Call to Worship
It takes courage to ask a question and truly pay heed to the answer. … From the highest level to the most practical level, all real questions come about from the pain of separation, the separation from the answer. … We are merely instruments through which the question can be asked and through which the question can be answered.
-Reshad Feild
Personal Statement:
“This I Believe”by Dana Theus Paddock
My name is Dana Theus Paddock and my family and I have been members of this Church for a little over three years.
What does it mean to be Human? At first I was a little daunted by this subject, but I quickly realized that of all the things that make me feel unique in the animal kingdom, I treasure two dimensions of my humanity above others – Mind and Spirit. And these are things I can talk about. My beliefs about everything are intertwined with my relationships to Mind and Spirit.
I was born into a family of the Mind, however, my relationship with Spirit didn’t start off too well. For you see, I was raised by two intelligent atheists, both recovering from a fundamentalist upbringing. In essence, I was raised to believe that there was no Spirit. Churches were frightening places, full of dark mysteries, songs I didn’t know and stories I didn’t believe in. As a result, I was never taught the language of Spirit.
Other than making it hard to find friends in the 1960’s Bible Belt where a play date was going to Church together, this lack of spiritual context didn’t seem to do me much harm in elementary school. But I could have used some religion in my adolescence. To make a very long story very short, some pretty awful things happened to me and my family in those years – things that cause most people to turn to God. But not us. We were tougher than that – Not!
Through my 20’s and into my 30’s, I didn’t have much time for Spirit. I was too busy learning the language of the Mind. I delved into pop psychology and therapy to analyze my behaviors and (sometimes even) my emotions. And my Mind confirmed that – yep -- I was pretty screwed up. But for all that time and money in analysis; it was simple acts of creativity, the genuine love of my husband, and breaking down to ask the God I didn’t believe in for forgiveness. It was the Spirit, not the Mind, that kept me out of the black hole of despair and depression that stalked my heart in those years.
And then, I came here to UUCA. In this community, I found thoughtful, discerning people, people who respected my belief that there are as many paths to Spirit as there are human beings to walk them. People of Mind AND Spirit. And watching these people – you in this sanctuary – I saw you open yourselves to the mystery of life. I was sitting in this pew -- and that one – when you taught me the language of Spirit.
And I began to see that when I spoke the language of Spirit, I was entering into an actual relationship with the things that my Mind had spent all those years analyzing at arm’s length. As I spoke the language of Spirit, my relationship with myself and the Universe took shape, and my heart opened, I began to let go of fear and I felt the mystical cycles of Spirit moving in me, around me and through me. It was wonderful. I stopped going to therapy.
Now I study the Mind and the Spirit. And I never feel more human than when I am delving into these mysteries. For what other animal can entertain such paradox – much less enjoy it? However, what I am learning presents new challenges to my evolving relationship with Spirit. Particularly challenging is research that indicates that my poetic, stirring dreams are random brain hiccups; that my experience of Oneness with the Universe is a bunch of hyperventilating neurons; and that the aching love I feel for my children is merely my DNA trying to stay in the gene pool.
So I’m developing my own theory – one more step in my journey. I’m beginning to believe that I may have come into this world little more than a bag of neurons, but that this is no longer what it means to be Me. When I speak the language of the Spirit – of allegory, gratitude, wonder, compassion and magic – I stretch myself beyond my genetic code – into a dynamic relationship with my biology, my psyche, my community and the Universe our science tries so hard to make sense of. And when I do this I become fully human, and I have a special role to play. Because when I speak the language of Spirit, it does not matter whether I am in a relationship with God or my own central nervous system. I am a stronger force for good in the world. I am a better citizen. I am a better friend. I am a better parent. And I am happy.
And to you I am so very grateful. You were here to teach me what I needed to learn when I needed to learn it. And you encourage me to pass on what wisdom I can. Thank you for speaking the language of Spirit with me.
Meditation
Enough with all the judging and comparing, ranking others to put ourselves up or down. Let us be done with it, if not forever, at least for a few quiet moments in the sanctuary of our souls. Let jealousies and envy cease. Let peace and the quiet assurance of being accepted by the universe be all we need to know or feel. Let us be centered in the center of our being which is rooted and grounded in the center of all being. And so let us rest content for a few moments in eternity with who and what we are…human beings who are finite, limited, imperfect…beautiful, awesome, mysterious…children of the universe.
