And You Knew Who You Were Then

Warren Jessop 

October 14, 2001

  "And you knew who you were then;
  Goils were goils and men were men.
  Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again."

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the debut of "All In the Family" on TV.  I still remember Mary Jane talking one afternoon back in 1971 about a show that featured a "family of bigots" (those were the words I remember), and that she was going to tune in that night. It turned out, as most of us remember, to be a comedy that wasn't afraid to deal with issues regarding race, religion, and politics---unusual in a time when Green Acres and The Brady Bunch defined TV comedy.  The wit and wisdom of Archie Bunker has since become part of the culture...

"God don't make no mistakes. That's how He got to be God

"Jesus was a Jew, but only on his mother's side.

"Faith is the stuff you wouldn't believe in if you were in your right
mind."

But this morning I'm interested in the supposed source of Archie's discontent, wonderfully expressed in the theme song we heard sung by Mark and Marcia, "Those Were the Days."  Of course it's not only Archie.  "Those were the days" is a common mantra.  And not only expressed in reference to one's own life, but in reference to humanity in general.  There was a time when "people seemed to be content."  Perhaps a simpler time.  When we were younger.  Or perhaps before we were born.  Or perhaps after we die.  Or perhaps in some idyllic hideaway that still exists---either a real place or just fictional. Shangri-la, the sweet by-and-by, Beulah land, the womb, Camelot, Eden, that house from the Street of Dreams, Utopia, the promised land, the Pacific islands as depicted by Gauguin, even deserts or wild coastal areas.  We may not know exactly where or when, except: not here and not now.  A time when you fully knew who you were.  Or at least you *could* have known, or will know.

We used to sing this in my mother's church:

   O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
   As on thy highest mount I stand,
   I look away across the sea,
   Where mansions are prepared for me,
   And view the shining glory shore,
   My heaven, my home forever more!

That may have given some of you the willies.  If so, I have the antidote.  Here is Alexander Pope's high-minded, lofty, cultured pastoral vision, around 1700:

   Happy the man, whose wish and care/ A few paternal acres bound,
   Content to breathe his native air/ In his own ground.
  
   Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
   Whose flocks supply him with attire;
   Whose trees in summer yield him shade,/ In winter fire.
  
   Blest, who can unconcernedly find
   Hours, days, and years slide soft away
   In health of body, peace of mind;/ Quiet by day.
  
   Sound sleep by night; study and ease
   Together mixed, sweet recreation,
   And innocence, which most does please/ With meditation.
  
   Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;/ Thus unlamented let me die,
   Steal from the world and not a stone/ Tell where I lie.

About the same time, John Dryden wrote:

   I am free as Nature first made man,
   Ere the base laws of servitude began.
   When wild in the woods the noble savage ran.
           John Dryden, Conquest of Granada, 1701

The noble savage.  The origin of that term isn't clear.  Dryden didn't invent it, but it's an idea---one of those "those were the days" ideas---that captivated the 18th century.  Afterwards it became associated with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the french novelist and philosopher, even though Rousseau never used the term.  Rousseau says this about the difference between civilized and natural states of human existence (from the Social Contract): "Although, in this state [of civil society], [man] deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man."

Once the Eden of the natural state is left, it's left forever, says Rousseau.  The Genesis story says the same thing.  After Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden they might have sung "Those were the days", but not before.  Could they have sung "And you knew who you were then"?  Maybe the best they could have sung is: "And it never occurred to us who we were then".  The irony of that story is, of course, intentional: they couldn't know who they were until *after* they ate that apple, gained the knowledge, were banished from Eden, and afflicted by the creator with obligations of work and suffering.

We post-moderns too, like Adam and Eve, share a fate of struggle and suffering, no going back to a supposed primitive Eden.  But those extended ideas and ennobled feelings that uplift our souls, as Rousseau puts it, also prompt us to ask as individuals, "Who Am I?", and, with others, "Who Are We?". Now it may not be necessary to ask "Who am I?" to "know" who you are. Archie Bunker's concept of self-knowledge appears to require no question.  For him, society had a structure and everyone had a prescribed role.  Archie knew, or was told, who he was supposed to be, and he thought he knew who everyone else was supposed to be. Individuals or groups who attempted to define their own roles and rules, who rejected the societal traditions that dictated what they were supposed to believe, how they were supposed to act, and where they were supposed to live, were feared.  Archie bridged the generations during which many strictures of society and barriers to self-expression disappeared.  He knew who he was and had no problem with the dictim: "Know thyself".  It's just that more and more other people didn't know who they were supposed to be.

This questionless concept of "know thyself" is also prevalent in most fundamentalist teachings.  Here's just one example, one of John Wesley's sermons: "By the grace of God, know thyself.  Know and feel that thou wast shapen in wickedness and in sin did thy mother conceive thee...Own thyself guilty of eternal death..."  And so on.

"Know thyself".  It's the motto said to have been inscribed on the portal of the Oracle at Delphi.  It was Socrates' motto too.  For him the unexamined life was not worth living, so he had to ask questions of himself and others.  We call it the Socratic method.

It's also dangerous, because it can challenge those holding power and money.  Socrates taught people to think independently and question everything.  We know the outcome: the establishment accused him of corrupting the youth of Athens and condemned him.

But we are Unitarians after all, and we love questions.  So we'll dismiss Archie, follow Socrates, and ask away.

