The first questions of spirituality are the questions of identity: “Who am I?” and “Who are human beings?” The Christian holiday of Epiphany invites us to ask those questions, find our answers, and live our authentic life with intention.
For the last nearly two years, now, our world has been coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In storm and rain, sorrow and pain,” we have tried, as best we were able, to go on singing.
The pandemic, and other challenges we’ve faced over the last few years, the Trump presidency, the January 6thchaos at the capitol one year ago and the ongoing attack on our democratic system, this congregation’s own journey in pausing worship, selling your beloved property, soldiering on with just a core group, and working to re-imagine where you might go from here, have tried us in many ways.
It’s been tough. It’s been a hard couple of years. It’s been a continuing blow to our spirits.
You might have phrased your “sorrow and pain” as “what the heck is going on?” But I think the deeper question is this one. I thought I knew who we were, as human beings, as Americans, as the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, but now I wonder… Who are these people? Who are we? Who am I?
Who am I? When I’m stuck indoors and can’t connect with my friends and family and spiritual community? When I can’t go to the office? When I’m suddenly worried about every handshake and trying to look presentable on endless Zoom meetings. Who is this person?
Who are we? As a nation. What does it mean to be American, any more? What’s important to us? What’s worth defending?
What is the Sepulveda UU Society? When we know longer have our building or a minister? When we can’t gather for worship or programs?
And now, as we enter a new fraught time of the pandemic, we also are facing what might be an end of the pandemic. So now, questions of how we build back what we have lost become foremost. How do we build back our relationships, our schools, our small businesses, our communities, our nation, our world.
It’s the same question of identity, but instead of “Who are we?” it becomes, “Who do we want to be?”
What is the unique gift I have inside of me that I want to name and let the world see? Are we the kind that answers, “Yes” to life, to truth, to love? Or are we someone different? What is that mystery within me that Chaim Stern spoke about in the words of our chalice lighting. What is that “voice still and small” saying to me, to each of us, to all of us?
In the Christian liturgical calendar, there’s a holiday set aside for asking these sorts of questions. It’s the holiday of Epiphany, which we just past on Thursday, January 6. The same day as the anniversary of the chaos at the capitol. You might know it as Three Kings Day. It’s the last day of the twelve days of the Christmas Season. The holiday of Epiphany.
Epiphany is the holiday at which Jesus is revealed, both to himself and to at least some of his followers, as God incarnate. In other words, Epiphany is the holiday in which Jesus claims his true identity. Epiphany is the spiritual holiday of naming our identity. “Who are we, really?”
Beneath the masks that I’ve made and worn over the years, beyond the person that my parents always wanted me to be, but was really more about their needs than my needs, outside of the roles I’m expected to play as spouse, and parent, and employee, ignoring the expectations of what I should be, or pretend to be, who, actually, am I? What is me?”
The question of Identity is one of the three basic spiritual questions. “Who am I?” we ask, along with “What should I do?” And “Why does it Matter?” Identity. Meaning. And Purpose. That’s what spirituality is uniquely about.
“Who am I?” asks, what am I when I examine myself? And in a more general sense, what is the nature of being human, that all of us share?
What is a human person? Are human beings good or bad? Are we persons of inherent worth and dignity, or is worth and dignity something we earn through our actions? Are we morally neutral at birth and good and evil is something we become later? Are human beings animals governed chiefly by instinct and genetics, or are we free to do what our rational minds choose to do, including choosing to overcome our animal natures? Do we have a soul that’s independent from our bodies: immortal and holy, but also at risk of damnation if we make bad choices in life? Or are we purely physical beings that cease to exist when our bodies die? Or is there some part of our consciousness that continues to exist? Maybe we move into another body in a long series of reincarnations, or maybe we go to a series of afterlife existences where we continue to grow and develop spiritually. Or maybe this life is followed by just one other, either a reward or punishment based on what we do here.