-Richard M. Fewkes
Sermon –
“What Does it Mean to be Human?”– Rev. Joan Gelbein
What does it mean to be Human? I have my own answer, packed in a little velvet purse, with which I traveled to greet this particular BQ, or, “Big Question.”
I pulled my answer out of its soft interiority and placed it humbly before the looming BQ.
“It’s Hope,” I said, “Hope is what it means to be Human.” BQ just looked at me.
“Hope is a distinguishing human characteristic.” I continued, gently, not wanting to stir BQ too much.
An essence of our humanness is that
we choose optimism and confidence;
we plan our days, one by one,
with silly playful things,
and mundane things to show our gratitude for each moment,
and with great things. We do this while
not knowing if anything matters at all, and knowing
that there is a certain end
to our days.
We humans are most human when we hope for the best,
when we hope against all hope,
when we look at the unyielding, random reality around us,
and into the shadow side of civilization, or
the shadow side of ourselves,
where greed and evil reside,
yet still find it in our hearts to declare into the wind:
“Where there is Life, there is Hope!”
BQ, being a provocateur, winked at me, and said, “Well, that answer is a number 82 variant out of 543 field tested answers with 101 to 379 variables possible for each.”
I didn’t realize BQs knew so much. “BQ!” I said, “How does a nice, looming BQ like you have so many answers?”
BQ, being a somewhat of a provocateur, said, “I listen!”
You know, this Big Questions business is entirely frustrating! Every one I’ve looked into has much more than I bargained for. None of them are particularly user-friendly. They’re sassy and obfuscating as a matter of fact.
You might observe that I’m behaving in a characteristically human way – using humor and sarcasm to deflect unknowing!
But, really – why can’t we just have a nice little question, like, “What color was George Washington’s white horse?”, listen to some gorgeous cello music, and then go out to brunch together? Does that sound simply mahvelous?
The decidedly human characteristics you’re observing in me now are --- avoidance, denial, slothfulness!
I admit to all of the fore-mentioned qualities.
I’ve been spending days, lately, staring at my two cats. Why aren’t they human? Why do I converse with them as if they were? Why do they purr so effusively and rub around on me with such gusto? Do they think I’m a cat? Do they know they’re cats? When Abe and I are out, do they lie around splayed out on their backs, on the kitchen floor, communicating in whatever mysterious way cats communicate, wondering about the purpose of life? Well, you never know!
The fact that I’m thinking about this at all illustrates a particularly human quality, which is to wonder and reflect on what life’s all about.
We are a somewhat specious species, given to rumination, reflection, navel-gazing, star-gazing, pipe-dreams, and a great, great capacity for curiosity.
..and story telling and myth-making, and assigning meaning to mysteries then putting them into particular containers called religion; and naming – yes, naming – everything in sight.
“You are Jean Luc, the cat,” I say to Jean Luc, the cat. His tail is straight up; he mews.
A lot of us Humans named the mystery all around us, “God” – which was a lot easier to deal with when it had a name, – and we devised a story in which God decided to start our kind – humans. So God, created by us, created us. We prompted the mystery, called God, to pull together some organic stuff, after first looking in a mirror for inspiration, and then create a male human and a female human.
“…So God created man in his own image, in his own image he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them.”
And there, in the Holy Books, we have the case for Revealed Truth. But, many humans were so curious about life that they kept asking questions. Science was invented by curious Humans after a while, to help them discover, test, and learn many, many new ideas through scientific inquiry.
Speaking of scientific inquiry, here’s some “what’s-happenin’-now,” hot-off-the press scientific updates on what it means to be human:
February 26, 2002, The New York Times “Science Times” section:
Headline – “When Humans Became Human.”
The sub-head says, “Archaeologists long believed that modern human behavior originated 40,000 years ago in Europe. But new findings are pushing the origins tens of thousands of years earlier, and thousands of miles south.”
The article tells us scientists agree that the first human ancestors appeared between five and seven million years ago, “probably when some ape-like creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs. … With somewhat less certainty, most scientists think that people who look like us – anatomically modern Homo sapiens – evolved by at least 130,000 years ago from ancestors who had remained in Africa. … But agreement breaks down completely on the question of when, where, and how these anatomically modern humans began to manifest creative and symbolic thinking. That is, when did they become fully human in behavior as well as body? When, and where was human culture born?”
