Page 181 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 7

The Work and Thinking of David Benner
stage with several of the people he lived with,
informing his audience that since moving to
Daybreak he never traveled alone. He then in-
vited his Daybreak friends to interrupt him at
any point if they had something they wanted to
say. Several of them did so, several times. It was,
indeed, no ordinary academic lectureship!
The topic of his talk was “What makes us hu-
man?” This, he said, had become a central que-
stion for him since leaving the world of the Ivy
League universities and moving into L’Arche. He
began by reviewing the standard list of things
suggested by anthropologists and evolutionary
psychologists as distinctive to humans – such
things as self-awareness, speech and symbolic
cognition, conscience, the ability to contempla-
te our origins and our future, and the capacity
to imagine. These, he noted, were all the product
of the mind, and consequently, it was the mind
that both the academy and the world had come
to assume was the centerpiece of our humanity.
Living with the developmentally disabled had
forced him to rethink this. If the mind was pri- animation comes from the inner presence of the
mary in what makes us human, those who were
intellectually deficient must be seen as less than
fully human. However, life with these wonder-
ful people taught him that they were far from
sub-human. From them he learned that it was
not the mind but the heart that makes us most
fundamentally human.
The assumption that thinking is at the core of
what makes us distinctively human is easy to
understand since thinking is so present in our
experience. Nevertheless, even though our
thoughts are fickle, we strongly identify with
them. Often they seem to be the most perso-
nal things we possess, and in many ways, they
are. My thoughts are mine. I can hold them in
secret or display them in public ways that pre-
sent me to best advantage. They are, however,
my thoughts. I may not be able to control them,
but I do get used to their constant presence and
this further strengthens my identification with
them. Over time, I also learn that I can use my
thoughts to bring comfort when I hurt, co-
herence when I am confused, and order when I
feel threatened by chaos.
180
Dust and Breath
The Judeo-Christian creation story gives us a
helpful way of approaching this important que-
stion. The Bible describes the creation of the
first human in the following words: “Yahweh
God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then
he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and
thus man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7).
Dust is the stuff of the earth. Humans are crea-
tures of the earth and inextricably connected
to the material world. This is vitally important,
particularly for anyone interested in spiritua-
lity. Whatever spirituality is, it should not be
something that pulls us away from the material
world. To be human is to have a fundamental
attachment to the earth.
Notice what animates this handful of dust – the
Divine breath. Divine breath transforms inani-
mate dust into a living, human person. Christi-
ans understand this breath as God’s Spirit – the
English word “spirit” coming from the Latin
spiritus, meaning “breath.” For Christians, our
Spirit of God. Humans are connected, therefore,
to both heaven and the earth. Life is to be lived
with awareness of these two reference points
for our identity and meaning. For the develop-
ment of full-orbed personhood we must be an-
chored in the material realities of our physical
environment but also connected to the ultimate
horizon that Paul Tillich called the ground of
our being. Our relationship with both is vital to
becoming fully human.
Of course, the easiest horizon to lose sight of
is the one that is immaterial and is, therefore,
unknowable to the senses. This has been the
story of modernity in the West, the result being
the reduction of humans to their bodies and the
de-sacralization of the world. The central place
of Divine breath in the various creation stories
points us to this easily overlooked horizon.“
Further comments on the above passages.
For most of us our thoughts dominate much
of our lives. They are the most personal thing
we possess. My thoughts are sometimes shared
but often held in secret.