Identity at the Center
Reverend Caryl Hurtig Casbon
October, 2003
 

I begin this morning by looking at a very fundamental question, “Who Am I?”

Eric Erickson, the late psychologists, said, “The sense of ‘I’ is one of the most obvious facts of existence---indeed, perhaps THE most obvious fact of existence--and it is, at the same time, one of the most elusive.”

I want to pause and ask you to listen to your own thoughts....what comes to mind when I ask you ..who are you? In this culture we often answer with where we work, or where we live. Taken a little farther, we might discuss our family, our political party, or other markers of status and position. In our private thoughts, if we ask this question at all, we probably think about our roles in our families and some of our accomplishments and limits.

Why is it so difficult to name who we are? There are so many layers to this question; as close as it is, it is elusive. As Margaret Meade said, “The last one to discover water would be the goldfish.”

How we answer this question has a profound impact on many of our choices. Embedded in this question is not only, “Who am I,” but also “Who I am not.” Anyone with an adolescent in their home realizes that they often start the identity search with the second question...who I am not. I am not you, mother. I am not one who cleans her room. I am not..... (fill in the blank.)

I think we use this sense of ourselves to filter out and let in experiences, and also determine how we act. I have said all of my life that I am a cat person, and, therefore, in all of my years, have never owned a dog. I have said all of my life, I am a writer, and therefore, have not painted very much. I have said all of my life, “I really don’t care for sports,” and therefore absolutely never read the sports page, nor watch any games on TV. It is a great filtering system, but possibly a dangerous one as well.

I think we must continue to ask ourselves, “What am I calling myself, and is it large enough for me?” Does it really line up with my true gifts, passions, and interests?

One of my favorite anecdotes regarding this issue comes from Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening: Having the Life you Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. Mark is a poet who survived a very serious encounter with cancer, and the book is a series of reflections born out of this experience. He tells the following story:

“It was a curious thing. Robert had filled the bathtub and put the fish in the tub, so he could clean their tank. After he’d scrubbed the film from the small walls of their make-believe deep, he went to retrieve them.

He was astonished to find that, though they had the entire tub to swim in, they were huddled in a small area the size of their tank. There was nothing containing them, nothing holding them back. Why wouldn’t they dart about freely? What had life in the tank done to their natural ability to swim? He goes on to ask, “In what ways are we like them? In what ways do we shrink our world so as not to feel the press of our own self-imposed captivity? Our own self-imposed sense of who we are.

I went to a small Presbyterian college in Washington State, Whitworth College, that had the best English department around. The professors treated us like we were their sons and daughters, and cared about what would happen to us beyond their walls. I remember one professor, Dean Ebner, said to us as we were graduating, “Be careful what you reject in life. The more you say ‘no’ to, the more your world will shrink.” I have always remembered that, especially when I find myself throwing up walls to new experiences.

Bear with me in another animal story. My daughter went to this little school in Portland, Arbor School, which was out in the country and also raised a few goats so the kids could watch the whole process. It wasn’t unusual to hear stories of the goats breaking out and running through the classrooms. One day I dropped Paige off at school and went over to the goat pen to see if any of the babies had arrived. The math teacher was standing there, and I asked him about what was different...had they moved the goat pen? He answered that they had, that they moved it so the goats could have a bigger, fresher space. But then he said, ‘The funniest thing happened. The day after we moved their pen, we drove up and all of the goats were standing where their old pen was. They had busted out and returned to the familiar space.”

I guess goats and goldfish have something in common, and suspect that we have a lot in common with them as well. These stories impress me because I think they speak to natures’ leaning towards homeostasis....keeping things as they are, and our ability to resist change. Even when we have an opportunity for larger living, for a greater sense of self, it is easy to go with what we know, and its useful to go back to where we started answering this question, Who am I?

We come to this question very young, and define ourselves out of early experiences, which call for reflection and sometime revision. My mother came of age during the depression, and still watches her money as though she has none. This habit, at times, while understandable, has made her life smaller than her circumstances called for. These things we learn early-on can be habitual and not necessarily serve us over the long haul if they go unexamined.

Wayne Mueller has written one of my favorite books, entitled HowThen Shall We Live? He bases the book on four questions, and I have taken this theme today from his first question, Who Am I? Mueller addresses some of the limits of psychology and using psychological labels to name ourselves. He notes that while many, if not most of us, have
experienced deep trauma and hurt growing up or just living in the world, it can be very limiting to make these experiences the essence of our identity. “I am an alcoholic.” “I am an abuse victim.” “I am a child of a dysfunctional family.”

This is one way to define ourselves, but we sense that the language of psychological diagnosis does not speak to our fundamental, spiritual nature. We sense the world shrinking when we put these labels at our center, on others. He states, “Diagnosis creates the illusion that because we suffer, we are broken, defective, handicapped beings. This can be as damaging as the original hurt.”

