After weaving together several strands from several sources that form our inherited identity, at last we come to the most recent and surprising strand: each of us. The inherent worth and dignity of every person means that each one of us adds something important and new. You are not just the legacy of your ancestors. You are yourself. And Unitarian Universalism would not be who we are without you.
watch a video of this worship service
Two weeks ago, I was on a plane to New York.
I usually read on airplanes. But I hadn’t brought a book with me and none of the books available at the shop in the terminal had appealed to me, so I watched a movie instead, on the little screen in the seat back in front of me.
Meanwhile, the teenaged girl in the seat next to me spent the entire flight watching a never-ending stream of one minute long TikTok videos on her phone.
The movie I watched was a documentary from a few years ago titled, Three Identical Strangers.
The set-up is captivating.
A young man in New York, named Rob, goes to his first day of college at a local community college. He’s never been to this school before, doesn’t know anyone, but everyone is extremely friendly. “Hey!” “How you doing?” High fives. And some of the girls even give him hugs and kisses. He’s enjoying it. But mystified. And most mysterious, some of the kids say, not just, “Great to see you!” but “Great to see you, again!”
Again.
One guy says, “Eddy! You’re back! I thought you weren’t coming back this year.”
Rob says, “I’ve never been here before. And my name isn’t Eddy.”
The guy says. “Well you sure look like Eddy. Come with me.”
They go to his dorm room where the guy finds a picture of Eddy. Eddy and this guy were friends the year before. He asks, “When were you born?” Rob and Eddy have the same birthday. He asks “Were you adopted?” Yes, Rob was.
They run to a phone booth. This is in the 1970s. They call Eddy. And then they drive through the night to Eddy’s house in Brooklyn. Rob goes up to the door. Eddy answers the door. And they each discover a twin they never knew they had.
It’s such a great story that it gets picked up by the local paper. The paper lands on the breakfast table of another family, and the sister says to her mother. “Doesn’t that look like David?”
So it turns out not to be twins, but triplets. Separated at birth. Raised by three different families. Adopted out of the same adoption agency.
The guys are adorable. Twins and triplets are always fascinating. And the random way they discovered each other exciting. They become local celebrities. They even get a cameo in a Madonna movie. And they appear on nationwide talk shows, like Phil Donahue, talking about how quickly they bonded with each other, and how much they have in common.
All of that is charming, but takes up just the first thirty minutes of the movie, and then there’s a twist.
Why didn’t any of the three families know that they were adopting one of a set of triplets? Why were they separated as infants instead of the agency finding a family that would raise all three? And is it just a coincidence that all three boys have an older sister, who was also adopted, also from the same agency?
We also learn that the three boys had been regularly visited by researchers from the adoption agency throughout their childhood. The families had been told it was part of normal follow-up to the adoption process. But it seems like more. And it turns out something more was going on. The adoption agency was conducting a study that they are keeping secret. A study that ended when the triplets discovered each other, but has never been published.
The documentary moves through twists and turns, and because the actual study has never been released it ends on a note of some ambiguity. But it seems likely that the study was about the old question of nature vs. nurture. Specifically, given three boys with identical genetics, what would be the effect of different parenting techniques in their development?
Because the three families had already adopted girls from the adoption agency, the agency had data about what kinds of families these were, and chose them specifically because of their differences. One was an upper middle-class family with a father who worked as a doctor and was often absent from the parenting. One was a working-class home, with a very gregarious father regularly involved in his son’s life, supportive and encouraging. The third was a disciplined home where the father was stern and withholding of affection.
A secret study such as this, with test subjects being examined without their consent, raises serious ethical issues, of course. The psychiatrist who headed the study is dead. The documentary interviews two researchers who participated, but without complete knowledge of what they were studying. And one of them points out that this was the 1950s and 60s when the culture of medical ethics was different than it is now.
But what of the question of nature and nurture? Is our life story fated by the genetic history we were born with? Or do factors like our environment and differing parenting styles affect our development? And what of the life choices that we make for ourselves, once we are old enough to make choices?
What does the case of the Three Identical Strangers tell us?
At first, the documentary points to the many similarities between the boys and makes a case that genetics controls everything.
The boys discover they all like Chinese food. They had all been wrestlers at some point in their life. Romantically, they all prefer older women.
It turns out the boy’s birth mother suffered from addiction and mental health issues. And all three men experience mental health issues as children and as adults as well.
But the boys were dissimilar in important ways, too.
Building on their local fame, they open a restaurant together “Triplets Roumanian Steakhouse.” But their different personalities soon made it impossible for them to work together.
They are gregarious, and reserved. Front of the house people, and back of the house people. Good with business. Good with people.
It turns out the initial similarities they discovered as they first met, were actually pretty trivial. These were strangers, meeting for the first time. It was the same experience we all have when you go out for a first date with someone you’re attracted to. You want the relationship to be successful. So you play up the interests you have in common and downplay the differences.
Oh. You like Chinese food. I love Chinese food!
Of course all three had been wrestlers at some point in school. Look at the way they’re built.
Of course all three prefer older women. They’re nineteen years old! All women are older women when you’re nineteen.
The boys looked the same, and share some physical and mental traits, but it turns out they were nearly as different as any three boys would be. And the differences would only increase as they grew older.
We’ve been talking about identity for the last few months, as one of the three core spiritual issues: identity, meaning, and purpose.
Identity is the question of, “Who am I?”