Who are you?  How do you go about finding out?  Is it even possible to find an answer?  At least we know it's possible to search for an answer. One way to proceed is to latch on to the methods advocated by what might be called the "self-knowledge industry".  This includes all the self-assesment tools, self-help books, support groups, individual and group therapy, study with a guru, genealogy.  Maybe even astrology, Tarot cards, call-in radio shows.

I've gone to UU leadership school where we all took the Myers Briggs assesment, as well as participated in "problem based learning" exercises (the life-boat exercise comes to mind) that involve brainstorming, working in teams, debriefing, etc.  I'm on the board of a support group of parents with acting-out kids.  A large part of the program there is based on gaining self knowledge: for example, parents are encouraged to keep a fact journal that records their actual behaviors over a period of months.  They are frequently surprised by the patterns revealed.

No matter what way you proceed, gaining self knowledge does require....effort, struggle, pain, sacrifice, pick your word.  It's all about overcoming fear and desire, after all.  Risk of failure is involved.

In the 1500s St. Teresa wrote this to advise the nuns in her charge:

"Shall we always be glancing around and saying: 'Are people looking at me or not?' ... 'Dare I begin such and such a task?' ... 'Will people think better of me if I refrain from following the crowd?' ...

"Oh, God help me daughters, how many souls the devil must have ruined in this way!  They think that all these misgivings, and many more that I could describe, arise from humility, whereas they really come from our lack of self-knowledge.  We get a distorted idea of our own nature, and, if we never stop thinking about ourselves, I am not surprised if we experience these fears and others which are still worse."

Sometimes we actively seek self-knowledge, but we also learn much about ourselves by how we react to the unbidden challenges that come into our lives.  How many of us know how we would react if we found ourselves passengers on a hijacked airliner?  Fortunately, with most of life's challenges, if we're unsatified with how we react in one instance, a similar challenge will not be long in coming.

This is the objective approach to self-knowledge.  We do something to prove ourselves.  We try, make mistakes, try again.  I'll never learn to sing a song just by staring at the notes.  Action is required.

But there's another dimension to knowing who we are.  It's the spiritual dimension.  It's more subjective, fuzzy, paradoxical, incomplete.  The question might be put this way: "Who am I, really?" or "Who are you, really?"

Some poets and philosophers, mainly of a humanist bent, say: be aware of the question but don't waste your time on trying to find an answer; life is too short---live your life.

Here's how D.H. Lawrence puts it in "Terra Incognita":

   ...And all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
   alternately palpitate,
   when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
   of Know-Thyself, knowing we can never know,
   we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
   and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
   as the fuchsia does...

Andre Gide agrees: "Know thyself?! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly.  ... A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly."

And Oscar Wilde: "'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world.  Over the portal of the new world, 'Be Thyself' shall be written.  And the message of Christ was simply 'Be Thyself.'"

Of course these poets and philosophers could not utter such pronouncements unless they had themselves searched for answers to the "Who am I" question.  
For others, mostly of a mystical bent, searching for an answer is of prime importance.  Or perhaps "searching" is too strong a word. Remaining open to answers may be the best that can be done.  Here's one way this is expressed, from the Gospel of Thomas:

"Jesus said: If those who lead you say to you 'See, the Kingdom [of God] is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you.  If they say to you 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you.  When you come to know yourselves then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living God.  But if you will not know yourselves you will dwell in poverty..."

Notice it's not knowledge of self leading to knowledge of God (because we can never fully know God), but to God's knowing us.  This is the message behind the message of most of the mystics of all religious traditions.

Here is how the self-aware Psalmist expressed it Psalm 139 (NRSV and Stephen Mitchell):

   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 search out my path and my lying down,
   and are acquainted with all my ways.
   Even before a word is on my tongue,
   God, you know it completely.
   You hem me in, behind and before,
   and lay your hand upon me.
   Such knowledge is too awesome to grasp;
   so deep that I cannot fathom it.

I like that line, "You hem me in, behind and before" because that is exactly how I feel sometimes, when listening to a Mozart chorus for instance, or when walking on a forest trail, or when lying in bed praying for my daughter.  But if too much Bible quotin' gives some of you the willies, again I have an antidote.  Here's how our own
Unitarian mystic, Emerson, sees it (from the essay "Nature"):

"In the woods we return to reason and faith. ...  Standing on the bare
ground---my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite
space---all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball; I
am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part and parcel of God".

And what of "those were the days" when "people seemed to be content"? There is a saying in Sanskrit that when translated comes out "that thou are" or "thou art that".  It refers to the interconnectedness of everything in general and of the Divine and human in particular.  It means we are part and parcel of God.  It doesn't mean we can have it all; it means we ARE It All.  It means we already have what we want. It means, for each of us as individuals, "these are the days."  But we are obliged to pay attention, to remain open to the unresolved and unresolvable mystery of our own being and that of others.

More than 50 years ago Aldous Huxley wrote: "It is because we don't know Who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human.  We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been."  And this, as timely today as in 1944: "There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man's apopalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem."

So on the global scale we must still live with: not here, not now, not yet, an unrealized goal, a Beulah-land to look forward to.  Each of us can achieve peace in our individual souls by paying attention to the Divine within, but, according to Huxley, there will be no enduring world peace until a good portion of the rest of humanity does so also.

Hush.  Sombody's calling your name.  It's your own inner voice, the voice of the universal Self.  Pay attention to that voice.  It will tell you who you are, really.