Finding Ourselves Anew

August 18,2024—Rita A. Capezzi

I planned and delivered this service with my daughter, Helen Lowry. We presented a version of it on July 21 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, our home congregation, where she is the paid alto soloist. Helen is the singer on the recorded music today, all but the hymns. In the Prelude, “Oh Mio Babbino Caro,” from 1918 Puccini’s one-act opera Gianni Schicchi, she sings that if she cannot have the man she loves, she’ll throw herself into the river. And so, her father makes it so.

My father was without doubt the most influential person in my life. He taught me, mostly by example, the tough lessons about endurance and persistence, about loyalty and devotion, about right action and truthfulness, and above all the need for humor and laughter to bear life’s ordinary challenges.

And my father and I, we argued incessantly . . . about just about everything. My particular sense of myself as a teenager is a case in point. While taking a high school psychology class, I whined, loudly and with dramatic, if not operatic, hand gestures, that I needed to go off and “Find myself!” This was pretty typical fair for a girl growing up in the 1970s, but for my plain, practical, hard-working father, this was utter nonsense. “What are you talkin’ about?” my father said, “Find yourself. You’re right here!!”

My father certainly had a mode of life imagined for me, as well as a manner in which to live it. He imagined me a good, strong housewife with a bunch of kids and a nice solid bricklayer or plumber for a husband, living not too far away. But I was concerned with who I was. I was concerned with my nature, with that defining quality that made me uniquely me. Not a very unusual preoccupation for a young person with little experience in the world, a person who spent a lot of time reading about the adventurous lives of other people. And a fairly typical way of defining “self.” Who am I, at the very core, I wondered, and how would I know?

There are many ways to define the “self,” some better than others perhaps. Upon our birth, for instance, what kind of selves are we? Are we voids, each a “tabula rasa,” empty and waiting for life experience to write itself upon us and make us who we become by the end? Or are we the “acorns” of Plato, thrown into this world from an ideal reality where we are already fully realized but forgetful of our true natures, destined to live by rediscovering ourselves through living into full satisfaction or at least we hope so? Maybe I and all the hippies had been reading Plato in that high school psychology class.

“Tabula rasa” and “acorn,” those notions have developed into the nurture-nature dichotomy many of us are familiar with, a mode of thinking influenced by scientific inquiry and discovery.

Are we the products of how we are raised by families and by the circumstances of our cultures, modeled out of what happens to us? Or are we the products, mostly, of our DNA, of our family genetics, inevitably shaped by what is beyond our control? In either case, what are the possibilities and the limits of what we choose within the shaping of what we can’t change?

The self, so to speak, can be defined in other ways as well. Are we each a whole, unified being, a self waiting to be uncovered or discovered or created? Is there something that is essentially “self,” holding together the trinity of our mind body and spirit, the “more” than any one of those, something enduring beyond death? Or are we evolving, unfolding selves, always under construction, always subject to change depending on what happens to us, our selves carried along the fabric of the universe as it expands and contracts and morphs and we with it? I’m merely scratching the surface of several fields of deep inquiry—psychology, sociology, theology, spirituality. Exploring the nature of ourselves is an activity as old as human consciousness, when first an ape woke long enough and lingeringly enough to ask: “Wait, how did I get here? Who am I? What am I doing? Why is everything so big and I am so small? What’s it all about, for heaven’s sake? Does anybody know?”

All the inquiry into the nature of a self, all the efforts to theorize what we are and how we become, all of it is probably right in some ways and wrong in others. Or at least, one route to the answer is likely insufficient.

We are mosaics of influence and inevitability, of the formed and the forming, of the vast and the miniscule. And, I care less now than I did as a teen about the nature of being, of my specific being. And that is because I care more now about how I will live, my father’s long-ago lessons finally sinking in, I suppose. And I care more now about how I am becoming, of how I am living this one life about which I can be sure. Thus, our own individual lives, in a sense, are each a journey to knowing ourselves. Perhaps it is like T.S. Eliot says, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

As a teenager, I had a sense that I was out there somewhere, not confined to the home and the life prepared for me by my loving and conservative father. I was both right and wrong about that. But it was forty years before I discovered our Unitarian Universalist faith and our UU call to love ourselves, to love others, to make the world better with others—to see ourselves as whole no matter how fragmentary and partial we each are. Love and loving makes us whole, no matter how broken. I strongly recommend that we take that invitation to pray naked in front of the full- length mirror, laughing hysterically as we will. Yes, “to face ourselves naked in the mirror with some measure of gentleness, much less reverence, is a hard assignment,” because too “many of us grow up believing that essential parts of us are unacceptable—the way we look or feel or talk or love or learn—and we never seem to fully unlearn that shame.” Too often, we are just shadows of how others see us.