Who am I? Immortal soul, or mortal body? Unconscious appetites or rational mind? Born good, or born bad, or born neutral? A separate individual, or a self dependent on and created by relationships with others, or perhaps a piece of a universal Divine spirit taking human form for a time before returning to my true nature?
These are the questions of identity that religions concern themselves with. “Who am I?” seems uncomplicated when first asked. But examining the issue leads to a host of complicated problems that philosophers and theologians have long wrestled with.
What do I refer to when I say “me?” Am I my soul? My body? My personality? Who is me? Who am I?
If I first think I am this body, then I have to admit that I have had several different bodies throughout my life. This isn’t the body I had when I was a child. This isn’t the body I had when I was a young adult. When I’m older I’ll have even a different body. Yet it seems like I’ve always been me. I have to admit that many times in my life I have been “Me” without this body. So maybe I could be me without any body! But if I am not my body, what am I?
Well one thing that connects me to that person I was when I was a child, and when I was a young man, is my memories. I remember being that child. I remember being that young man. And I remember being the person named I was, in ways that nobody else does, I have memories of me from the “inside” as it were. So maybe it is my memories that make me, me.
But I also know that my memories are not very complete, and not even always accurate. I had the experience a few years ago of reading a diary that I had kept many years before that and I was surprised at how many events I had recorded that I had no memory of. And even stranger, even when I read about having done those things, I still couldn’t remember them. In fact, most of my life I actually don’t remember at all. And I’m sure there were some experiences of my life that I remembered at one time that I don’t remember now.
My body has changed. My memories have changed. But I’m always me. So what is it that I’m talking about when I say “me”? In fact, when I examine myself, I see that all of me changes, constantly. My opinions change. I learn new things and my mind changes. I love things today I never used to care about. As a kid in school, I played the clarinet, but I haven’t picked up a clarinet in decades. Some things I used to care about passionately I no longer bother with at all.
There isn’t anything about the self that lasts from year to year throughout our whole life. And if we’re very specific about it, we can’t even name a part of the self that lasts intact from moment to moment. There is, it seems, no lasting, permanent self at all.
Instead, what we seem to be, upon examination, is a series of connected but unique moments of existence. One moment leads to the next. One self leads to the next. Each moment is a tiny fragment of experience, with a beginning a middle and an end. Each moment sets up the next, but when it ends nothing actually carries over from one to the next. Who I am this moment greatly influences who I will be in the next moment, so there is a sense of contuity. I’m closely related to who I was a moment ago, but I’m also something new.
This is how Buddhism views the question of self-identity. Buddhism sees there is no lasting self. The notion of a permanent “I” is a fiction created by our minds linking together all of the separate moments in our series of momentary selves. Our bodies and memories and thoughts are constantly changing. There is no immortal soul that travels through our lives with us. What we call the self is a long series of separate moments. This is a connection of cause and effect, as each moment sets up the next, but not of any existing material thing. The Buddhists use the analogy of one candle lighting another candle. The flame of the first candle causes the flame of the second candle, and the two flames look much the same, but they are not the same flame.
This insight, then, of the nature of the self, leads us to an important truth about reality. And this insight about the nature of reality, leads us out of the abstractions of theology, to the practical considerations of living in this world.
If it is true that there is no permanent self that lasts with us throughout our lifetime, and possibly beyond. (And I say “If it is true” only because you don’t have to agree with me, but I do in fact think that it is true that there is no lasting self.) Then, it seems that we could make the same analysis and come to the same conclusion about the rest of existence as well, not just human persons but the whole of reality.
It isn’t just human persons, bodies and memories and so on that seem to be changing at every moment, but everything changes. Some things change more slowly than people. Rocks, for instance, or the Pacific Ocean, or the moon. But everything is changing. The sun changes. Sunspots come and go. Solar flares come and go. The earth changes. Eventually Los Angeles will be west of San Francisco.
Nothing lasts. From moment to moment everything changes. What comes next is greatly influenced by what we have now, so there is a quality of connection. The next moment isn’t randomly different. The next moment is always very similar to the present moment. But it’s always something new. Every moment creates a brand-new reality.
