What Makes Us Human? part one

Shortly before his death, Henri Nouwen was invited to deliver a special lecture at a university. He had retired at that time and was living in Toronto in the L’Arch community of Daybreak, a community made up of developmentally disabled persons and a few helpers. Henri came onto the stage with several of the people he lived with, informing his audience that since moving to Daybreak, he had never traveled alone.

He then invited his Daybreak friends to interrupt him at any time if they had something to say. Several of them did so several times. The topic of his talk was “What makes us human?” This, he said, had become a central question for him since leaving academia and joining the Daybreak community.

Henri began his lecture by reviewing the standard list of things suggested by anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists as distinctive to humans, things such as self-awareness, speech and symbolic cognition, conscience, the ability to contemplate our origins and our future, and the capacity to imagine.

According to Nouwen, these were all products of the mind, and for good reasons, it was the mind that both the academy and the world had come to assume was the centerpiece of our humanity.

But living with the developmentally challenged or disabled forced him to rethink this conclusion.

If the mind is the primary factor in what makes us human, then it is easy to say that those who are intellectually deficient must be seen as less than fully human.

However, life with the residents at Daybreak taught him that they were far from being considered subhuman. It was from them - the disabled - that he learned that it was not the mind but the heart that makes us human.

The heart, as it were, is what makes us fundamentally human.

For us Christians, the miracle of being human is being connected to both dust and breath. Genesis 2:7 reminds us that “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Humans are created from the dust of the earth, and are therefore indivisibly connected to the material world - we are material and are connected to all things material that we see. What this means is that part of being human is an attachment to the earth.

The other part of being human is that the dust is only animated by breath - divine breath. Divine breath transforms inanimate dust into a living being, a human person. Christians understand this breath as God’s Spirit.

The dust cannot be fully human by itself alone, nor can the breath bring life without the dust into which it can breathe. Both the dust and the breath are integral in making the human being come alive. 

Humans are connected, therefore, to both heaven and earth.

For this reason, if life is to be fully lived, it must be lived with the awareness of these two points: dust and breath, as reference points for human identity and meaning. The full development of our personhood must be anchored in the material realities that surround us, but also simultaneously connected to the divine breath.

Our relationship with both is vital in becoming fully human.

We cannot focus on one to the detriment of the other. To focus on dust at the expense of breath is to be overly materialistic and lose the kingdom of heaven. Listen to what Jesus said in response to the rich young man in Matthew 19:23: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” To focus on the breath at the expense of the dust is to be like the Pharisee who denigrated the Publican at prayer in Luke 19. According to Jesus, the Publican went home justified. 

We must focus on both at the same time. The two must always interact. The two must always engage with each other. And our lives must be one that honors both material and spiritual realities if we are to find our place and fulfillment as human beings. It is a delicate balance, but it is a dance that we must dance, nonetheless.

The truth is, honoring both the breath and the dust as constituent dimensions of being human requires living in the tension between them. But it often feels like we do not have the tools with which to creatively manage the tension between the dust and the breath.

The reason is that we are plagued by an inordinate desire and longing, either for the dust or the breath.

Listen to what Plato said about human desire and longings: We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which would have us believe that we can have a great love, perpetuate our own seed, and contemplate the divine.

This is the paradox of life: us turning inward, into ourselves, and the desire and longing for breath turn, reflecting a kind of madness that continues to create restlessness within us.

The desire and longing for dust turn us inward, into ourselves, and the desire and longing for breath turn us outward, away from ourselves.

But the good news is that it is within that tension that we find the sweet spot-the spot that awakens us, enlivens us, renews us, refreshes us, and provides us with a view into our own humanity and that of others.

And when we find that sweet spot, it feels like we have found the kingdom of God; we feel liberated. And because of the new freedom that we have found, we commit ourselves to the invitation of that sweet spot, we dedicate ourselves to the values of that sweet spot, and we dive into that sweet spot.

And for me, that sweet spot has always been a kind heart, which is both dust and breath, and yet expresses the deep connection between the dust and breath.

Our reaction to finding that sweet spot feels like the Parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl of Great Value.

Listen to Jesus:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then, in his joy, went and sold all he had and bought that field."

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it."

These parables point to the shedding off all things to possess that one thing - a kind heart. The heart is the part of the human body that makes life possible while also connecting us emotionally and spiritually with each other.

The heart, the seat of human kindness, also holds all the contradictions of our lives. And those contradictions will be on full display as we begin Holy Week, leading up to Good Friday.

But our contradictions don’t make us less human; it simply means that we are oriented, either to the dust or to the breath.

If there was ever any lesson from faith, it is one that assures us that a faithful balance is less prone to contradictions. Being less prone to contradictions doesn’t make us better human beings; it makes us come fully alive as dust animated by breath. 



Manny+

(this is an excerpt from my Wednesday Evening in Lent program. I will share another excerpt next week)