the IRS building. We demanded the repeal of sodomy laws that made private sexual acts between consenting adults illegal. We demanded Federal protection against discrimination.
In 1987, the catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic was increasing. I was working for the AIDS Project Los Angeles. The March on Washington was the first time that the AIDS quilt had been displayed in its entirety. I walked amid the hundreds and hundreds of panels spread out on the great lawn of the Capital, each quilt representing someone’s lover, family member, friend, reading the names and the messages, and I cried until I could no longer walk. And then I sat and I cried some more. A Chaplain came over with a box of tissues and put his hand on my shoulder.
The names on the quilt, and the march and the rally, were a grand example of coming out. Telling our hidden truth. We gathered in Washington as much to show ourselves as to show others how many we were. How strong we were.
National Coming Out Day was inaugurated the next year, the date chosen to be a commemoration of the march. The 1987 march had been a day of activism. National Coming Out Day is a day of activism, too. We were determined to no longer hide behind the closet doors that allow folks to assume we don’t exist, or exist in so small a number that we don’t matter, and therefore no one is hurt, or at least no one we know is hurt, when our laws allow discrimination in employment, military service, marriage, adoption, and so on.
“There’s a river flowing in my soul, and it’s telling me, I am somebody.” Somebody who matters. Somebody who deserves respect. A person of inherent worth and dignity.
And by the way, it’s truly impressive how many of the demands we marched for in 1987 have now been won, thirty-four years later.
National Coming Out Day uses the metaphor of the closet. But it’s a curious kind of closet. It’s a closet that we carry around with us everywhere we go. Every encounter. Sometimes the door is open. Sometimes it’s closed. And there isn’t just one coming out day. You have to keep coming out over and over again. There’s always another door needing to be opened. Every new person you meet, makes an assumption, or remains in ignorance, until we actively do something to reveal outwardly a truth we know inwardly.
So maybe a better metaphor isn’t a closet but a mask.
We wear a mask over our real face. We take our mask with us, slipping it on and off several times throughout the day, going in and out of buildings, depending on where we are, and who we’re with. We don’t hide in a closet where no one can see us. We walk around interacting with other people, but wearing a mask; people see us outwardly, but they don’t see us inwardly, until we choose to take the mask off and they see us truly.
Lately, we’re all been wearing masks. Literal masks. So we know this feeling of being seen, but not being seen. Or of seeing other people but seeing only part of them. Something is hidden. Something is not being shown. We’re getting a curated version of other people’s identities: a partial truth.
And like the metaphoric masks I’ve been talking about, the literal masks we wear for COVID hide us, but they also protect us. We wear them deliberately, because uncovering ourselves too completely in this pandemic environment can be dangerous. We wear a mask to protect our health, even as we are aware of the trade-offs. They are literal lifesavers in some ways. But an annoying hassle that we will gladly take off as soon as we can do so safely.
My husband teaches middle-school in the Los Angeles school district. The kids are back in school and they wear masks all day. The teachers, too. Jim tells me that the kids are fine with wearing masks. They don’t complain. I think for a lot of kids during those early adolescent years it’s nice to be able to hide behind a mask. Everybody looks kind of the same. Nobody sees that new pimple on your chin. And Jim tells me that discipline is better this year, too. With everyone wearing a mask, it’s hard to whisper to the kid next to you, or disrupt the class with a funny face. So the class is quiet and the kids focus on their work.
The other thread to this sermon, the other reason that I thought of masks as a sermon topic for today, is that we’re now in the month of October, coming up toward Halloween. Folks who celebrate Halloween might be thinking about who, or what, they are going to “go as” this year. What costume to make or buy. And what mask they’re going to wear.
I don’t celebrate Halloween much myself. So this isn’t true of me. But some people get very excited about dressing up for Halloween. For some people it’s a chance to experiment with pretending to be something that they aren’t. For other people, dressing up is a chance to express outwardly a true part of themselves they usually keep hidden.
Or maybe those two motivations are actually the same thing. Does dressing up as a monster allow you to have fun pretending to be a monster, when you really aren’t that way at all? But why would it be fun to pretend to be a monster, if you weren’t already a little monstrous really, deep down? Does dressing up as a sexy witch allow you to finally express publicly the sexy witch you carry inside you secretly all year round? Or isn’t it rather that the costume you wear the other 364 days of the year is more likely the real you, and the Halloween costume is just a bit of fun?
So we think about masks as hiding our true selves, but in many cases they reveal our true selves, or at least something of our true selves. The mask constrains our freedom, but also protects us from harm. The mask inhibits social interaction, but, like middle-school kids, a little appropriate mask-wearing can help us focus on the work we need to do.
This time of year we’re thinking about Halloween masks. And we’ve been thinking about COVID masks for a year and a half now.
But Carl Jung tells us that we always walk around wearing masks.
Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist, created a theory of personal masks, each of us has one, called the Persona.
The Persona is the social self that you present to the world. Each of us has an internal self, a self that we know for ourselves, and a Persona, which is the self we construct to show to the world. Your inner and outer self may be closely similar, or may be very different.
Like all the masks we’ve been talking about, the Persona is a mixture of helpful and unhelpful, healthy and unhealthy, hiding, protecting, revealing, distorting, facilitating.
Part of the use of the Persona is to present ourselves in a way that fulfills our social function. A doctor presents a doctor-persona, because we expect a doctor to behave like a doctor and it helps a doctor get their job done if they wear a “doctor” mask. A teacher wears a “teacher” mask. I put on my “minister” mask when I’m in my role as a minister, and I take it off, somewhat, when I’m at home with my husband or out with my friends. Or rather I exchange it for a husband mask, or a friend mask.
But my minister mask is also a comfortable fit for me, because in some ways I truly am the person I am when I’m a minister. Being a minister is a good role for me, because getting to put on the minister mask allows me to express a side of myself, a true part of myself, I don’t always get to express in other parts of my life.
Because our masks can be helpful as well as harmful, Jung didn’t advise his patients to remove their Persona-mask, but rather to bring their Persona into balance with their inner self.
A person who completely expressed their inner self at all times in every situation would be a social disaster. They would be a wild, uncontrolled narcissist that no one would want to be around. We want our doctor to be a doctor when they come to their doctor’s office.
But the opposite danger is that a person can get too attached to their Persona-mask, never take it off, and forget the inner person underneath. The doctor’s wife doesn’t want a doctor at home, she wants a husband. And even a patient in the doctor’s office doesn’t want a fake, generic, mask for a doctor; they want a real person with an inner life, who they can relate to as a real person.
So Jung saw the psychological task as one where we recognize the extent to which we have become overly-attached to our mask and work on allowing our inner self to emerge. But at the same time, recognize the helpful, healthy part of the social mask that helps us stay tethered to the social world that we also need for our psychic health.
This is the spiritual task for us, too. The question of Identity, “Who am I, really?” includes an answer both me as an individual, and me as I am within the network of my social connections. We want to take off our mask to open ourselves to intimacy, but we also want to recognize, that just like the masks we’re wearing for COVID, some mask-wearing actually allows us to draw closer to others.
We live in these two dimensions: inner and outer, individual and communal. As we said in the words of our chalice lighting: “symbol of truth and freedom. We strive to understand ourselves and our earthly home.” Wearing masks properly can help us do both.
We want, not a rigid mask, that conceals us entirely, nor no mask at all, that tramples our need for social connection under unleashed individualism. We want, ideally, a supple mask. A mask we wear but know we are wearing. A mask we control rather than one that controls us. A playful mask that we play with. A mask we use, to serve the world around us, and to serve our own health within the world.