Showing Our Humanness These Days

Back in 1998 I wrote a chapter in a volume dedicated to my former graduate school professor, Dr. Harold Hazelip.  The volume was edited by three gentlemen that I respected, Gary Holloway, Randy Harris, and Mark Black. All three of us were university profs at the time. They assigned to me probably the most complicated topic I’d written on, before or after.  The topic? “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”  As a family therapy and psychologist, I knew first hand how complicated the topic was. I’d dealt with many fragile human beings and their families or their marriages.  I had seen what I thought were some of the worst of what it means to be human. I had also seen what I thought were some of the best of what it means to be human.

The first paragraph of that chapter goes like this:

“Jean Valjean, thief, victim, and saint in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, leaves prison, steals from a priest who forgives his misdeed, and eventually becomes both mayor of Montreuil and a successful entrepreneur. His life is complicated by a host of characters including Fantine and her illegitimate child, Cossette, but most of all by Javert, an incorruptible and obsessive policeman who seeks to punish Valjean for his past. In his former life Valjean symbolizes the dark side of humanity, but in his new life he represents the good in people as he recues the downtrodden, endows a hospital, protects a parentless child, and avoids the relentless pursuit of Javert. Javert, the symbol of law and order who is tormented by his own demand for perfection, eventually commits suicide while Valjean dies in the presence of those whose lives he has blessed. The contrast between the two characters is striking: one man evolved from thief to saint, while the other went from rigid orthodoxy to despair and suicide (p. 91." 

You and I may be like Victor Hugo as we look upon things these days, in our own lives and on the television screen and in the newspaper.  We see the best of people and we see the worst of people. We see those who hoard and then sell items at exorbitant prices.  Thankfully eBay and Amazon caught them. We also see those who spend all day long sewing masks for hospitals, nursing homes, and medical clinics, and even caps for physicians going into surgery. We see a range of heroes keeping people alive all the way from those who stock our shelves, pick up our trash at the appointed day and time, those who risk life and limb to save us in our more dire moments, nurses and doctors. All work is noble. All work is important. All work in valuable. Everyone deserves respect. Everyone deserves to be paid a decent wage for labor.

In the chapter that I mentioned above, I write about contemporary and not so contemporary psychological and theological views of human nature. I won’t bore you with those. If you’re interested, go to Amazon and see if you can read all or part of this chapter there. Then, I attempt to deconstruct a Biblical view of human nature. This is where it gets interesting. The Bible was never, in my opinion, designed to articulate a fully thought out theology of humankind. It makes inferences left and right, but you won’t find in one specific book, chapter, and verse a note that says, “This is what it means to be human.” We are left to search and study.

The article nuances creation, the Fall, Hebraic views of human nature, sin and its effects, and then I attempt to tease out Hebrew and Greek words of human nature. I am then left with how to put it all together? Love God with all of what? Love my neighbor as who? I boil it down to the fact that Jewish thought did not subdivide humans into parts, rather, they spun out notions around “Hebraic holism.” 

That said, are we evil, are we good? Yes. And yes. At the end, I write, “When we know that we are created in the image of God, even though we are fallen, self-centered, and self-seeking, then we are free to act……(we can therefore) live graciously with other human beings….By doing so we can understand what it means to be a human, created in the image of God, in a world which is estranged from God but never forgotten by the creator (p. 104).”

Why write that long of an introduction to simple and complicated questions?

How could a person preach the word of God on Sundays and then run the KKK? Check out Jerry Mitchell’s book, Race Against Time, and you’ll learn more about that person as well as others.

How could a person obliged to help all farmers tell Willie Head, “Yes, there’s money there but not for you people.”

How could a county official in the office of the USDA tell the Grant family, “No matter what you do, we are going to sell you out.”

How could a bank officer, the FSA county supervisor, and the owner of the local tractor supply collaborate behind closed doors to seize the farmers’ (yes, there were two of them, partners in the farming business) assets and sell them for pennies on the dollar? 

Those are just four stories. There are more. Maybe I’ll write some more about them in a day or two. One farmer that comes to mind is that of a farmer, near death, lying in his hospital bed in his living room, talking with me. His caretaker listened nearby. I had no idea about his condition before walking into his home. It was a short but poignant conversation. I wish we had met earlier.

So, we discriminate against people and then we go to church on Sunday mornings. We may even be a deacon or an elder in the church, or maybe a Sunday school teacher.

Maybe some of us can recognize our dividedness and come around to a more gracious way of living in these times.