But the First Principle—the inherent worth and dignity of each person—that is a call we accept as UUs, a call that requires care not only of others but for ourselves. “It is deeply spiritual work to put down our self-loathing, to set it aside, even for a few moments,” to no longer be silent in our skins, but to dwell in the silence that will enable us to feel the deep-rootedness of our beingness, part of the molecules and the circulation of the universe, heaven existing in every breath. “It is deeply spiritual work to learn to treat ourselves with compassion; to learn to see ourselves, if only in moments, the same way we look at something or someone we find beautiful: a newborn baby, the ocean, a sunset.” Come, come, whoever you are, just as you are. The invitation to gather and to learn love is always there, always right here. “If we would but allow the majesty of creation to be, it would bless us.”

And the testimony of our beings is always present. By our lives, by our hearts, by our eyes, by our hands—whatever our natures, however we find ourselves, through all our complexities—we may each know ourselves to be whole.

Yet no matter what each of us is, no matter how well we know ourselves, we are not ourselves by ourselves. Our Seventh Principle reminds us that we are never alone. We are on a web of interdependence, inextricably bound to each other. We sing of our wholeness within a community of acceptance and support. “Wholeness within and wholeness in relationship.” We are each breath-taking, extraordinary beings, beautiful just the way we are. And it is being part of a community committed to the First Principle that enables us to be whole, part of the whole of thriving life and love. Each of us belongs to ourselves and also to the larger whole. We are part of a team each with a speciality, but not less than a whole person because of that. It is community which enables us to express our gifts, our selves, and, in that relationship, we are not diminished. And so we obliged to find ourselves, to know ourselves sufficiently so as to give what we are to and within our community. Do we love ourselves sufficiently to give what we are? Nothing less will do in these times, nothing, for the needs of the world are too great. The needs are great, and we are each small. But because you alone cannot save the world does not mean you are exempt from doing and giving to make the world better.

What’s it all about, Alphie . . . or anyone? This is the answer I am living with in these times: If you don’t love yourself and accept yourself, how will you love and accept others? If you don’t recognize the unique gifts of your beingness, how will you see the gifts of everyone else? We are living in hard times, in devasting uncertainty and disruption, we all know this. Seemingly unprecedented hatred and divisiveness and viciousness, resistant to the human rights of too many and inexplicably cruel. No one of us really knows what to do to solve such problems, once and for all. No one of us can do anything alone. But let’s shift the perspective. Let’s shift it together. We feel like we’re living in hell sometimes, these hard times of discord and violence, of the cheapening of some lives, of the planet on fire and also flooded. But heaven is here, among us and with us now, ready to break apart devasting thoughts and actions meant to hurt some of us and demean some of us and control all of us.

But nature, by its nature and of which we are a part and never apart from, nature wants our diversity and our flourishing. There is never only one song, all our songs and gifts are required—those overwrought, those down to earth, those curious and questioning, those soaring high. We are all in this choir, whether we sing like angels or like goats. We are needed whether we are classical, Americana, jazzy, or pop.

No one has the luxury, in these times, of holding back. Perfection is not the goal, only the finding within ourselves the gifts we have to offer, and offering them.

Spirit of Light and Life, majesty of community and wholeness, keep present to us our connection. May we find ourselves—each with our strange and partial gifts. May we use our all of these gifts to bring Love into this hurting world; this world which we so value, which we so cherish. In the words of the Rev. Stephan R. Papa: “Majesty of Creation,” “If we would but allow the majesty of creation to be, it would bless us. If we would incorporate the myriad aspects of creation instead of trying to incarcerate them, the wars would end. If we could accept ourselves, maybe then we would accept others. If all these questions add up to confusion, all these answers add up to one affirmation—Love life and it will bless you.” So “Let us give thanks for tender flesh, for heartbeat and breath and bone, each one whole, each one holy.” May our hearts be in a holy place, “something even non-believers can believe in.” And may we move together in love, each making our own kind of music, making our music together. May it ever be so.