The glory of God is the human person fully alive,
and the life of the human is the vision of God.
~ St. Irenaeus of Lyons

You shall lovingly accept the humanity entrusted to you!
You shall be obedient to your destiny! You shall not continually try to escape it!
You shall be true to yourself! You shall embrace yourself! . . .
We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living.
We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.
~ Johannes Baptist Metz

One of my areas of interest and study over the years has been theological anthropology which deals with what it means to be human from the perspective of faith. The main appeal of this for me is that it necessarily grounds our theology and spirituality in actual human life and experience. As a result, it tends to be less susceptible to becoming ivory tower theology. It’s where the rubber hits the road theology. I’m not interested in theology or spirituality that are not consciously and intentionally engaged with reality. In my early twenties the two most burning questions for me personally were “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to be holy?” I suspected then, and am convinced now, that they are the same question. That answering or responding to one of these questions is to respond to the other as well. That to live into and out from one of these questions is to live into and out from the other.

Some of my interest in these questions, especially in my twenties, no doubt was rooted in the fact that the two most formative figures in my life — my parents — died fairly young. My mom when I was in college and my dad when I was in graduate school, before I even had children of my own. Other than love and wonder, nothing wakes us up quicker than the near occasion of death. And dying always comes with the invitation to ponder and participate in the deeper meanings of what it means to live. This is really the invitation during Lent: to take inventory of our lives in order to make sure we are not sleepwalking through our days and nights but rather are tending them like a gardener tends a garden to insure it is flourishing. To enter into the spirituality of Lent involves rededicating ourselves to living significant lives as those lives are understood from a divine perspective.

So many of my theological influences, especially formative figures from modern times, have been men and women who were committed to enacting their theology, trying to put into action the fruits of wrestling with the questions of what it means to be human and holy, to be fully alive, to live a significant life amidst the mundanity, messiness, and mystery of daily living. I am thinking of people like Rabbi Abraham Heschel who lost most of his family and many friends in the holocaust and who marched arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King, Jr. to Selma. I am thinking of Thomas Merton who was an orphan at sixteen and from his monastery in Kentucky became one of our great prophetic mystics and social critics of the 20th century. I am thinking of Dorothy Day who fed, clothed, and sheltered the destitute of New York City for fifty years and became one of our great mystical prophets. And I am thinking of Daniel Berrigan who like Day took Jesus’ words and life seriously and dared to resist publicly the madness of American militarism while quietly accompanying A.I.D.S. patients and the dying. Each one was grappling with what it means to be human when one’s humanity is understood as a Divine bestowal.

The bestowal however, comes with more than a little assembly required, presenting itself to us not whole and entire wrapped with a bow, but as an open-ended invitation and vocation. In my own quest and struggle, and with the guidance of folks like these four exemplars, I realized that the vocation question (as opposed to the occupation or career question) is intimately and necessarily connected to the invitation question which usually precedes it. The invitation question has two parts: What does it mean to be human? and What does it mean to be me? Stated a bit differently, Who am I before God or in God? The vocation question is, what, if any, are the implications of my answers to these invitatory questions for the investment, direction, and living or giving of my life? How and to what end do I live my life in light of who I discover myself to be in God? Showing the core of his own answer to the invitatory questions Abraham Heschel puts it this way: “How should we live in a way which is compatible with our being a likeness of God?”

My experience is that the deeply existential questions are always the deeply spiritual questions, just as the profoundly spiritual questions are always the profoundly human ones. By this I am implying that genuine holiness or sanctity has nothing to do with either the silly, sentimental, and glamorized or the anal-retentive versions of saintliness and everything to do with becoming more fully human. The vocation question (again, not the job or career question) is not especially or only meant for young people “just starting out,” but rather, like all burning questions that refuse to go away, is meant for each and every person each and every day of each and every stage in life.

Heschel and Merton, as well as Johannes Metz and William McNamara especially emphasize that, while we are conceived and born as human beings, becoming or being human is not a done deal. It is instead up for grabs, TBD. Consequently, as we become more intellectually capable, more ethically conscious and spiritually reflective, our second vocation as human persons (following our vocation to allow ourselves to be loved) is, in fact, to choose to become human, which in addition to being an ontological summons is a gift, a graced task, an ongoing responsibility, and a destiny. Understood correctly, Metz insists that our love for ourselves, our “Yes” to our self, is a “categorical imperative.” This has been at the core of my teaching for the last thirty years, as well as at the center of my own spirituality and Jacobian struggle where the wound and the blessing become one.

