As reported in these pages nearly two months ago, in the midst of a 17-inch January snowstorm, I broke my ankle. I slipped on the ice while trying to extricate my car, stuck in an unplowed parking lot.
Happily, I am pleased to report that after six weeks of wearing a hard cast and walking on crutches, I am back to my normal routine, and the ankle has healed well. I am most grateful for all the prayers and good wishes I received for a speedy and full recovery.
I am also very grateful to so many who were of such great assistance in helping deal with the limitations posed by my navigating on crutches.
Humbling weeks
While appreciating the kind solicitude, I must confess it was truly a humbling experience to depend upon others for transportation, opening doors, carrying a vestment bag or briefcase, putting on an overcoat, or picking up food from a buffet line or dropped gloves.
The entire experience made me more conscience of and sensitive to the challenges faced by those who cope with permanent disabilities -- and more appreciative of the extraordinary grit and determination they must exercise just to go about the ordinary tasks of daily life that I have tended to take for granted.
It also brought home very forcefully how critically important it is to ensure that our church facilities -- and indeed all public buildings and accommodations -- are barrier-free and handicapped-accessible.
Lenten lesson
While my temporary disability was a minor inconvenience at best (and more of an irritation created by the loss of mobility and independence than a source of genuine pain), it did serve to remind me of my humanness and of the fragility of life. That realization, in turn, has prompted me during this Lenten season to reflect on how fully Jesus embraced our humanity and on the lessons that has for everyday living.
The Gospels overflow with stories and illustrations of how deeply Jesus immersed Himself into this human condition of ours. For example, He did not exercise divine foreknowledge during His activity here on earth; He didn't suspend the laws of nature for His own personal growth and development.
Neither did Jesus spare Himself human emotion, nor did He wall Himself off from the rest of humankind, surrounding Himself with sycophants and lackeys as so many of the powerful of the world tend to do. Further, Jesus experienced everything that is fully human, save sin:
* Jesus tasted the poverty of the stable of Bethlehem and knew the drudgery of the laboring man while working alongside Joseph in the carpenter shop of Nazareth.
* He experienced the boyhood excitement of those periodic visits to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate the great Jewish feasts.
* He also experienced the confusion, anxiety and growing pains of adolescence as He sought to define His own personality and identity, even when that search was misunderstood by the parents He loved so dearly when they did not comprehend the preoccupation He had "with His Father's business."
* Jesus celebrated with the wedding couple at Cana and feasted at the banquet table of Zacchaeus.
* He experienced surprise and anger when those were appropriate, such as when He drove the greedy money-changers from the temple or when He stood silently before the court of the malicious Herod, refusing to answer the questions of the murderer of His beloved cousin, John the Baptist.
Emotional Jesus
Jesus was a man of tremendous human compassion, with an eagle eye for the needs of others: feeding the multitudes on the Mount of Beatitudes...healing a woman who had touched the hem of His garment...rebuking the disciples who sought to protect Him from the little children...or in the moment of His own deep personal agony on Calvary, remembering to entrust His Mother to John's care as well as to heal the tormented thief who hung beside Him.
Jesus' humor is also evident, especially if we read between the lines of the Gospel text. For example, we can envision Him teasing the Samaritan woman as He conversed with her by the well, or picture the twinkle in His eye as He watched the impetuous Peter leap naked from the boat, swimming ahead of the others to embrace Him at the shore of Tiberias.
Jesus knew weariness at the end of a long journey, bathed in the love of His mother, and rejoiced in the friendship He enjoyed with Lazarus, and his sisters Martha and Mary.
Jesus could also grow lonely for human companionship, as He did in the Garden of Gethsemane when He begged His disciples to stay awake and keep Him company. In that same scene, we can observe His feelings of fear and anxiety as He shuddered -- to the extent of sweating blood -- at the prospect of His impending suffering and death.
Humanity
Those and countless other vignettes reveal that Jesus was fully human. Far from being a pious automaton or statuesque zombie, as He is often depicted in art or portrayed in films, Jesus was a living, breathing, compassionate, feeling human being.
He experienced fully the rhythmic cycle of life and death, joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, striving and fulfillment that are the inescapable hallmarks of our human condition.
It is important to keep this lesson of Jesus' humanity ever in our minds, because so often we forget it. So often, we despair of our life situation, lamenting the fact that God could not possibly understand our joys and sorrows, hopes and doubts, disappointments and failures. We wonder if God knows how we feel, how we are pushed and pulled by life's harsh realities.
Acceptance
But Christ's sojourn among us underscores that God does understand and appreciate our life situation because, although fully divine, Jesus was also fully human.
