It’s easier toward the end of life to see that what we call the self is widely changeable. I’m not the person I was as a child, or teen, or young adult. My self becomes more stable as I age, but perhaps I’ve just given up exploring and experimenting out of laziness, or learned to accept a version of myself grown comfortable by habit. How, if I found him, would I recognize the me I was born to be

            For this, my last year in professional ministry, I’m working through a year-long series of sermons in which I address for perhaps the final time the foundational issues of spirituality and the holy days of the Unitarian Universalist liturgical year and challenge myself to come to some concluding thoughts.

            These are issues and stories that I’ve looked at numerous times over the past 30 years since I went to seminary and started preaching.  I’ve returned to them again and again, because in the life of the church there are always new folks entering the faith who need to wrestle for the first time with these questions, and because even for those of us who have encountered these issues previously, they don’t lend themselves to easy answers, and are worth taking a deeper look at, or a view from a different angle.

            So over the last few weeks I preached what will likely be my last take on a Christmas sermon, my last Hanukkah sermon.  Today, for the holiday of Epiphany, I take as my theme what may be my last sermon on a spiritual issue I may have preached about more than any other in my career, because it fascinates me:  the question of identity.

            You’ve heard me preach on this subject several times.

            The spiritual question of identity is one of the core spiritual questions.  Along with the questions of purpose, and meaning, “What should I do?” and “Why does it matter?”, the question of identity, “Who am I?” is one of those uniquely spiritual questions that point to the distinctive heart of what religion is here to help us with as we make sense of life.

            The nature of the self.  “Who am I?”  And the nature of humanity, “Who are we?”  Are we mortal, or immortal?  Are we born good, or with original sin?  Are we an integrated piece of all existence, or a special creation with a special destiny?

What does it mean to be me?  Am I my body?  My soul?  Is there a permanent self that carries my identity through my life and possibly continues after death or is a permanent “I” only a fiction created by our memories linking up discrete moments as they come into and go out of existence along with the rest of the impermanent universe?

            You can see why that’s a question worth returning to more than once in a ministry career.

            Today I want to look at a slightly different but related question, not about the nature of the self, but the question of the true self, not what am I, but who am I, really?  Is this person I am today reflective of the true self that I am supposed to be, was meant to be?  Or at some point along the way did I take a wrong turn or get shoved off track and now I’m living a fake life, an alternate life?

            If we say, as we do during a child dedication, that every new life comes with unique gifts, a particular talent, a never before in existence individual offering an unrepeatable tool toward the progress of the universe toward its divine ends, then what a tragedy it would be if my true self got waylaid somewhere.  If I’m not the me I was born to be then a gap will be created never to be filled, and the universe will suffer my absence.

Maybe I didn’t get the encouragement I needed.  Maybe I wasn’t exposed to the right education.  An absent or insufficiently affectionate parent.  An insufficiently attentive teacher.  A missed opportunity.  An accident that shouldn’t have happened.  A life-changing illness.  A bad influence.  A bad choice.  

            At first just a small thing, but a small turning none-the-less.  And though the parallel tracks of my true self, and this false self I’ve become, stayed near enough for many years to not make a great difference, eventually the distance became further and further and today I’m hopelessly separated from the life I was supposed to live.

            I should have been an artist.

            I should have married Harry.

            I should have gone to law school.

            I could have…

            If I’d just stuck with it…

            If only I hadn’t started…

            You are you, that’s certain.  You are the “you” you became.  But are you the real you, the true you, the “you” you were meant to be?

            It’s an appropriate question for today.  Tomorrow is the Christian holiday of Epiphany.

            The secular meaning of epiphany is a sudden realization.  A sudden understanding.  Something that had been obscure is suddenly made known.

            The Christian meaning of Epiphany celebrates the moment when Jesus is first recognized as the Messiah.  In Western Christian traditions, the recognition moment comes when the three Kings arrive to give gifts to the infant Jesus.  That’s why tomorrow is celebrated as Three Kings Day in many cultures.  In Eastern Christian traditions the epiphany moment is when Jesus is baptized as an adult.  It is John the Baptist who has the epiphany when he recognizes that Jesus is the one he was preparing the way for.  In some traditions, Epiphany also celebrates the Wedding at Cana when Jesus performs his first miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and his true divine self is revealed to the wedding guests.

            Epiphany is about the true self being revealed.

But what do we mean by the “true” self?

This question is especially important for Universalists.

In Universalist theology, all existence will eventually be “saved.”  That is, all existence will eventually be included together in the end point of God’s divine plan.  No created thing will be left out.  God, a being of infinite love, would never create something only to leave it abandoned.  The divine embrace is universal.  There is no eternal Hell.  God’s patience is inexhaustible.  God will continue to walk beside and work with every soul until eventually even the most stubborn sinner turns back toward the forgiving God and finds its way home.

That strong affirmation of God’s love feels good as theology, but as sociology it’s troubling.  Because the world is actually filled with some pretty awful human beings.  You can probably think of a few.  To say that I will need eventually to be happily folded into God’s embrace with that person, and that person, and that person, doesn’t feel quite so heartwarming.  That guy?  Yuck!

Orthodox Christian theology holds that there are bad people who deserve to be punished, and God will punish them.  And I, presuming I get to heaven, won’t need to have my bliss spoiled by them.  Indeed, Orthodox Christian theology says that all of us are sinners who deserve eternal punishment and it’s only by God’s grace, and Jesus’ death on the cross, that some of us are saved.  If we’re born with original sin then Hell is where we belong, and thank God for it.

So Universalists had to come up with an alternate understanding of human nature and why sin is the aberration rather than salvation.