This may at first seem unsettling. But consider what a refreshing thought for the beginning of a new year.
Every moment gives birth to a brand-new world.
Every moment brings the opportunity to give birth to a brand new you.
There is no lasting thing that carries over from the past to the present. There is no real weight of the past holding you down, no burden you are saddled with, no stone you have to carry. This moment is free. You can let the past go at any time. You are free because the future is free.
Between the last moment and this current moment, a break occurs. This new moment is conditioned, by default, as it were, to re-create the past, the way that a rock goes on being a rock moment after moment, eon after eon. But there is also the possibility, in that break between the past moment and the present moment, to consciously make a change. To choose something different. To say, I won’t, this time, blindly re-create the past. I will consciously choose, to resist the influence of recreating what I don’t want, and to purposefully choose more of what I do want.
If we live consciously, in the moment, we can make choices that create a better future, for ourselves personally, and collectively for our communities and for all the world.
If you want this new year to be different, you can make it so. If we want a different world, we can make it so. If you want a new you, well you already have one, every moment, you just have to choose who you want to be. We can choose the country we want. We can choose the new spiritual community want. You can choose to be who you want to be, starting now.
We could choose to be kinder. More forgiving. More joyful. More compassionate. We could choose to be more generous, more involved. We could be friendlier, lighter, sillier or more serious, louder or softer, stronger, or more gentle. We could choose to be peaceful instead of violent, just instead of unjust, loving and liberated.
Instead of continuing to carry our hurts and angers and bad habits over from one old moment into the next new moment we could leave them in the past. We could make a new choice.
We could choose to create new moments for our own lives and the world that are more true to the core values that we name as our guiding principles.
We could choose to create lives that look more like our ideals.
We could choose, as Harry Meserve said in our Meditation, “to be as good as in our hearts we have always wanted to be.”
In order to do that. We must be very clear about who it is that we want to be. The moment-by-moment re-creation of reality allows us the means by which we can make change happen. But plotting the direction of that change requires that we know where we want to go.
And so we start by being very certain of our core values.
We begin with values.
What is important? What is really important? What are the qualities and characteristics that are really the best for you, the most important, the most valuable in creating lives of spiritual health?
I named several values just a moment ago. Kindness. Forgiveness. Joy. Compassion. Generosity. Engagement.
In the first song that we sang this morning the guiding principles were: life, truth, and love.
I say often that the Divine Values are Peace, Love, and Justice.
The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism are a list of values. The value of persons, justice, compassion, relationships, freedom, responsibility, democracy, and so on.
Your mission statement includes several values for this community: vibrancy, diversity, community, acceptance, hope, compassion, justice, action.
Here’s what you might do as a spiritual exercise to begin the new year. Spend some time in the next week or so discovering for yourself your personal core values. What is really the most important for you? What does that “voice still and small” deep inside you whisper over and over again? See if you can list between three and seven words that describe your guiding principles. Your core values.
I try each year to come up with just a single word that I let guide me throughout the year. My word for 2022 is “Connection.”
And here’s the thing. Your core values are you, truly you. Our bodies change. Our thoughts and opinions and memories change. The world around us changes. But our values don’t change. My values today are the same as they were when I was a child and throughout my life. My strategies for bringing those values into the world around sometimes change but the values don’t. The values I learned from my parents, my public school, my church, the culture around me, are the same today: the value of family, community, kindness, the importance of love, being fair, acceptance of others, non-violence, personal responsibility, being a good citizen. That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s who I always am, or try to be, as everything else about me changes.
Your core values are who you are. Your core values are your answer to the question, “Who am I?” Your values are you. Not a permanent, lasting, “thing.” But a series of moments of experience, oriented around living your core values into existence.
Once you know who you are at your core, then you can begin the work of bringing that person more fully into existence.
And won’t that be a happy new year?
May it be so.