Becoming Who We Are
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
March 21, 2004

	This is the Christian season of Lent, between Mardi Gras and Easter – well actually between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but I wanted to put it into a more upbeat perspective.  It is traditionally a time of reflection, for fasting and prayer, commemorating Jesus’ 40 days in the desert at he beginning of his ministry as told in the Gospels.  In the Christian tradition Lent is a time to look inside, to stake stock.
	On the other hand, if your spirituality is more attuned to the earth’s calendar than the Christian one, you will recognize that we are in the change of seasons, the Vernal Equinox, where the earth fulfills its promise of generating new life.  Some of us put on a mummer’s play in the depth of the dark time of year, to make the sun come back, and sure enough, it did!  I hope the rest of you are grateful.
	So we have occasion to look inside and to look outside, to consider what is there and what we might become.  But for some perverse reason, today’s Lenten Equinox reflection will be neither Christian nor pagan, but Buddhist.
	My starting point is the reading from Thomas Merton who was a Trappist monk with a particular interest in Buddhism.  Merton begins his reflection with the observation that our souls themselves are invisible to us, and that we know them only as they are reflected in our actions, in what we say or do, and in other people’s reactions to what we say and do.  This was a startling idea for me.  In my yoga class, our instructor Chip Hartanft, who is a licensed physical therapist, often reminds us that we can’t feel most of our vital organs.  We can perceive something of what is happening in our digestive tracts and our lungs, but we simply don’t get any feeling from our liver, pancreas, kidneys and gall bladder.  Most of the internal organs have no nerve endings.  They are out of sight and for the most part out of mind until they malfunction.
	Merton says the soul is like this, we can’t directly perceive it, we don’t know it’s there except as is shows in our actions and words.  And here is where we make our big mistake: we equate our actions with our essence.  We get so used to looking for ourselves in what we do that we think we are what we do.  
	In the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the author is trying to explain how the culture of Savannah, Georgia is different from the culture of New York or Boston.  He says that in New York or Boston the first question that people ask on meeting you is “what do you do?” whereas in Savannah, the first question is “what will you have to drink?”  Actually in many parts of the South, the first question is “where are you from?” and the second is “who are your people?” because these questions fix social location for the southerner much more effectively than choice of career or progress on the career ladder.  In this stereotype, the Northern point of view is you are what you do, and the Southern is that you are where you came from and your ancestry – and what you will have to drink.
	But I digress.  Whatever the social outlook, Merton is saying as a spiritual matter that it’s an illusion that we are what we do.  Our soul, our essence, consists in being, not doing.  Yet the soul is invisible until it acts. So we act.
	My first wife used to say that I kept so many projects going because I was afraid to take a look at myself, to see who I really am.  Well, that was fifteen years ago in another life, but the pattern has reasserted itself in my new life.  I habitually keep a dozen balls in the air.  People who try to reach me by phone know that I’m seldom home because I have so many committee meetings, board meetings and music sessions.  This is why Thomas Merton’s idea speaks to me, and maybe it will speak to some of you. 
	He says
“The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm.”
	I recall a fear that I articulated as I made the decision to go into the ministry, the fear that beneath all the frantic layers of activity there was no there there, that if you peel away all the layers of the onion, all the things I do, there would be no “me” at the center.
	The Buddha certainly teaches that we cannot find ourselves in our activities.  Our activities are driven by our desires, our cravings and clingings, and it is those cravings and clinging which are the root of our unhappiness.  So whether our activities get their aim, or fail to get it, whether we win or lose the game we’re playing at the moment, the result is the same.  We will not find ourselves, and we will not achieve any permanent happiness.  If we win, we may have at the most a temporary satisfaction, but we will shortly see that the old demons which haunted us while we were in pursuit have not vanished in the winning; they are with us still.  Suddenly the prize we won doesn’t seem so valuable, we must go after the next one.
	Thoreau said, “In getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”  Our power may display itself in lots of money, or influence, or recognition, or seeing ourselves on TV or quoted in the newspaper, but these are illusory manifestations.  Our power does not consist in activity, but in being able to touch the wellsprings of who we are.
