Forgotten Wholeness
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 5, 2020

“Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.” (Rachel Naomi Remen, in Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, New York, Riverhead Books, 1996: p. 108.)

Maybe it’s impossible to remember our truest selves. Maybe we were most our true, authentic selves, at our most integral, most whole, when we were too young to remember. The Quaker author, Parker Palmer, suggests that perhaps we were most ourselves as infants, before we begin to sense that in order to be safe and to get along in the wider world, we must hide parts of our identity. Babies, notes Palmer, don’t divide themselves; their insides match their outsides. What you see is what you get. (Parker J. Palmer, video, https://onbeing.org/blog/living-an-undivided-life/)

Life begins early to teach us to bury parts of ourselves. Possibly a parent finds something about us unacceptable. Life at school can teach us to protect places within ourselves that might not fit the norm. Perhaps you emerge as an artist in a family of tradespeople or scientists. Or vice versa. Perhaps you long for religion and mystify your atheist parents. Or vice versa: maybe you are a non-believing child in a fundamentalist family. Maybe your gender expression or identity is unique, and it is not safe to be honest and open. The stakes are high: rejection from peers, and possibly even family. Imagine being told that you, people like you, will be rejected by God, and consigned to an eternity spent apart from loved ones, in the misery of hell. These are powerful threats, meant to keep people conforming to what is seen as a comfortable norm. After all, what will people think? And so we learn to cover these identities, to hide them away. We learn to protect ourselves, to try to become less vulnerable . Our lives become increasingly divided; the inside of us not matching the outside.

“Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.”

Forgotten, perhaps, on the surface, but our fundamental selves, our core beings, are still there under the surface longing to be set free, to be acknowledged and accepted. Without discovering our truths, which maybe we have forgotten, or think we have forgotten, we cannot be truly whole. The result is pain, and anger, and fear.

Our theme for the month of January is Integrity. So often we hear the word Integrity and stop at the first definition of the word: being honest and having strong moral principles. We think of people with integrity as those who speak their truths and live according to their core values, and of course, this is true. As we heard in our story this morning, it’s doing the right thing even when no one is watching. But the second definition of integrity is ‘the state of being whole or undivided.’ Often we hear the phrase ‘structural integrity’, meaning something that is sound. Can we have integrity according to one definition, but not the other? And how can we achieve both?

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?” (Charles Bukowski, poet)

If we want to explore our deepest beliefs and longings, we find that we have to begin peeling away layers, much like we do with an onion.

The psychologist Dr. Bob Barret once told a story of a training session he experienced, in which participants were taught what it would be like for cancer patients to have everything that was vital to them, bit by bit, taken away from them. He explained,

“Each of us was given 16 index cards and asked to write on each the names of people, abilities, things and values we hold dear. In the course of our imagined cancer, we had to surrender cards or somewhat abruptly have them taken from us.
At the end,” he said, “I had two cards: One read “Integrity” and the other read “My Family.” How could I choose between these two? Such a choice was unfair and impossible. My initial thought was that I would give up my integrity, because I loved my daughters and would want their comfort at my death. But then, I would realize that dying without integrity might be worse. I drifted back and forth, not wanting to choose. In the end, I uneasily kept the integrity card because I reasoned that if I lost my family, integrity would still be possible; if I lost my integrity, my life would be without value.” (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16832392)

Dr. Barret’s story didn’t end there. As a result of his work helping terminally ill people, during the 1980’s he went on to support gay men who had contracted AIDS. And in the course of getting to know these men better, he over time came to the realization that he himself was a closeted gay man, living a lie. And in real life he wrestled with the exact situation he had confronted in the training exercise: the realization that he had to choose between his integrity and his family.
Ultimately, Bob Barret chose to out himself; to reveal to his family that he was gay. Back in the 1980’s this was a rare decision. It was a painful choice for him that led to loneliness and isolation. In revealing his true self he gave up, for a time, connection to his family and community. He went on to say, “Many times I was tempted to abandon my integrity and go back to the person my family wanted me to be. But returning seemed useless, for if I left my integrity at the door, I would not have much to offer other than my presence.”
Barret continued, “Today, at age 67, I live totally out as a gay man. To my surprise, being gay has turned out to be an opportunity for me to help sexual minorities and their families. For a while, I feared I had lost my family. I think they felt betrayed and ashamed of me. But today we’ve found ways to live in our love — each of us true to our own integrity.” (Ibid.)
I was different enough from my family – a bookworm that wanted college and a career – that I grew up with a sense of feeling different. In a family where the women all sewed and knitted and crocheted, I just wanted to read. In a house with three generations I used to hide away and read in the only bathroom; perhaps not my most popular choice. I got teased a lot – got called things like “Betty Coed” and ‘that liberal hippie’, the ‘women’s libber’. And I always felt slightly apart, not quite fitting in socially, never a wild child, not understanding a lot of what my peers were trying to accomplish during adolescence, for example. I skipped most of the risky behaviors. I had some friends, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. But I am blessed that I was never rejected by family, and that I have been able to live my life largely in a way that permits my inside and my outside to match. My spirit was not broken, which happens to so many young people.
I deeply value integrity: being willing to speak up, to speak my truths and to live according to my values and my identity. And I also recognize how privileged – how lucky – I am to be able to live this way. I never experienced the kind of rejection or punishment and trauma that would cause me to hide critical parts of myself away. I was spared the trauma that can result in anxiety, or depression, or more severe conditions such as dissociation.
I value my integrity. When reading Bob Barret’s story, I found myself wondering which index card I might be left with at the end. Would it be integrity? Would I take integrity instead of love? I wondered if a life without love would be worth living.
These are hard questions, and I am hoping that in our conversation following the service, and in the days ahead, that you will each spend some time thinking about what index cards you would be unable to part with. We can rediscover our core identity, our wholeness, by removing almost everything, one at a time, that might be covering it up. What is obscuring our truest nature, and allowing us to forget what is most important to us and most important about us?
As I pondered what one card I might keep after everything else was stripped away, I came to see that there was something underneath integrity; something that creates a foundation for integrity. Perhaps integrity would not be the one thing I would hold onto for dear life.

Perhaps the one remaining value might be courage. Is it possible to live a life of integrity without courage? To come out, to identify as gender fluid, to speak up when someone is telling a racist joke, to let people think that you are eccentric; different in some key ways, marching to the beat of your own drummer. To live a life of integrity, to be who you truly are, requires a tremendous amount of courage.

My friends, earlier in the service we read these words:

“Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves:
it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves to know who we genuinely are”. (Remen, op. cit.)

We begin our lives as whole beings; knowing what we want and need. The pressure to conform comes later, beginning in early childhood, and by the time we emerge from adolescence we might have buried much of our identity. We might spend years hiding critical parts of ourselves, unable to be whole. We might end up living divided lives, forgetting some of our most important truths. Or rather, we might think we have forgotten, but we cannot hide from the pain of being divided.

My wish for everyone is that you can find the courage you need to go deep within, to begin to peel away the layers that have built up, layers meant originally to protect you but ended up locking you away. May you know who and what you are, and may you know love, and courage, and integrity.

Amen.