HUMANS BEING

Er… what was that?  “Humans being”?  Must be a typo.

Only it’s not.  

Last month, our focus was on human nature.  A theme emerged: most treatment of this idea is too individual.  But we don’t exist in a vacuum.  We’re interdependent biologically.  And theologically…

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All [humans] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.”  — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And so it is that this month, we’re choosing to zoom out a bit.  If pinching your fingers together zooms in, then widen them a bit and let’s zoom out… bigger than just one person standing alone.  Let’s include interdependence as a characteristic of human nature.

And so… our ‘big idea’: humans being.  Or “humans, naturally” (building on “human nature”), if you prefer.  (Both are a little awkward, but you get the point…). Being a human means being connected.

How might we make interdependence then part of our daily practice?  

Put another way: if we are indeed caught in network of mutuality… if indeed our connection to one another and to the world are inescapable… then why do we spend so much time acting otherwise?

One of the oldest and truest understandings of sin relates to separation.  Separation from self.  Separation from our deepest ties.  Separation from the holy.  Recall Pharaoh in the ancient stories, whose heart hardened despite several opportunities for it to break open.  Recall the prophets — ancient and modern — who have sought to call us back to better ways, usually by treating one another better. 

Rev. Kate Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist chaplain to the Maine Warden Service.  In her beautiful & powerful book Here If You Need Me, she describes the process of ‘re-membering’.  When something difficult happens, it can feel as though we are adrift.  Especially in the face of a loss, our familiar tethers to life itself come loose.  “Re-membering’ then is the process of reconnecting one another with life, with this world we share.  Re-establishing trust; rebuilding trust.

We are each ‘members’ of creation.  Everything is.  Only, sometimes we forget.  To ‘re-member’ is to remind of one’s place in the great family of things.

May we each be agent’s of one another’s ‘re-membering’… reminding one another of our place in the sacred Whole.  May we seek out ideas about humanity that are not only stories of great individuals but of people working together.  That journey itself is a reward.  And may we work for a social and political order that matches our deep faith in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and of our sacred place in the interdependent web.