The Universalist reasoned that a loving God wouldn’t create a sinful soul, knowing it would end up eternally damned.  A loving God would only create beings that were destined for happiness.  We are born good.  If we end up miserable sinners it must be that at some point we left the path God intended for us.  We turned away.  God will wait for us to turn back.  There are no bad people, only temporarily bad outcomes.  God will wait for us to return again to being the beings we were made to be. The inherent worth and dignity of every person.  

Isn’t this the liberal conception of humanity?

Good people are turned bad.  Some weren’t held as infants.  Some were malnourished.  Every baby is born good but some are neglected, unsupervised, abused, exposed to trauma.  Their true self never had a chance to express itself.  A bad person is what happens to a good person after they were twisted and turned away from who they really are.  

And later, when they were old enough to make choices for themselves, their damaged selves steered them even further astray from their true path.  Their search for belonging led to them falling in with the wrong crowd.  Their pain led them to self-medicate.  If only there had been healthy options for feeling powerful, and valuable, and loved, but there weren’t, or their already blinded eyes couldn’t see them.  They weren’t born that way.  No one’s born that way.  If we analyze the destructive, dangerous persons among us, we can see the path that made them this way, and if we trace that path back to the beginning, we can see the tragic circumstances that perverted their true self.

Right?

So our Universalist theology leads us to a conception of the self that there is a true, original, (and always good) self, that we can then fall away from through the unhappy circumstances and bad choices of our later lives.

But if that’s true for the people who fall into dangerous and destructive lives, then it must be true for the rest of us as well.  Maybe we didn’t fall as far off the path intended for us as some of the worst of humanity clearly did, but if it’s possible to fall a lot, how we can be sure we didn’t fall a little?

In fact, given all of the billions of circumstances you’ve been exposed to and choices you’ve made over your life, isn’t it by far most likely that you did fall off the path at some point?

Which brings us to the likely conclusion that in some way, small or large, you aren’t living the life you were supposed to.

My husband, who until last June was a middle-school teacher, used to encourage his students to go to college by telling them that the main advantage of a college degree isn’t that it trains you to be one thing, but that it opens the possibility for you to be many things.

He told his thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students, you may think today you know what you want to be:  a soccer player, a pop star, a policeman, a teacher, but almost no adult is actually living their Plan A.  Almost everyone ends up doing something with their life other than what they imagined. Getting a college degree will expose you to the world of options and also qualify you to take your place among the world’s many offerings.

For much of human history who you would become depended a lot on who your parent was.  My father was a farmer, and his father was a farmer, and I’ll be a farmer, too.  But modern western culture grants us a wide freedom to make our own way in a world that is a lot wider than we can grasp as young people.  When I left the Methodist church as a teenager, I never thought I would enter a church again.  I certainly never dreamed I would end up being a minister, and I had never even heard of Unitarian Universalism.  

You can’t figure those things out until you start being exposed to the world and the actual circumstances of your life.  I don’t believe that we are born for one destiny in danger of falling away from it any more than I believe we are born sinners in danger of not finding our way to salvation.  I believe we’re born, or that is, conceived, mostly blanks with an open future and with only a little bit of DNA from our parents to get us started.  We aren’t born complete; we’re born barely begun.  

We find our way in life by living through it.  Our experiences don’t reveal our true self; they shape it.  A healthy childhood isn’t about sending us down a predetermined path and making sure the guardrails on both sides are high enough and strong enough to keep us from breaking out.  Healthy childhood development is about equipping us with skills and character traits like discernment, reason, good judgment, self-confidence, ethics, patience and persistence, compassion, teamwork, and maybe a college degree, and then letting us loose to explore.

We find this friend.  He introduces us to his favorite band.  We read that book.  We go on that school trip.  We overhear a truth of what adult life is like.  We learn something about our changing bodies.  Our heart breaks.  We win a prize.  Someone gets elected president.  Someone invents a new piece of technology.

We don’t follow a path.  We clear a path.  We make a path.  And because we are the ones making the path step by step as we go, there’s no way to fall off.

You can’t be led away from yourself.  You’re always walking as yourself, into yourself, through yourself, toward yourself.  Life is not a living out of the self you were born to be, but an endless becoming of the self you live.

Forrest Church, who was for a couple of decades the minister of the Unitarian Universalist All Souls Church in New York City, wrote, in the words of 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.”

            There is no path set out for you, by parent, or god.  There is no alternate you, you could have been.  This version of you is the only you possible, created by you, not at your birth with some proper destiny, but created in real time, as you live, and further created and enlarged with every new experience you encounter and choice you make along the way.

            It is useless to say, “I could have been a doctor” or “I could have had a baby.”  No you couldn’t.  That person who might have become a doctor or a parent wouldn’t be you.  They would be as unfamiliar to you as is any stranger you meet.

            You can’t have that life or any life other than the one you have.  Tragic or blessed, short or long, rich or poor, famous or not, this is the only you you can be.  You cannot regret, “If only I had chosen a different way” because it wouldn’t be you living the life that stemmed from that choice.

            We sang, “return again” but we don’t return.  Life goes only forward.  There’s no lost path we can find again.  We don’t return to who we are, we go forward to meet who we will become.

We flow.  Like a river.  We are somebody.  The healthy spirit doesn’t pine for who they were, but loves who they are, and challenges themselves to keep growing into ever better incarnations of themselves.

You, truly, and only, are the person you are.  Every happy and sad moment.  Every mistake.  Every lucky break.  Every turn and twist of your life.  Every missed chance and happy accident.  Your proudest day.  The days of depression and defeat.  Here you are.  Your true self, revealed.  The self you made.

The self who chose to be here today and add this experience to your ongoing unfolding.  This is your path.  You can still make a choice of where you will go from here and what experience you want this afternoon.  You can begin this hour the work of becoming whoever you still desire to be.