Some archeologists see a sudden change that they believed started about 40,000 years ago. They asked, “Was there some fundamental shift in brain wiring or some change in conditions of life?” What prompted their questions was finding evidence that modern Homo sapiens appeared in Europe at that time and left the first artifacts of abstract and symbolic thought. Those ancient people made more-advanced tools, buried their dead with ceremony, and expressed a new kind of self-awareness with beads and pendants that were worn, and in fine sculptures of the female form. They found, also, the exceptional and exquisite paintings in the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet in France.
However, further research in Africa is now revealing even earlier changes in human behavior, pushing back the date of symbolic thinking in modern humans to, perhaps, 90,000 years ago or more.
Symbolic thinking, an indicator of what it means to be human, is a form of consciousness that extends beyond the here and now to a contemplation of the past and future and a perception of the world within and beyond one individual.
Thinking and communication through abstract symbols is the foundation of all creativity, art and music, and language. Becoming human, way back then, included technological skills, cognitive skills, formation of a common identity, ability to communicate ideas, and organization of societies into stable groups.
Relatively rare large mammals, through cultural revolutions, came, at this point, to what one archaeologist described as “something like a geologic force.” And, considering what it means to be human must take a route through the very tantalizing worlds of anthropology, paleontology, and archeology before it goes anywhere else!
I’m a totally addicted New York Times reader from way back and especially fond of the Tuesdays Science Times section, so I was delighted to come upon this article, so serendipitously connected to the sermon topic for today. But, I want to thank a couple of folks here for dropping me notes about the article, and for even dropping off the section of the paper for me in the church office. Also, Eloise Harmon left a message on my phone that Roger MacGowan had a brand-new book to recommend on the subject, and Roger, himself, left me a copy of a page of Science News magazine which reviewed the book. More serendipity!
I’m not one to ignore messages from the universe which come through alert earthly messengers, so I immediately called Borders and got a copy of the book. Its title is, The Monkey in the Mirror, Essays on the Science of What Makes us Human, by Ian Tattersall.
Ian Tattersall is a Curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History.
In his new book, Tattersall details what is known about diversity among hominids and how we came to know it. He reveals some of the questions about human evolution that still loom. Not the least of these is how we became what we are.
He talks first about evolution and says there can’t be implied from Darwin’s theory a linear development of species, which is what we’ve been taught. The central prediction that emerges from Darwin’s evolutionary theory is based on the common descent of all life forms from a common ancestor. You know – we get better and better, from ape to human, as if it were on a scale of “good” to “Best!”
Research doesn’t bear this pattern out. Tattersall wrote that today is it recognized that looking at our predecessors as no more than junior-league versions of ourselves may be profoundly misleading as a key to understanding the kinds of creatures they were. Nature is riddled with discontinuities! Evolution is actually a matter of sporadic innovation. Some adaptations work, some are not viable.
In Tattersall’s words, “From the beginning, the history of life has been one of continuous experimentation, one of the production of new species and triage among them by competition” … and the extinction of the unfortunate. Humans owe much to chance, and we are not finely engineered organisms with every component perfectly in place.
Take the Neanderthals, for instance. They are the best-known of the ancient inhabitants of Europe. They were highly distinctive hominids with brains as large as our own, and emerged somewhere in greater Europe around half a million or more years ago. But, and this is a BIG “but,” there is really no convincing suggestion from data and research of symbolic behaviors in the Neanderthals.
Tattersall writes:
“Nothing lasts forever, though, and the Neanderthals eventually found themselves battling for ecological space and survival against our own kind, Homo sapiens. This new species had evolved somewhere else outside Europe, and it began expanding into the Neanderthals’ heartland about 40,000 years ago. What’s more, the invaders arrived not just with modern anatomy but with a whole panoply of behaviors that makes our species so remarkable today. Homo sapiens is without doubt not only a uniquely gifted but a uniquely dangerous creature; and the outcome of the resulting confrontation with the resident Neanderthals was nothing short of inevitable.”
