Week 9: Human Nature (part 1)
Thursday, March 11th, 2010We turn this week, to the third section in our year-long project on rethinking the way we find ourselves in the Story of Ultimate Reality.
To recap…
We’ve seen the fundamental illness of the Christian Church in our nation. Consequently, we’re wondering together, if there isn’t a better way to tell the Story of God. We recognize that the Reality Narratives we tell ourselves about “The Way Things Are” are powerfully deterministic in our lives, and since the lives we’re living as Christians in our society today, are anemic at best, we are well served considering new ways to tell our core framing Story.
We’re in the beginning stages of this year-long project, talking first about the players in the Story. The section we just finished was about rethinking our images of God. The section we begin today, will reframe how we think about our own natures. What is the essential nature of the human being?
Rethinking Human Nature
Listen to these words from the first pages of the Bible…
God created human beings;
He created them godlike,
reflecting God’s own nature.
God looked over everything he had made;
and it was so good,
so very good!
With those few words, our tradition lays out a radical conception of human nature.
“Created in very image and likeness of God;” that’s how we say it.
Imago dei; that’s the Latin way to say it.
This fundamental construct, given us in the very beginning of our Story, says that at our cores, we are made of the same stuff God is made of. We may have buried our Divine likeness under many layers, but our starting place is this. Divinity is woven into our fabric, inextricably bound up within us. It is so much a part of us, that if it were removed, we would cease to be.
The image of God is not a character trait we can put on or take off. It’s not like being mean, or being kind; on one day we’re one, the next day the other. Neither is it that we take on the Divine nature when we are baptized as Christians, not having had it before.
No, the Divine is simply the essence of human nature. It is the center of the human soul. We are sacred, not because we have prayed the sinner’s prayer, not because we have been baptized, not because we have experienced inner transformation or redemption. No, we are sacred simply because we exist, simply because we were created.
Consequently, when we are in touch with our truest selves, we are in touch with the Divine. There is a wisdom within us, greater than the foolishness in which we so often live. There is a virtue within us, greater than the vice we so often commit. There is kindness within us, greater than the meanness we so often express. But most of all, deep within us there is love, and the desire to give ourselves away in the service of Divine purpose. And this attribute is greater than any selfishness that drives us on a given day.
This starting point for thinking about ourselves changes everything!
It changes how we relate to one another. It changes how we see our own weaknesses, our own failures, our own sins. It changes how we conceive the spiritual journey in our minds. It changes everything!
If the Divine is my truest essence, then I am not defined by my weaknesses or my failures. If the Divine is my truest essence, neither am I defined by my successes or victories. I don’t have to define myself as my sin and shame, and I don’t have to drive myself into the ground to succeed and thus be of worth or value.
Like every other human being, I am, simply by virtue of my existence, breathtakingly precious, extraordinarily magnificent, and essentially Divine.
And the spiritual journey, becomes a journey of returning to that fundamental reality.
So…
If this truth is so central to our Story as Christians, how is it that it became so foreign to us, so distant, so seemingly untrue, and so elusive in our daily lives?
Here how our Story explains the disconnect. Something has gone badly wrong. We have forgotten ourselves, we have drifted from being ourselves, and we have allowed a lesser, more base version of self to act as a mask, a guise over our true selves.
The ancients and the theologians call this separation from our true, Divine centers,the “False Self.”
When we live as false versions of ourselves, we fall into a lower state of existence. Ours became lives of fear, falseness and ignorance. It is as though we can no longer remember our true beings, our true beginnings, as though we are living in a deep sleep, under the sway of a counterfeit nature, a counterfeit identity.
And this ignorance of our true selves condemns us to deep, ongoing, visceral anxiety. That anxiety, in turn, drives us to words, deeds, motivations, and actions that create broken lives and a broken world. We become slaves to falseness, condemned to lives of anxiety and vice.
But note what we are not saying. We are not saying that our truest selves are somehow corrupted. Instead, we are saying that we’ve been set apart from our truest selves; set apart from our Divine selves.
Some of our spiritual ancestors used the image of an illness to describe sin. Though our bodies get sick,we never describe the sickened body as our true self. Yes, sin infects us, but does not define us.
Eriugena (poor guy, looks like a toad!)
One of our spiritual ancestors, Eriugena, an Irish philosopher, scholar, and theologian from the ninth century called sin “leprosy of the soul.” Leprosy, he said, distorts the body and makes one appear monstrous. Sin, he continued, does the same. In fact, it can so distort us, that we come to believe that the disease is in fact, the face of the human soul. And, just as leprosy deadens sensation, sin deadens our sensitivity to that what is deepest in us, and truest about us. We come to believe, act, and live, as though we are not, made in image of God.
The spiritual life, the experience of the Divine, the experience of grace, the experience of redemption that defines the spiritual journey; these restore us to the source of our well-being. They restore the true sense of self, the experience of living from our Divine centers.
In next section, when we get to re-thinking Jesus, we will say about the life, teachings, and work of Christ that they act as our memory, calling us back to our deepest identity. Christ remembers for us, our origins, our beginnings, our true selves.
Now…
Saying that sin does not define our truest selves is not to say that it is a trifling. Not at all. The ancients, who understood out nature so well, teach us that sin is a formidable foe. Theirs was not the view that our true selves could be easily recovered, it was not the view that our true selves exists under a thin veneer of falseness.
No, the infection of the human soul is serious, and it is unrelenting. Greed, lust, pride, envy, wrath, and so forth are tangled with the very roots of our beings. They are cancerous adversaries, and their removal is a daunting undertaking.
Again, listen to an analogy from Eriugena. Sin, he says, is like a lion, pouncing on everything that is born. It is always lurking at the door, and its desire is for you. It hovers, he says, at the door of the womb, ready to infect everything that comes into being.
But even so, as formidable a foe as sin is for the human soul, it is destructive to mistake the disease for our true faces. For years, that fundamental misconception has negatively impacted the spiritual life, the spiritual journey. We mistakenly define the spiritual life as a battle with sin, making this the centerpiece of our Story, giving way too much power to sin.
Once we define the spiritual journey as a battle with sin, we fail to focus on returning to our true selves. 
Historically, we have enshrined this mistake under cover of three Christian doctrines; the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, and dualism.
These doctrines, improperly understood, stand as obstacles to our return to our authentic selves. We’ll look at the harmful results of our doctrinal misinterpretations next time as we continue thinking about the essence of human nature.