What it means to be human

To ask what it means to be human strikes at the fabric of the soul.

 

The problem with trying to define what it means to be human is that we now take so much of the inhuman for granted. We confuse the meaning of the words “natural” and “human,” make synonyms of them. War is “natural” they tell us. Violence is “natural,” they argue. Self-aggrandizement is “natural,” they maintain. What they do not say is that just because something is “natural” does not make it human. Humanity goes in and out of focus, blurred always by the “natural” and unconscious of the spiritual that magnetizes it.

 

But I have seen humanity. I knew its face even when I cannot define it. It is blazoned in my mind. It measures my character and condemns my disregard. Anything less than these images disappoints me to the core.

 

I have a picture in my mind of nuns putting flowers in the gun barrels of Filipino soldiers in Manila who then refused to shoot into the crowd. I still hold in my heart the sight of a young man in Tiananmen Square standing in front of of a moving tank that then turned back. I carry the image of men carrying a lone survivor out of a tangle of earthquake wreckage on a swaying overpass that then collapsed. Every time these images flash before my mind I remember that to be human is to give yourself for things far greater than yourself.

 

I have a memory, too, as a twelve-year-old of crying silently but bitterly, face down into my pillow on the living room floor. That day, my bird, my only life companion, had disappeared up an open flue in our apartment wall. There were visiting relatives in the house, in my bedroom, whom I knew were not to be disturbed. The needs of the guests came first, I had been taught. But when the house was safely dark, I let the pain pour out, not simply for the loss of my dearest possession but also in sorrow for my own carelessness in his regard. Then, suddenly, I felt the covers around me tighten. My mother had gotten in on one side of the mattress, my father on the other, and together they held me all the long and empty night. I learned then that being human meant to enter into someone else’s pain.

 

So what do I believe in? What do I define as human? I believe in the pursuit of the spiritual, in the presence to pain, and the sacredness of life. Without these, life is useless and humanity is a farce.  

So what do I believe in? What do I define as human? I believe in the pursuit of the spiritual, in the presence to pain, and the sacredness of life. Without these, life is useless and humanity is a farce. 

To be human it is necessary, perhaps, to think again about what matters in life, to ask always what is, is. To be human is to listen to the rest of the world with a tender heart, and learn to live life with our arms open and our souls seared with a sense of responsibility for everything that is.

Without a doubt, given those criteria, we may indeed not live the “better life,” but we may in the end, at least have lived a fully human one.



   —excerpted from Awakenings: Prophetic Reflections by Joan Chittister (Orbis)



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