Inside Out1
Rev. Myke Johnson
Jan 11, 2009
Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church
Excerpts from the Readings
From Drinking the Rain2
Alix Kates Shulman
Much of the joy I always feel on the island lies precisely in being free of the nagging suspicion I
used to have that no matter what I was doing I might better be doing something else: if playing
with my kids I should be working, if working I was neglecting my friends, if out with my friends
I belonged home with my kids. …“Don’t you see?” I hear Margaret say. “You’re always in
equal danger of falling off either side of the tightrope. So you’d better just trust yourself and
keep moving along on your own course, without letting anyone dissuade you.”
Ask Me3
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. …
William Stafford
Sermon
Each of us has a mask we wear. There is a face we present to the world, perhaps more than one,
which is not quite the same as the face inside of us. (Lift up mask) This mask was a gift to me
from a Brewster woman when I was leaving Cape Cod to come to Maine. Allison understood
the nature of masks—on the outside are newsprint clippings from the dictionary… including
words that refer to individual identity: like woman and man. But on the inside are other
dictionary clippings with far more mysterious and evocative words: wisdom and winged, god and
goddess, healer and witch, meditate and global.
This mask suggests that the face we present to the world is not quite as exciting and powerful as
the face within us has the potential to be, the unseen face on the inside. Think about the masks
you may put on as you go about your daily life. What words might be pasted onto the outside of
your mask? What face do you present in your job, in your family, among your friends? What
words might be hidden on the inside of your mask? What secrets do you hold in your heart, not
yet revealed to anyone?
Authenticity is the process of discovering and bringing to life that which we carry on the
inside—so that our mask becomes a manifestation of who we really are, not something that hides
who we are. Authenticity is being real, genuine, trustworthy and whole.
1
Copyright 2009 by Rev. Mykel Johnson and Allen Avenue UU Church. Permission to reprint must be requested
from office@a2u2.org, and is usually granted.
2
This is an excerpt from the full reading by Alix Kates Shulman, found in Drinking the Rain, (Penguin Books,
1995), p. 238.
3
Find the complete poem in William Stafford, “Ask Me” from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, (Graywolf
Press, 1977) p. 56.
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There is a tale from India about a housewife who knew a story and a song. But she never shared
the story or the song with anyone. Imprisoned within her, they were feeling choked. One day
when she was napping with her mouth open, the story and the song fell out of her. They took the
shape of a man’s coat and a pair of shoes, and sat outside her house. When the woman’s
husband came home, he saw the coat and the pair of shoes, and became suspicious: “Who has
been visiting you?” he raged. “I don’t know,” she replied. She was upset, and he stormed off to
sleep in the neighborhood temple.
When the lamps in each house were put out, the lamp flames used to go to the temple to spend
the night gossiping. And so the man overheard the lamp flame from his house talking about the
story and the song that had escaped from his wife, and how they had taken their revenge. He
understood then, and in the morning, he went back home and asked his wife about her story and
her song. But she had forgotten them. “What story, what song?” she said.4
Each one of us has a story and a song inside of us. Each one of us is a unique person, never
before imagined, with unique potential, unique possibilities and gifts to bring into the world.
When we do not bring forth those gifts and possibilities, when we do not share our story and our
song, there is a deep tragedy in it. According to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, "If
you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth
what is inside you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you."5
It is not easy to be authentic. I wonder, Why do we wear a mask at all? Why is it so hard to just
be ourselves? Where did we learn to hide, to keep secrets, to become actors in our lives? And
there is a simple answer that comes to me: We cannot share our story and our song without
someone to listen to our story and our song. We are intrinsically social beings. We cannot
become ourselves without those who welcome us, and help us to learn to be ourselves. We
human beings are learners—we don’t come into the world fully formed. We must learn from our
parents and our teachers what we need to know to survive in human society. And without those
who welcome us, we cannot survive at all. Nell Morton once said, “We hear each other into
speech.”
And so our human authenticity is a dance between the inner self, and the outer circle of the
human community. When I was growing up, my parents would get together with friends and
play guitars and sing old cowboy songs. So it was easy for me, as a child, to learn to sing, and
later to play the guitar. I made up my first song when I was about twelve. As a teenager, I
started to hate the country western music of my parents, and to gravitate toward popular music
and rock and roll. All the teenagers were doing that. Eventually I began to listen to folk music,
and to find my own musical expression.