	When we are able to take ourselves out of activity, when we make a space in our lives for contemplation, whether this is through a meditation practice or taking long walks in the countryside or gardening or whatever stills your own vibrations, we can see that our activity and our thinking falls into certain patterns.  For example, I have learned through therapy that my personality goes through cycles of grandiosity and despising.  In my grandiose phase, I am the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I am entitled to have my every wish filled automatically and without undue effort on my part, as the just rewards of my genius and merit.  When I realize that my every wish is not being filled and that everyone is not bowing down before me in awe, I then shift into my despising mode and am the lowest, most corrupt worm that ever slank through a putrid pile of garbage.  I deserve nothing because I am so inept, callous, cold and unfeeling.  
	Now this is just my pattern; some of you may have this one, and some of you may have a different one, but we all have them.  We wouldn’t be personalities at all if we didn’t have them.  Yet the Buddha taught that they don’t have to drive us, for they are not all of who we are.
	If I can step back from my own pattern a bit, if I can make a place in my mind free of the pattern, within which I can contemplate the pattern, perhaps I can deal with it.  Now dealing with it does not mean, at the beginning, stopping the pattern from happening.  It’s been shaping my life since I was a young child, and it isn’t going to stop overnight.  But if I can just see that it is a pattern, and that there is more to me than this pattern -- that there is also a will and a consciousness outside the pattern – then maybe I can move to expand the space that is not the pattern.  Maybe I can recognize the pattern when it starts asserting itself in my thoughts and say, “hold on, let’s try to stay grounded in reality here.  You’re neither an angel nor a devil, you’re neither perfect nor damned, just try to be a good schmo doing the best he can.”
	Just the bare recognition that there is more to me than these patterns is a step of incalculable value.  Go back to my onion example of a few minutes ago. I said that I was afraid that if we peeled away all the layers of me, there would be nothing in the center.  Many strains of Buddhism would say, yes, that’s what you’ll find, nothing at the center, and isn’t that wonderful?  Many strains of Buddhism praise emptiness.  Emptiness is a good thing, or at least emptiness is at the core of all things.  This is linked with another doctrine of the Buddha, that the self is an illusion, that we are actually bundles of characteristics and the idea of an enduring entity called Edmund Robinson is a fairy tale that I tell myself in order to keep from seeing the essential emptiness.
	So we progress from Thomas Merton’s insight that we are more than what we do to the insight that if we can make a space in the patterns of our personalities, we can see what we are, to the proposition that maybe what we’ll see is emptiness.  We’re getting in touch with who we are by seeing who we aren’t.
	This idea is echoed in several mystical traditions.  In Christian theology, we have the concept of kenosis, which is Greek for “emptying,” God empties himself of divinity in order to assume human form in Jesus.  Kabalah, the fifteenth century Jewish mystical philosophy, takes this notion a step further in the concept of Tsimtsum, which means “withdrawal.”  This concept begins with God as God is in God’s self, not as revealed to humans through history or the Bible, and not as any humans can know it, using the neuter pronoun to avoid attributing gender.  The kabbalists use the Hebrew words en sof to refer to this first godhead.  En sof occupies the entire world, leaving no space for creation, since it is impossible to imagine an area which is not God, since this would constitute a limitation on God’s infinity.  Thus creation is only possible if God contracts out of a space, leaving a hole in God’s person within which creation of the world can take place.  Thus God sort of withdraws to a perimeter.
	In a similar way, we can only get a handle on who we really are, or who we really aren’t, if we can carve out a hole in our personalities, a place where our constant activity and our constant grasping does not prevail.	
	In other words, to understand who we are, we must ourselves go through this kenosis, this emptying,   We must set aside the phenomenal selves, the activities and the network of cravings and strivings which we take for ourselves but which are actually not ourselves.  Only when we can set aside this skein of trial and terror will we see that what is left is something that is us and not-us, that connects with something larger, something from which we all sprung	and to which we shall return.  We will stand with Emerson on the bare ground:
“Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

	I find this setting myself aside is most important in one activity which is central to my calling, and that is preaching.  I am at my best in preaching when I can set my Edmund aside, get Edmund out of the way and let some deeper truth speak through me.  The orthodox ministers call this the voice of God; I prefer to think that if I can touch a truth which is larger than me, maybe it will be a truth which touches you as well, and you will get something out of the preaching.