Nothing is more tragic, Heschel asserts, than to be a human being, a homo sapien biped skipping and tripping through life, and to get to the earthly end of it and never to have made any progress toward the God-given and God-intended trajectory of our lives which is to become who we already are in God. Metz stresses that the reality of sin is not so much evidence of being human, nor an excuse to sin, but rather a forfeiture of our humanity, a betrayal of the humanity entrusted to us. We often think of sin as a violation against God or another without understanding that it is also a sin against ourselves, a fundamental violation of our humanity, and who we are in God. When we learn of a man who walks into an Orlando nightclub — and because it is known to be a gay establishment — dispenses a barrage of bullets and terror killing 49 people and wounding 53 others, each an image of God, we lament, “Who could be so in-humane.” We don’t say, “What do you expect? He was only human.” No, we recognize it as a profound violation of what it means to be human, a contradiction whole-and-entire of what being human is. And both our recognition and our lament come from the deep truth of our own humanity, our own humaneness.

This – the failure to be human, not the desire to be God – is the primal sin. Metz writes:

Our self-acceptance is the basis of the Christian creed. Assent to God starts in our sincere assent to ourselves, just as sinful flight from God starts in our flight from ourselves. In accepting the chalice of our existence, we show our obedience to the will of the Creator in heaven (cf. Mt. 26: 39-42); in rejecting it, we reject God.

We are, each and all of us, works-in-progress. We are, as the first Christians were known, people “of the way,” or as Day titled her weekly column “on pilgrimage.” I doubt I need to remind you, we are not people who have “already arrived.” When a person or community deludes themselves by thinking they have arrived, trouble is not far behind. Christian spirituality is not about becoming godly (I know, sounds shocking, sounds almost blasphemous and heretical). I suggest we leave godliness to God. When humans try to be godly raather than more genuinely and fully human holiness becomes divorced from humanness. Christian spirituality is about becoming human, and becoming more, not less the peculiar treasure each one of us uniquely is created to be. For Christ-ones it is Jesus who is the exemplar and his Spirit who is our animating and sustaining support for becoming human. If becoming human is not beneath the dignity of God, then Christians  should naturally know to associate it with the Christ-life not atheistic humanism. If God became human, why in the world (or anywhere else) would Christians want to surrender the noble endowment of our humanity entrusted to us by God.

Although the language is relatively recent historically, for too long now certain Christians have framed the incarnation — the enfleshment of the divine in the human as embodied by Jesus of Nazareth — within the narrow and skewed understanding of salvation as “being saved” or “accepting Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior.” When we reduce the mystery of the liberating love of God to quaint quips, we deprive ourselves of the richer truth of salvation and the fuller revelation of the incarnation which reveals both what God is like and what it means to be a real, authentic, fully formed human being. To infer that Jesus acted as he did merely because he had a God switch he could turn on when in a jam and Voila! — be God, is a heresy. It is not Jesus’ divinity but his humanity and the Spirit that enables him to be truly human, that bolsters his fierce and faithful refusal time and time again not to betray or compromise his humanity. This is most instructive for us who are called to become human in the concrete realities of life.

As the author of the Letter to the Philippians wrote,

though he was in the form of God, [Christ Jesus] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross. (Phil. 2: 6-7).

Jesus too came into the world as a human being, not as a divinely automated robot disguised as a fully formed human person but rather as one who also had to become human. “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” the evangelist Luke wrote (Lk. 2: 52). Jesus is the prototype of human becoming, of one who repeatedly and lovingly accepted the humanity entrusted to him. Each day, again and again and again, Jesus chose to embrace and embody the deepest truth of his humanity, to listen deeply to it (obedience from ob “to” + audire “listen, hear”) and to resist the temptation to breach it. This is the primary call and response for those who self-identify as Christ-ones. For humans, there is no other way: the road to holiness goes through humanness, as Dag Hammarskjold wrote in his classic Markings, and through the particularity and preciousness of one’s being. The ongoing transformational process of Christ-ening is, in fact, the sacred drama of participating in our own human becoming as modeled by Jesus, as animated and guided by the Spirit, and as oriented toward God. Humanization is sanctification and sanctification is humanization. That is, to become human is to become holy and to become holy is to become human.

To become like Christ, which is the particular invitation of Lent, is not to mimic Jesus but rather to transpose Jesus into this place and this time by becoming more authentically and deeply oneself and more truly and fully human as we are hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). This is what Merton means in New Seeds of Contemplation when he writes, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” And then, “Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.” And finally, “The secret of my full identity is hidden in [God}. [God] alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be.”

To move toward God who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves is necessarily to move nearer to our true self and to move toward our true self is to move toward the ineffable one we dare to call God.

ARTWORK: Kathy Conzelman. Used with permission of the artist.  Simply KMC Photos

Bibliography: SEE

Who Is Man? Abraham Joshua Heschel
New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton
Poverty of Spirit, Johannes Baptist Metz
The Art of Being Human, William McNamara
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day

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