Creating my own music would have been impossible without learning the guitar from my
parents. It would have been impossible without the tradition of folk music that had come before
me, and somehow resonated within me. In a different family, I might have taken piano lessons,
4
“A Story and a Song,” from Ramanujan, A.K., A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Takes from India, University of
California Press, 1997)
5
The Gnostic Gospels were second and third century writings about Jesus not included in the books of the Christian
Bible, recently re-discovered by scholars.
2
or studied the violin. I might have found Beethoven or Mozart. In a different culture, I might
have chanted to the rhythms of the kalimba or the hand drum. My own music could have taken a
different form entirely.
Authenticity it is not quite as simple as merely bringing forth what is inside of us. Authenticity
requires a community that welcomes and values our gifts and potential. Each of us has a need to
be known and loved. We are like chameleons, able to blend into our environment, become what
is needed, what is desired, what is held in high esteem. In our attempts to be known and loved,
we put on masks, we try on roles, we shape ourselves into contortions, hoping to fit in, hoping to
be respected, acknowledged, admired. That dance between the self and the community is what
helps us to learn how to live, and it is also what can get us into trouble.
When I look back on my own dance between self and community, I remember how my family
moved from one place to another when I was a child. In one school, I learned that being too
smart would make the other kids hate you. But then we moved to a school where being smart
made you popular. And then we moved again. So I learned to keep quiet about what I was, until
I could figure out what would be acceptable in each new school. Layer by layer, I was creating
the mask between the inside and the outside. I remember the bright moments when I would find
other people who seemed to be kindred souls—who were, on the outside, what I was hiding on
the inside.
For most of us, our lives are a journey of searching and losing and finding ourselves over and
over again. We get glimpses of our gifts, illuminations; we learn the way slowly. Think about
those moments when you have felt closest to your authentic self. Each time we take on a new
role in our lives, there is a new challenge to explore the fit between that outer role and our inner
selves. For example, when a person becomes a parent, there may be a time of losing the inner
self, of becoming absorbed in the role of mother, or father. To be a parent is an expression of
self, and also a transformation of self.
May Sarton, in her later years, wrote:
Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…6
It is a central purpose of the spiritual journey to learn to become our true selves, to share our true
story and song. Whatever masks we wear, whatever roles we take on with society, we are called
to look on the inside of the mask to see what is hidden there, what is waiting to be revealed. In
some traditions, this inner side of the mask is called the soul. And even when we have sung our
songs, and told our stories, the soul continues to be shy at times, to hide itself or reveal itself in
mysterious ways. The world of the outside community makes demands on us, requires us to fill
many roles and functions. And so we must develop ways of turning inward, to stay connected to
our souls, to live what is within us, in the midst of the demands from what is outside us.
6
In Collected Poems 1930-1973, (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 156.
3
One practice that has helped me is journaling. And for me, that means, not just recording what I
have done, but asking myself over and over again, in the solitude of my room, how is it with my
soul today? What is transpiring on the inside of the mask? What am I feeling? If my soul is low
down or weary, can I be present to that weariness, before jumping into the activities of my day?
If my soul is afraid or lost or lonely, can I pay attention to those dark places within?
Parker Palmer, the author of Let Your Life Speak, talks about how, in the journey of the soul, we
learn as much from our limitations as from our strengths. We learn from our failures. He shares
how as a young man he had tried a career as an activist and then as an academic, but neither
world seemed to fit for him. At 35, he had a Ph.D., and good references, and would have been
able to move up in the academic world. But he wanted a “deeper congruence between [his] inner
and outer life.” He went on a sabbatical at the Pendle Hill Quaker community to search for a life
path that felt authentic. The Quakers at Pendle Hill counseled him, “Have faith and way will
open.” But it wasn’t working.
He confided his troubles to a wise older woman. Here is how he recounts their conversation.
“Ruth,” I said, “people keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the
silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. … I still don’t have
the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do. Way may open for other people, but
it’s sure not opening for me.”