I have heard the saying, “The beginning of wisdom is to call something by its right name.” In our search for healing and working with some of our painful experiences, I think we have come a long ways, but we also run the risk of getting stuck in that labeling, which can become quite a small goldfish bowl.

In the Courage to Teach program, where I do most of my work these days and run renewal retreats for educators, we have a practice of starting our retreat series with a focus on what we call birthright gifts, or more poetically, Seeds of True Self. These are the gifts and qualities we came in with, and which, if nurtured, have much to give back to the world, but like many good things, can be easily forgotten and misplaced in our lives.

When setting this process up, I like to ask the question, “What have people been telling you your whole life?” We each try to think of 10 gifts we seem to have naturally at our disposal, and then share stories of when we have been able to use these gifts in our work or homes. Being in touch with these gifts is so important, because, like any gift, if it is not tended and cared for, can go to waste. One of my birthright gifts is a deep desire and leaning towards understanding the inner life and life of the spirit. Another is a love of nature and beauty, both of which I try to incorporate in all that I do. I consciously try to care for these gifts so that they may be available to me in my work and life.

When our retreatants are asked this question, they come up with a rich and very individual variety of responses: persistence, ability to listen, ability to hold complexity, patience, sense of humor and playfulness, artistic expression, intuition, organization, and so on. When we ask ourselves, “Who am I” it is so important we consider our gifts and hold them in the light as least as much as our suffering and shortcomings. Research tells us that we give 7 times more attention to negative feedback than to positive feedback. I think this has serious implications in our lives.

As a writer, I know that if I have an idea and don’t write about it when it is fresh, it can go by, and I can’t go back and write from that inspiration because it has passed, and I no longer am living in the same awareness. I think that our gifts can go unused as well, and that there is a sacred obligation to be aware of them, and use them consciously and wisely in our short lives. They are part of who we are.

Who am I? Ram Dass has written a book, Still Here, after he suffered a very serious stroke and lived with the devastating results for a number of years. (He wrote Be Here Now in the seventies and the title...Still Here, is a play on that.) Ram Dass lived in India for years and was one of the first westerners, a former Harvard professor, to bring back some of the teachings from the east.

He talks about how he has had five or six lives in this lifetime, and names a number of major stages he went through. The self that was a Harvard professor died, and gave way to the self that became a student of his Indian Guru. The self that was a world-famous lecturer, jetsetter, golfer, died and made room for this new self that is confined to a wheelchair and learning the lessons of becoming the one who receives help rather than acting as the helper. (He also wrote How Can I Help, and put service at the center of his spiritual practice. ) Ram Dass is a model for me because I see him as someone willing to let his identity die and transform, and someone who knows how to let go and take in as life gives him new challenges and opportunities.

I think all of us have this experience, of looking back at say a job we held for a long time, and then moved on from. It feels like another lifetime, and another self that occupied that time. I look back at my life in another marriage, and wonder who that person was. This is partly why this question can be so powerful and illusive. We truly do change so much in our lifetimes.

In Hinduism, they believe our lives unfold in 12 year cycles, and that we complete certain tasks and stages in this time, and start a new cycle at each 12 year anniversary. They base their whole concept of adult development and learning around a12 year cycle which corresponds to their astrological calendar. Of course, many psychologists have studied the life cycle...Jung, Maria Montessori, and Adler all took note of the Hindu cycles when they developed their own theories of child and adult development, or, as Jung called it, adult unfoldment. I know we all sense when a certain stage in our lives is coming to an end, in the way we feel the coming changes in the season. We sense we have used up what that stage offered us, and it is time to move on.

Who are you?

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.”

The Quakers believe that each of us has the Light of God within us, an inner sanctuary, an essence, a holy place, we can return to again and again.

Buddhism teaches us of our Buddha nature. Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of this essence. “Whatever our lives are like, our Buddha nature is always there. And it is always perfect. We say that not even the Buddhas can improve it in their infinite wisdom, nor can sentient beings spoil it in their seemingly infinite confusion. Our true nature could becompared to the sky, and the confusion of the ordinary mind to clouds.”

Who we are has many layers that are constructed and integrated over a lifetime, but are also beautifully fluid. It is so hopeful to me that I don’t have to be stuck being the same being I was last year. Yet, paradoxically, the wisdom traditions point to the deeper answer to this question, and to a place that is eternal and unchanging. I want to end with another reading from Mark Nepo that speaks to this deeper identity, and reminds us of how to live from this place: He calls this piece “Unlearning Back to God.”

Each person is born with an unencumbered spot---free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry---an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.

To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the
nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of satori, as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover this original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.”

Blessings on you...may we all go forward and find our way home to our true sense of identity and the connection to the Center...to that unencumbered spot. Om, Peace, Amen.