since we’re human
Let me begin with a presupposition. We’re all thinking human beings who have figured out the way we want to live and are living out that way to the best of our ability.
Though of course, when I say “we,” I mean individually. For though we think together—or pray, or romance, or dream together—still, even taking in that idea belonging to the other, at the bar across the table, or in church listening to the pastor at the pulpit; even when tearful with a friend and feeling, honestly as possible, that true stirring of genuine empathy: still he is himself, she is herself, and this cannot be otherwise. It’s a fact of life.
So we, as individuals, know our way and follow it. But then, as I said, we’re thinking human beings, with eyes wide open. Perhaps we’ve been to Cambodia and seen the Killing Fields, or cared for a paranoid schizophrenic, or had a divorce. Or maybe it’s a series of minor things, which might also do the trick. Lots of things in life don’t make sense. We encounter them and have no place to put them, no way to react. So though we “know,” in truth, when we think about it, all we know is that we don’t.
But we must act anyway. If not knowing meant not doing, then we’d never do. And more than anything, we need to do, right? Action is the real thing: movement forward, progression: food for the hungry, clothing for the poor, social justice, slowly conquering the great demon of poverty. These are noble goals. Do we need to know the way to know these are good? Certainly not: look here, I am feeding this man! He was hungry and now he is not! I am clothing this woman! She was cold, but no longer!
Furthermore, just because life is action and movement doesn’t mean we can’t think about these actions. We’ll still think, still try to understand; we’ll listen to Camus and Dostoyevsky, we’ll know and act, and act where we can’t know, and do our very best, dedicating our lives to art or teaching or social justice; we’ll paint, edify, love, and move forward with relentless energy, riding on action’s innate power.
And yet, the time comes when we feel we’ve missed something. Though we stand up and move—sometimes we even run—we don’t feel we’ve gone anywhere. That, or we’re too eager, leaning too far forward, torso past the legs, and we fall on our face like children just learning to walk. This too is universally human.
The falling might be depression, even suicide (as with Virginia Woolf or Anne Sexton); it might be the neglect of friends and family, so blindly you strive to quell injustice. The standing-still, the “I am where I started” might be poverty’s number game, raising this one up only to see two more fall down; or it might be the anxiety peculiar to the artist, the fervent desire to get published which in truth leads to neither happiness nor fulfilment.
So, we don’t know the way and we can’t act it either. All is muddled confusion, black quicksand. No hope, no meaning, no truth. We are all too human.
And that’s the way it would end, except that there’s good news. A gospel.
We are human and God is God.
We are human, God is God; therefore we are not God.
All this, all the writing amassed above, my struggle, maybe your struggle—it all shouts “Let me do it!” as if some four-year-old, grumpy with his parents. I want to know and I want to do, but I have neither. Life is a pitch-black warehouse and I’m equipped with a broken pen-light. I’m going to screw up, and screw up often.
But I happen to believe in a God.
You may not, and that’s a valid response, but for the Christian, his denial is something crucial.
Though it’s visceral, sometimes even painful, Christians should acknowledge that which lies behind what we’re doing, and not get muddled in our own ideas of oughts and shoulds. The way is dark and our illumination consists mostly of centuries of fallible tradition, a seething mass of humanity, ideas passed down parent to child, pastor to parishioner, president to Joe the Plumber. This, of course, does not invalidate the “ways” we follow, but neither does it make them right. We believe in a God, and sometimes he sits beyond all this, speaking beyond it too, usually quietly, to the poor, the weak, the “least of these,” often in ways we might not understand.
But this isn’t an answer. More of a question: a wavering finger pointed in an uncertain direction, unsure yet hopeful. Because it’s easy to miss it. We’re all too human.
