For this Labor Day weekend, continuing our liturgical theme of identity, I’ll talk about the common practice, at least in American culture, to define ourselves by the work we do.
Watch the video of this worship service
“Who am I?” is the question we will be looking at for the first part of this church year.
The question of Identity is crucial, because, if we believe as Unitarian Universalists that every person is a person of inherent worth and dignity, then persons matter. If every person is an individual, born unique, with unrepeatable gifts to offer toward our mutual salvation, then we need to help every person connect with their gifts and bring them out. Our work of spiritual self-liberation is to uncover who we really are, free from any false messages we received from the pathologies of our upbringing and socialization of our culture and let our true divine selves emerge. And our social liberation is to counter all the forms of privation and oppression that hold other people back from being who they are.
But we can’t be free to be you and me, if we don’t know who we truly are. That’s the question of identity.
“Who am I?” has many aspects. Who we are might be defined by our talents, our interests, our passions.
Or, “Who am I?” could be answered by describing our social roles and our network of relationships.
Or, “Who am I?” when we belong to a spiritual community, could be answered in reference to our shared faith and the history of people who claimed our religious identity before us.
Part of “Who am I?” could be a list of the values that are important to us, the principles that guide our lives and shape our identity. Identity as character.
In American culture, it’s a conversational gambit, when meeting someone new, to ask them, “What do you do for a living?”
In America, we say identity is occupation. You are what you do.
I’m a minister, I say. Or you might say, I’m retired but I worked for forty-five years as an engineer in the aerospace industry. Or you might say, I’m a student. Or I’m an attorney. Or I’m between jobs right now. Or I’m a graphic designer, or a life coach, or a chiropractor, or I’m a lion tamer or an exotic dancer, or I’m… well, whatever.
“I am,” we say. And then we say what we do.
“I am.” The very personal, very unique, singular person that is me, me to my depths and core, me a person of inherent worth and dignity, me, my very self, is equated to, “I am” and then the job title of the work I do.
Is that fair?
Is that even accurate?
Personally, I hate introducing myself to strangers by telling them what I do.
At church, wearing my stole and shaking hands with visitors after worship I’m happy to be “the minister.” That’s comfortable for me, and feels like “me.”
But off the job, at a party, a stranger approaches wanting to be polite and start a casual conversation. They introduce themselves, “I’m so and so.” Then they ask, “So what do you do?” I’m guessing “I’m a minister” is not what they want to hear.
I hesitate to say the words. And as soon as they’re out of my mouth I see this look of fear on the stranger’s face. “Oh no,” they’re thinking. “What have I gotten myself into?”
If I had said I’m a retired aerospace engineer, they might have said, “Cool!” What sort of projects did you work on? That could have led to an interesting conversation and maybe a friendship.
Or their eyes might have glazed over in boredom but at least we could move on to talking about something else. But when you say, “I’m a minister.” There’s no moving on.
Instead, “I’m a minister” in our culture leads to conversations about Jesus and the Bible, and then a long explanation about Unitarian Universalism and politics and science, which inevitably leads back to more church talk, and soon I feel that I’m disappearing and the conversation is no longer even about me.
I love my work. But sitting pool-side at a gay resort in Palm Springs I dread the guy on the chaise next to me leaning over and asking, “So, what do you do?”
Some minister friends simply lie.
You might know that asking a stranger, “what do you do for a living” is culturally very American, and in some countries the question is considered offensive.
I’ve had Dutch friends and English friends tell me that they roll their eyes when Americans ask them, “what do you do?”
The question is considered too intimate in Holland. In Britain the question makes folks think you’re about to judge them based on what their work reveals about their economic class.
Imagine asking Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, the character played by Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey, “What do you do?” Imagine the eye roll she would give you. How could the Dowager Countess even answer that question? What does she do? She doesn’t do. She simply is.
In Europe, the American question, “what do you do for a living?” is diagnosed as a pathology of defining our identity, by our work. Europeans don’t define themselves by the work they do, but by the living they do.
In Europe, the conversation starters are, “what do you think of this wine?” “Are you going to see that new ABBA show with the holograms?” “Did you read Ben Macintyre’s piece in the Times?” “What do you think of that new mid-fielder for Real Madrid?”
Europeans ask what are your experiences, your ideas, your pleasures. Who are you? Not what’s your line of work.
If somebody asked me what I’m passionate about, I could answer art and music. If they asked me where I went on vacation, I could talk about Italy, or hiking in King’s Canyon. If someone asked me about an editorial in the paper, I could discuss ideas. I would walk away from the conversation with a sense that I shared something important about myself, and learned something important about that person. How I spend my life, not just how I spend my day.
When we define our identity by our work, we mistake an expression of our selves, with our true selves.