Just as Jesus accepted our human condition and redeemed it through His humanity, so, too, the only way we can hope to reproduce the mystery of Christ in our lives and to share in the fruits of His redemption is through the agency of our own humanity:
* by wholeheartedly accepting ourselves as limited and imperfect human beings, and
* in the context of this human condition, by striving to grow and develop in our own personality and in our loving relationships with others.
Proper emphasis
Unfortunately, that truth of our humanity has, at times, been overlooked, repressed or denied by some within the Church, with unfortunate consequences.
For example, some spiritual writers have tended to promote what the psychologist Eugene Kennedy has termed "the lighthouse" model of humanity, namely, a view of the human person that sees the intellect as the primary or most important factor in an individual's development, and the emotions or feelings as a restive burden under which people labor but which must in no way be trusted.
In other words, that view of life treats shabbily any aspect of the personality other than the intellect and fails to realize that the Holy Spirit acts within the total human person, not just within a certain part of us.
Flawed approach
In that perception of humanity, our fallible human nature is seen as something to be conquered rather than fulfilled. Human failings and even the experience of quite normal human emotions -- like distraction in prayer, hurt at a slight or tears at the loss of a loved one -- are frequently viewed as horrendous.
At best, such an approach to spirituality leaves us feeling rather schizophrenic, divorcing our spiritual life from our emotional life.
At worst, it leads us to become rather rigid aliens to the human condition, feeling guilty and unforgiving about ourselves as persons.
What counts
In addition to those unhealthy forms of spirituality that can tend to inhibit a wholesome acceptance of our humanity, at times our task-orientated culture reinforces this predisposition.
We Americans are very pragmatic people and have too often bought into the concept that only the serviceable is worthwhile. In other words, the wider society tells us that it is the effectiveness of things, persons and deeds that really counts, not their inner goodness, truth or beauty.
That pragmatism has often spilled over into our approach to the Christian life. Very often, efficiency and productivity become the determining norm in the evaluation of whether we are following Jesus faithfully. We feel constrained to perform efficiently and effectively. We feel guilty when we are not doing something.
Time off
At least, I know that can be an issue for me. Very often, when I relax, take a day off or go on a vacation, as I did last month, I tend to feel guilty, as if I'm betraying an implicit standard of conduct that does not include wasting time.
I find myself making excuses for why I am sitting still, playing a game, enjoying nature, reading or listening to music. Or I feel compelled to explain to others what I am doing. Perhaps others can identify with those feelings.
Take another example: How often do we manifest the tendency to take upon ourselves more than we can physically or emotionally bear, and, then, identify this excessive availability with a full living of the Christian life?
I would submit that this attitude is a subtle denial of our humanity, which ultimately is harmful to us spiritually as well as physically and emotionally. It is a bow to the utilitarian trend within our Western culture, a trend which fails to appreciate the real value of esthetics, relaxation, leisure and contemplation.
Success and failure
Finally, I would suggest that a full acceptance of our humanity can lead to an acceptance of what I would call "a theology of failure."
We must never forget that we do not ascend to God in a straight line but in a roller-coaster fashion, always going somewhere, but not necessarily directly nor in a predictable manner. Every success of ours always has a tinge of failure about it, and no one of our failures is ever completely such.
Only each of us knows the crosses God has asked us to bear: a goal unfulfilled...a dream unrealized...an opportunity frittered away...a loved one lost...loneliness in our life...an alcoholic or drug-addicted family member...an unpleasant boss or co-worker...a child gone wrong...terminal illness...and other crosses too personal and too numerous to mention.
Even though we cannot find an answer for the failures and sufferings we endure, at the same time we know that Jesus saw meaning in our human condition, even in the apparent failure of the cross. So we, too, must find meaning in our human struggles and failures.
To approach life with such an attitude is not to condone imperfection nor to approve of failure; rather, it is to enter more fully into the life of Jesus by accepting our humanity even as He accepted, assumed and redeemed it in His own person, and by responding humbly to the creative promptings of the Spirit, who operates within us only in our human condition.
Core of faith
In other words, to accept and embrace our humanity is to come face-to-face with the core mystery of our Christian faith: the Redemption.
It is to recognize from the viewpoint of our limitations, frustrations and failures that we are truly loved by another; that we have been redeemed fully by another, Jesus; and that He asks only that we open ourselves to His grace.
To accept our humanity is to know experientially that we are the prodigal sons and daughters for whom God is a loving Father, that we are the lost sheep for whom Christ became the Good Shepherd, and that we are the weak ones for whom the Holy Spirit has been sent forth.
During Lent, may we accept and embrace our humanity more fully, and see it not as something to be feared or ashamed of, but as something to be developed and fulfilled for God's glory and for our own salvation.