Twins and triplets obviously evoke that question. Am I my own self? Am I like my brother? Am I fated by the genetic history of my parents and grandparents? Will I necessarily become like they were? Would my life be different if I were raised with different people in a different place? Would I be different? And if I could be different, if I were raised by a wealthy family with loving parents, for instance, then what do I mean by me? Am I really that person I could have been, or am I truly the person I am? Who am I, really?
And who are we? As the question is posed when we talk about this church as a community.
Are we who we are simply by the accident of our history? We had that minister, and then that minister, and then that one. We had this conflict, and that crisis. We were founded as a Christian church and became Unitarian later on. We have this building, which is this size, which limits the size of the congregation. And we’re in this neighborhood. And we’re surrounded by the movie and television industry so naturally our membership includes a lot of creative and crafty people.
What of that is really us? And what is just what happened to us?
Can we separate the question of what happened to us from some essential core that is truly us, underneath all of that inheritance we never had a chance to choose?
We’ve been looking at Unitarian and Universalist history for the past several weeks.
Our roots are in early Christianity, which itself has roots in Judaism. And our current identity borrows from both. Our form of worship being very like Protestant Christianity. Our Unitarian theology being more like Judaism.
We reached a significant point in our development at the time of the rise of humanist thought in 16th century Italy. Humanism re-emerged a second time, strongly, in our development in the early 20th century. Humanism heavily shapes our communities today.
Enlightenment Unitarians were writers, and thinkers, and scientists. They were political activists and reformers. That character lives on in us.
In the nineteenth century, Emerson and the Transcendentalists introduced a romantic, more spiritual element to our theology which had gotten dry and overly intellectual: “corpse-cold” Emerson called it. That, too, is part of our legacy, both the intellectual and the romantic.
And beyond the direct historical line, we are also the inheritors of principles in our spiritual lives that come from these Unitarians and Universalists before us. It is from them that our religion, too, is a religion of Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance. A religion that prizes Democracy and the democratic process in our congregations and society at large. We are a “reality-based” religion, because they were, too.
With that genetic weight upon us, that ancient blood flowing through our veins, do we have a choice to be anything other than we are? Or is it possible to be UU and also be ourselves in a way we may make for ourselves?
I spent Thanksgiving Day with my father in North Carolina. I was raised in Santa Monica and have spent my whole life in the greater Los Angeles area, but my parents moved to North Carolina when they retired in the 1980s.
My mother died a year ago, so Thanksgiving dinner was just my dad and me, and my husband, Jim.
We had a lovely visit.
Jim and I had just been in New York, where we saw shows every night and went to museums and galleries every afternoon, as we like to do.
At one point my father told me, “I’m sure glad you and Jim each found someone as interested in the arts as you are.”
It’s true. Jim and I are arts junkies. My parents on the other hand never went to the theater. Our family nearly never went to a museum, and when we did it was probably a natural history museum, not an art museum. We never went to the symphony. I remember a few summertime pops concerts. I remember our church put on a production of The Sound of Music one year, and boy was I jealous of the kids who got to perform in that! But my parents just weren’t interested in that stuff. They read books all the time, so I’m glad for that inheritance. But we only had a few old records in the house. We never went to the movies. They just weren’t interested.
My mother used to joke that whether it was nature or nurture, everything comes from your parents anyway.
So where did my interest in the arts come from? How, is it, with my parents’ genes and my parents’ parenting, that I am so completely my own person?
In Three Identical Strangers, when they start to tease out the debate about nature and nurture, one of the experts they interview concludes that our genetics and our early upbringing points us in a direction. But as we age, we increase in our ability and opportunity to make choices for ourselves. We begin to have experiences outside our family unit. We experiment. We find ourselves attracted to something. We try it out. And if it pleases, we go further.
The narrow path of possibilities we start on, starts to widen. Not a single line, but a path shaped like a cone that expands to the left and right with a very broad and every increasing middle.
There will be parts of life that are beyond the boundaries of our path, forever closed to us. I’m never going to be the Prince of Wales. I’m never going to climb Everest or argue before the Supreme Court, or figure out why teenagers like Tik Tok so much.
But within the broad boundaries of the lives available to me, I get to make my own way. I’m not like my parents. I’m not much like my brothers raised in the same household, sharing much of my DNA.
Is this person I’ve become truly me? Of all the alternatives on that broad path of possibilities is the one I’ve chosen the real me?
The answer has to be yes. Because this is the me, I’ve become. This is the only actual me, that exists. That other person, raised by wealthy, theater-going parents, who took me to the art museum to look at Rembrandt instead of the Natural History museum to look at dinosaur bones, the parents who took me to the audition for The Sound of Music, instead of just the performance. Well, that other person might have been someone I like, but isn’t, in fact, and could never be, me.
Here I am. This is me.
And there you are. That is you.
Pointed by genetic history and childhood environment in a direction, and then you pushed out the boundaries of possibility to the right and the left as you had the particular experiences and made the choices, that made you.
As the Unitarian Universalist minister, Forrest Church, writes in our Call to Worship:
“Others may be responsible for our being born,
But what we make of our lives,
How deeply and intensively we live,
Is our responsibility, and ours alone.”
And the same for our church.
Being gifted with this wonderful building, and our particular history of the last 80 years, and the shared history of Unitarians and Universalists: Arius, Origen, Socinus, Servetus, Channing, Parker, Emerson, we were pointed in a direction. And from there we are responsible for making our own path, pushing out the boundaries on either side, choosing who we will be.
The future, our future, is wide open. We can be this, or that. We can let the momentum of the past push us down a given path, or we can choose a new way. We can make of this community, even today, anything we wish for it. We can make our own Unitarian Universalism, for here, for now. We can be the people we imagine. We can make ourselves.