Ruth’s reply was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. “I’m a birthright Friend,” she
said somberly, “and in sixty-plus years of living way has never opened in front of
me.” She paused, and I started sinking into despair. …Then she spoke again, this
time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same
guiding effect.”7
He learned the lesson that “there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in [our
lives] as there is in what can and does.”8
I remember that experience of learning from failure in my life, from way closing behind me.
Once I took a part-time job being an administrative assistant to an author who was an
acquaintance of mine—I helped with her bills and filing, the transcribing of her writing, and
other stuff like that. I liked and admired this person and eventually we became good friends.
But every day I went to do this job, I felt more and more depressed. I could barely drag myself
over to her house. My depression was telling me, this is not your work. You cannot stay in this
job.
I don’t particularly like it when the guidance from within comes in the form of a choking feeling
of “get me out of here!” Especially when it seems illogical and extreme and embarrassing. But
that has often been the voice of my soul asserting its necessary path. Pushed by that inner
weight, I tried to figure out what I needed in a job—and at that time, what I needed most was
work that brought me into contact with people. This work was done alone in a room. So I went
over to the neighborhood bookstore, and applied for a job, and there was an opening that week.
It was just right. Each of us has a natural temperament, a way of being that leans more toward
one thing, and less toward another. We only learn these things by trying them out.
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8
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, (Jossey-Bass, 2000), p. 38.
Ibid., p. 39.
4
Parker Palmer writes:
If I try to be or do something [--even something noble--] that has nothing to do
with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact
that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort
myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than
if I had never set out to do this particular “good.” When I try to do something that
is not in my nature… way will close behind me.9
Our feelings, our energies, our inclinations, our limitations—these are the language of soul. To
live from the inside out means facing the darkness within us as well as the light, the weakness as
well as the strength. There is no way to authenticity without acceptance of the shadow side,
without the underworld of our souls.
It is important to acknowledge that the outer world can oppress the soul in many different ways.
Jobs can be soul-wounding. Racism, sexism, and homophobia can be soul-wounding. Poverty
can be soul-wounding. African American poet Langston Hughes wrote:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?10
There are moments in history when the search for authenticity takes on heroic communal
dimensions—when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, or drag queens rioted at the Stonewall Inn.
But every person’s search for the soul requires a kind of courage. A willingness to go into the
darkness of the unknown, to risk exposure and separation from the group, in order to find a
deeper connection.
Religion itself has been used to oppress the urgings of the soul. When my sisters and I were
kids, we learned that God could see everything, that God knew everything. God could see what
was on the inside of us—what we were thinking and feeling. That understanding could have
been encouraging and comforting. But then we were taught that God would judge us for what
we thought and felt. If we broke the rules, God would know. Now I think what a crime it was
that such a judging God was attached to our inner lives. Religion, rather than helping us on the
path to greater self-understanding, had put up the barriers of guilt and fear and shame about what
was inside of us.
9
Ibid., p. 47.
From Montage of a Dream Deferred (Henry Holt,1951).
10
5
I notice that oppressive aspect of religion all the time in my life as a minister. When a minister
walks into the room, people start to feel guilty about all sorts of things—they start to watch their
language, and try not to swear or tell the wrong kind of jokes. They apologize for not coming to
church. The minister becomes a symbol of that old judgmental force.
We all have a need to be known and loved, to be understood. Authenticity is being connected to
that deep part of myself, that inside part of myself. How can I face that inside, with its
limitations and shadows, its imperfections, if I do not feel accepted at the core? If I do not feel
loved and worthy of love? Now I can hear the words of Psalm 130 and find deep comfort there:
It begins:
O God, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You ..are acquainted with all my ways…
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…
Each one of us is a unique human being, a gift for the world, knit together by a mysterious and
sacred power. It is our deepest calling to live authentically who we are, to sing our song and tell
the story that is ours alone. As a religious community, the most important gift we can give each
other is to cherish that inner spark, to welcome the voice that speaks from the inside of the mask,
to help each other listen to the hidden river flowing in our souls.
Martha Graham wrote:11
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through
you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time this expression
is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; the
world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor
how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to
keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
11
In Dance to the Piper. Found on numerous websites of quotations.
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