In contrast, the Cro-Magnons, which is what the invading Homo sapiens were called, led lives that were drenched in symbol. They were making exquisite sculptures and painting spectacular multicolored art of the walls of caves. They made music with sophisticated wind instruments, probably with percussion as well. They engraved notations on bone plaques that were clearly some kind of record-keeping. They buried their dead elaborately, and decorated their bodies and objects as well; they loved bracelets, pendants, and necklaces. (My kind of folks!) They invented bone needles, announcing the beginning of couture, and even introduced kiln-baked ceramics. What’s more, they must have possessed language that was more or less as we’re familiar with it.
The Cro-Magnons were more like us than any species that had come before. They were the first kind of human we can hope to understand in terms of our own psychology and cognitive abilities.
Once the Cro-Magnons became established, they spread like wildfire and Neanderthal localities began to dry up. “But then, whether with a bang or a whimper, the Neanderthals were gone, forever.”
What does it mean to be human? The Cro-Magnons displayed the many facets we, today, relate to being human. Including the darker side of our species. We bear, as they did, the paradoxes, the ambiguities of being fully human.
Tattersall believes, from the evidence, that since what he calls a “wholesale replacement of the Neanderthals” did not take a hugely long time, there was a direct confrontation between the two kinds of hominid. The Neanderthals didn’t “stand a chance against the craft and guile of the invaders, with their linguistic and symbolic skills.” His conclusion is that Homo sapiens appears to be inherently—and probably inherently savagely—intolerant of competition from its relatives.
Homo sapiens has an appalling historical record of behavior toward resident human populations, let alone toward other species. Think of the Vikings, the Mongols, the Crusaders. Think of Rwanda and Bosnia—and, September 11.
Evolution is best described as opportunistic, simply exploiting or rejecting possibilities as and when they arise, and these possibilities may be favorable or unfavorable depending on the circumstances at any given moment. We have to grapple with our survival instincts that make us opportunistic.
We are a random creation. Will humanity survive? Well, that’s Big Question Number 8. I have till May to figure that one out.
So, as far as coming to grips with what it means to be human, I can’t idealize it, and I can’t know it completely.
For me, being human gets back to Hope. Having experiences of the possibilities of love and kindness, understanding our human potentials for thriving creativity and community, caring for our talents, gifts, health—all these inspire me and give me happiness and purpose.
Being hopeful is one of the surest routes to experiencing what is the best of being human. It is also tricky. One’s hopefulness is constantly being challenged and seasoned by change, suffering, and loss.
I, too, am a perpetrator of pain. Aggressive and destructive needs populate my emotions and spirit as well. The challenges are deep and abiding.
I feel a deep poignancy in what it means to be human because of the eventual loss of everything. Hope seems the ultimate naivete.
Yet, my strongest longing is not to conquer but to love; not to deny my full imperfect humanity, but to get to know it better; not to condemn, but to set limits.
I want to open myself up to my life with less fear.
The first week of February, Abe and I were in the Carribean, on the island of St. John, a guest of friends who own a spectacular home there.
I began to feel infused with the utter power of nature, timidly at first, pushing against the absolute presence of laser-like sunshine, heat, great distances of sea, the darkest of nights, more stars than I’ve ever seen reminding me of the overwhelming mystery of most everything. The winds could turn into hurricanes, and the rock of the island was once part of an explosive volcanic eruption.
This was almost too elemental for a city girl.
Then, after a few days, a boundary lifted. Very little I had brought with me seemed important. Very little of my particular individuality seemed important. I was beginning to allow feelings of profound vulnerability. I was beginning to feel as if I was one with all natural power, as if dark night and wind were becoming fused into my very being. Something had gotten through a defensive shell. For some precious small moments in time I could sense eons of ancestors at my back and only the sun before me, melting into my heart. I knew I had been washed clean; reminded of what it means to be human, and deeply at home in the universe.
Benediction
When we go forth from this place, may we be blessed by the life that sustains and renews us, and open to the Grace that surrounds and surprises us.
May we go forth from this place with openness and with gratitude.
Amen, shalom, and Blessed Be!
Suggested Reading:
The Monkey in the Mirror; Essays on the Science of What Makes us Human, by Ian Tattersall, 2002, Harcourt Publishers.
What Does It Mean to Be Human? Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World, compiled and Edited by Frederick Franck, Janis Roze, and Richard Connolly, 2000, St. Martin’s Press.
Amen.