What we do might be a clue about who we are, but our working self isn’t itself, who we are. If we’re satisfied in our job it might be because it permits some essential part of our inner self to come alive. But the job, then, is the flower, not the root of our identity.
And if we’re dis-satisfied with our job, it might be because the work is disconnected from our true self. We’re pretending to be someone on the job, rather than living our truth. Bad work blocks the expression of our true self, instead of facilitating it.
In exploring our personal identity, we want to reach behind the doing part of our life, to uncover the simply being part of our lives that sustains are doing.
Who are you when you aren’t working? Who are you when you aren’t responding to the demands of “making a living” but when you are simply living?
My mother, who died last year, was an elementary school teacher.
She worked, first in Ohio, and then in the Santa Monica school system for twenty-five years, taking several years off to stay home with my three brothers and I when we were babies.
And then, in 1986 she retired from teaching and moved with my father to Waynesville, North Carolina. And what did she immediately start doing?
She started volunteering as a tutor teaching reading and writing at the local elementary school. She tutored at the elementary school for the next thirty-five years, doing basically the same job as a volunteer in retirement, she had done during her working life.
My mom loved what she did. Teaching touched some inner truth of her identity. My mother always said that she loved the teaching part of being a teacher, but she didn’t love the school administration, and the sometimes unsupportive principals she had to work with. As a volunteer she could do only that part that let her be most her.
But even in my mother’s case, I would push back if someone claimed that a teacher was who she was. She loved children. She loved helping. She was committed to service. She optimistic about humanity and saw that education and particularly reading was key to better lives for all. Teaching was an expression of who she was. But so was her being a member of her church, and being a mother and grandmother, and a mate to my father, and a neighbor and other ways she expressed her being. Being a teacher was an expression of her identity, but not itself her identity.
I was scrolling through facebook not too long ago. And because facebook knows everything, it knew that I just had my 60th birthday, so I came across an ad for a guy who works as a retirement planner. I was ready to scroll on when I noticed something that made me curious. He said he worked on an aspect of retirement planning most people neglect.
When most people think about retirement planning, they think about the money. Can I afford to retire? Where should I invest my savings? When should I start taking social security?
The service this guy offered though was different: not help with the money question, but help in answering the question, “What will you do in retirement?” How will you continue to find meaning and purpose in life?” He said the question retirees fail to prepare for is, “Who will I be, when I’m not working?”
Marge Piercy says,
“I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along,
Who stand in the line and haul in their places,
Who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.”
If we value the workers, what do we say about those who are no longer working?
If our identity is our work, if we earn our self-worth along with our paycheck, if we define our identity by our job title, saying “I am” my work. Then who are we when we stop working?
I didn’t sign up for that guy’s retirement planning service, but I suspect his counseling would be to help people see that work is an expression of who we are, but not our identity. And the inner self, that it is our spiritual task to uncover and connect with, can survive perfectly well without that job. And when we know who we truly are, we can express ourselves in multiple ways, through all our living, not merely our working.
Like my mother in retirement, you can take those parts of the job that connected with your passions and those skills that you developed through years of experience and are proud of and want to share, and find ways to continue expressing that self, with a usefulness that serves others, that continues to give your life a meaningful purpose, while leaving the job behind.
It might even end up being better work, more closely connected to your true self. As Marge Piercy says, “The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.”
On this Labor Day we celebrate the workers.
In the words of our Opening Hymn: “We sing of the prophets, the teachers, the dreamers,
designers, creators, and workers, and seers.”
You often hear the job advice, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Find the work that allows you to express who you truly are, and you will find work to be a joy: satisfying and fulfilling.
You may have heard the phrase attributed to Joseph Campbell, “Follow your bliss, and the money will follow.” But if that were the case there would be a lot more pop stars, and professional athletes, and far fewer talented actors working as waiters.
But if we take “follow your bliss,” to mean, know your true self and seek ways to express that self into the world, then we might come to understand that there are a lot of experiences out there that can express the true, wonderful, creative, gifted you. The world needs only one Beyonce, but you can be you, in a lot of ways.
I have found that being a minister is a good job for me and a good life. Although as a younger man I never would have imagined myself becoming a minister (it certainly never was the path of my “bliss”) this work does seem to touch on something true to my core identity.
And moreover, I’ve found that my work has revealed truths about myself that I was unaware of. I’ve learned about myself, through this work. I’ve risen to challenges I didn’t know I could tackle. I’ve discovered new interests and developed new skills. I’ve become more like a minister, as I’ve lived into this role, not because the job has changed me, but because the job has revealed to me parts of my identity that were hidden from me before I began this work.
By the way, what Joseph Campbell actually said was this:
“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.”
Follow your bliss, is walking your unique path, “the life you ought to be living.” When we connect to our true self, doors will open: your door, “that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.” Maybe not a door to to money, or celebrity. But doors will open to the true self, to the best life, to the you the world needs and you truly are.