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COMING HOME TO OURSELVES
by Rev. Amanda Poppei
Feb 25, 2007        

Who are you?  I mean, who are you really, down in your bones?  What is it about you that could never be taken away, never stripped off, never glossed over? 

         I am a Unitarian Universalist.  This feels like a piece of my essence, so deep in me that there was never a time when it wasn’t who I am.  And I often refer to myself as a third generation Unitarian Universalist…so you know that it’s true, that I have always been UU, that I was raised in the church…homegrown, a cradle UU, as we say.

         This is a lie.

         The true story is this:  I was an inquisitive, overly intellectual, slightly irritating, but ultimately loveable eight year old (think Hermione in the Harry Potter books), with a friend named Margot.  Margot lived with her parents, whom she called by special Italian names (this seemed exotic when I was eight) and her older sister (very exotic, since I was an only child).  Margot’s house had a huge backyard with a hydrangea tree.  Margot had a life-sized doll named Angela, who was an invaluable player in living room theater productions.  Margot’s parents allowed sleepovers whenever Margot wanted, and in the morning you could spoon sugar onto your cereal.  You will see, perhaps, that Margot was a character of some high repute to the eight year old me. 

I wanted Margot’s backyard with the hydrangea tree.  My mother said no, we had pine trees.  I wanted Margot’s older sister.  My mother said no, citing biological impossibility.  I wanted Margot’s life-sized doll.  My mother said no, pointing out a lack of storage space.  Finally, after one of the famous sleepovers with sugar cereal in the morning, I wanted Margot’s church.  My mother said…maybe. 

         What she said was, “What is Margot’s church?”  And when I told her that it was called something about Unitary, and it was wonderful, and they sang songs in the class and let you learn about Taoism, she said “Yes.”  And then my mother told me about my birthright, my family history that had been as yet unrevealed to me.  We were already Unitarian Universalist.  My mother was Unitarian, raised in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania church.  My grandmother was Unitarian, discovering the faith in young adulthood at the Arlington, Virginia church.  This made us, as it turned out, one of the longest-running Unitarian Universalist families in the area.  And that day became the day I discovered who I really was.  I knew then…and I believe now…that it was who I had been all along.

         So I started going to Religious Education classes at the First Unitarian Society of Albany, and later my mother started going to services, and in high school my grandmother moved in next door and she started going…and pretty soon, we had a three generation Unitarian Universalist family in the pews with a call to ministry added in for good measure.  Now, part of the truth of this story is that I discovered Unitarian Universalism through my friend Margot in 4th grade.  But I think a deeper truth, the truth I tell, is that I have always been Unitarian Universalist.  I know it in my bones.

         It’s a magical thing when that happens, when we discover something about ourselves that is both new and older than old.  It happens sometimes when we fall in love—we meet this person who is new and exciting and then suddenly, we feel as though we must have loved them forever.  We feel as though perhaps we were born loving them…as my favorite Beatles’ song puts it, “who knows how long I’ve loved you?”  In the rush of love—and, perhaps, slightly crazy hormones—we imagine ourselves as destined to be together, called from beyond time.  And we may be…I make no claims here about destiny, serendipity, or chance…what I am interested in is that feeling.  That feeling of meant-to-be-togetherness.

That feeling comes not just through romantic love, but platonic love as well.  Who has not met someone and suddenly realized that this person will be, without a doubt, a Good Friend.  A kindred spirit.  Anne of Green Gables knew it the minute she saw Diana…here was the friend she had been waiting for.

         We feel this amazing feeling not just when we fall in love with another person, but when we fall in love with a new activity, or instrument, or place.  I have a friend who took up rowing in her 30s.  There she was, waking up at 4 in the morning to make it out to the boathouse, getting blisters all over her hands, and discovering—much to her surprise—that she was an athlete, a woman of great strength and physical prowess.  And that she had always been that woman…she just hadn’t known it. 

         I think of this kind of discovery, this discovery of who we have always been, as a sort of coming home.  A coming home to ourselves.  And coming home, of course, implies that we’ve been somewhere else, that we’ve taken a journey.  Indeed, I think it is often when we try something new, when we venture out into uncharted territory, that we are most likely to find some new piece of ourselves that turns out to be so much part of who we have always been.  We can’t go out looking for it, but we can put ourselves in its way.