	Now this all sounds very paradoxical; it may sound completely nonsensical to many of you.  But in good Zen fashion, I’m not going to try to resolve the paradox, but rather I’m going to ask you to sit with it as I add still another layer of complication, that is the factor of time.  For the self or nonself which we are contemplating does not exist outside of time but subject to it, as everything else is.  Heraclitus is quoted as saying you never step into the same river twice, but the Buddha would say it is not the same you which steps in the second time.
	Process theology, as you know by now, looks at the world not as a collection of things but a series of events, nothing is, but everything is in the process of becoming. My colleague Marge Kiep says that instead of calling our type of creature human beings, maybe we should call ourselves human becomings.
	Our striving itself takes place in time, and when we try to simply sit and just be, we are constantly bombarded with our hopes for the future, our fears for the disasters which may befall us, our regrets for the past.  To get to our essential selves, we try to put aside these moments before and moments after, and live fully in this very moment.  There will never be another moment just like this moment.  Can you feel it?  Can you feel your lungs breathing in a volume of air which is different from the last volume they breathed?  Can you feel how you are not quite the same person you were a moment ago?  Can you check in with your bones and your muscles to see how they are aligned?  You may find that you are holding on to something, that you have worries or fears clenching at your back or neck or jaw. Your body is the first reality, the first thing to check in with in getting in touch with yourself.  And your body exists in time.
	In our yoga practice we are taught to put our bodies in a particular posture and stretch our muscles to the barriers, but don’t try to go beyond those barriers.  So I straighten my leg until I begin to feel tightness and stop.  After holding this for a few minutes, I get out of the posture and then go back into it.  Miraculously, I can go further the second time, for the tissues in my body have expanded, have stretched to accommodate.
	The lesson in this for spiritual practice is that the spirit, like the body, unfolds in its own time and in its own way.  You can’t force a flower to bloom, you have to give it the right conditions and wait for it to bloom.  Similarly, the process of getting in touch with our deepest selves, or nonselves, involves ceasing our activity and watching.  Watching the unfolding of who you are.
	You don’t have to do meditation or do yoga or prayer or chanting or sufi dancing to get this, but you do need to somehow set yourself apart from your activities.  I see those of you with young children looking at me and saying, yeah, right.  I have faith there is room for spiritual practice in every life, no mater how jammed.  In fact, the more jammed our lives are, the more there is need for time to set aside the doing.
	But it does take some effort, it is in some ways counter-intuitive, and as you get to recognize your own patterns of craving and clinging, it may require you to stop from the pursuit of some of life’s pleasures, a pursuit you have always defined as the pursuit of happiness.  After all, doesn’t freedom consist in being able to satisfy our wants whenever we have them?  Isn’t that the American dream?  Surely when Jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness being an inalienable right, he was talking about the right to buy clothes and cars and condos and vacations and CDs and cell phones up to the limit of our charge cards, wasn’t he?  Isn’t that what happiness is about?  Isn’t that what freedom is about?
	Maybe not. Maybe happiness consists is giving up pursuits of anything.  Maybe freedom consists in freedom from our wants, not the always-limited ability to attempt to satisfy them.
	Becoming who we are is a process of putting aside who we aren’t.  Theologians have a phrase, the via negativa, which means that we try to arrive at what God is by making statements about what God isn’t.  We arrive at the bottom line through a process of subtraction, not addition.   We encourage the rose to bloom at its fullest by regularly pruning the bush back.  We create the sculpture by taking away all the stone which isn’t the figure.  
	I entered last week’s sermon in the Borden contest, which has a big prize but requires the sermon to conform to certain rules, and the last rule is that the sermon must advocate something, it must tell the listeners to buy or boycott or vote or convict.  That was easy with last week’s sermon on same-sex marriage, a social issue very much with us at this time.  It’s a little harder to figure out how to end this sermon by advocating anything, because what I have been talking about is the value of non-doing.  And yet to realize this value in our lives does require effort, and it does require time.  So to conclude I will urge something after all: as the spring breaks around you, as the days become more friendly, go someplace, make some time, and be.  Just be.
Amen.