         Venturing out of our routine is one way toward discovery.  Taking time away is another.  Time for retreat, for restfulness and quiet, can also be time for realization and self-discovery.  It may seem clichéd now, but there’s a reason that mystics have lived alone, that spiritual people have gone on retreat for centuries.  The Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Weston writes about the slow days of summer, when we “might turn to examine our own lives.”  He calls us “unfinished clay, half-moulded, that still waits on us to think what we have been and as we are still yet have to become.”  There’s a sense of promise there, an expansiveness in the idea that we may become many things, yet.  We may shape ourselves, and be shaped, and we may find that the new shape suits us so well that we realize we must have always been that way, in some sense.  And when we are away on retreat, whether it’s in the mountains or by the water or just at home on a snow day, we have the space to shape ourselves, to examine ourselves, to wonder who we have been and who we might yet become.  To wonder who we are, what we are, that we haven’t yet discovered.

         Another way to think about this is to imagine what your soul looks like.  I will always remember my college Spanish professor, a woman who was clearly Caribbean, with a quick accent and a love of salsa music and long, long hair flowing down her back.  Caribena, as she told us the first day of class, Caribena to her core.  Except she wasn’t.  She was Italian-American, raised speaking Italian, not even learning Spanish until she met her Puerto Rican husband.  She fell in love not just with the man, but with his culture.  Now as it happens, she divorced that man eventually, but it didn’t matter…as she would say, she didn’t divorce his family, and she didn’t divorce his country.  Something in her soul connected so deeply with Caribbean culture that she became Caribbean.  So that while it was still true that she was Italian-American, it was somehow also true, really true, that she was Caribena.  The soul allows for a few different kinds of truth.  

I think it’s because of this kind of expansiveness of the soul—this ability to have multiple truths, multiple identities within us—that we’re able to take journeys that seem to travel so far from who we have been, only to find that it’s who we always were.  I’ve told you my story of discovering Unitarian Universalism.  My husband’s is different: he was raised Catholic, was confirmed, spent years going to mass and taking his faith there quite seriously.  At some point, though, he realized that Catholicism wasn’t for him anymore, and through a slightly circuitous route wound up at All Souls Church, Unitarian, and decided Unitarian Universalism was for him.  Does this mean that his childhood and young adulthood, as a Catholic, weren’t really him at all?  I don’t think so.  I think that as we evolve, as we walk along a lifetime, we continue to discover who we are—blending in all of our experiences, making sense of them little by little, and unearthing new truths about ourselves as we go.  There’s no one time in our lives when we suddenly stop, look around, and say, “ah, yes.  This is who I am, just exactly.  I’m all done growing, I think.”  And if there were—well my goodness, the years after that would be a little dull, wouldn’t they?! 

Instead, I think we are called to continually reexamine and reimagine ourselves.  There is real precedent for this in our own religious tradition.  William Ellery Channing, understood by many as the father of American Unitarianism, fostered the “self-culture” movement, or as he put it, “the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature.”  More than a hundred fifty years later—and after some work on gender inclusion, I might add!—our movement’s ministers are still calling for this kind of work.  Forrest Church, the senior minister of All Souls in New York City, asks us to “imagine your life as a series of works in progress presented daily at a craft fair.  Each day’s exhibits present an overlapping series of projects—the child project, the parent project, the love project, the vocation project, the justice project, even the God project…we work on dozens of projects at once, tasks that invest our lives with meaning.”  Our movement, our religion of free faith, calls us to these projects, asks us to never stop learning and growing, moving toward the light and toward a more fully-lived self.

And what I want to say this morning is that when we do this learning, when we work on these ‘projects’ and when we really get it right—those are the moments when we realize that we are not changing who we are, but becoming more fully ourselves.  That our life journeys—even when they include a decision to leave one place, one way of thinking, to embrace another—are not really journeys away from who we have been.  They are journeys toward our center.  And so all our experiences, all the life we’ve had, are part of that center—and because of that what we discover there in the center feels both new and somehow very familiar.

So I want to ask you again…Who are you?  What is that rests deep in your soul, just waiting to be awakened?  And what do you think might wake it up?  Perhaps you already know what that deep part of your soul is, perhaps you’ve begun to discover it, or discovered it years ago.  But often that deep, deep piece of our soul feels a little scary, offering the promise of something new but holding, also, the fear of the unknown. 

         My invitation to you this morning is to go ahead and take the jump.  Follow the path, and see where it leads.  We are on an awesome journey here, wandering together and alone, up the steepest mountains and through the most peaceful valleys.  And when you hear that call, whether it’s quiet and still or a lightning bolt, when you hear that call beckoning you onward to the deepest part of who you are…go ahead and follow it.  On the journey of our lives, as we bend and weave and wander to find our deepest self…on that journey, all roads lead to home. 

Amen. 

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