The childish wonderment has a way of coming around to us later in life, knocking on the door of our consciousness with a reminder that our parents never really answered our insatiable string of "why?"s. Childhood had a simpler frame of enquiry that seems to trail off as we get on with the things which our parents insisted need to be done.
The marvel of consciousness takes a back seat as we find our way in a pre-established system of education and employment. We nervously begin our ascent at the foot of a variety of ladders – social, intellectual, financial – from a tremoring grip on the lower rungs to eventually placing hand over hand in the hopeful rhythm of what we're told is 'progress'. But from time to time an intrusive question arises, a moment of staccato in all this stability, and we are left wondering who we are and what we are. So, what is a human?
A survey of the planet can leave us in no doubt that the species of humans is unique. We have mined and developed the substance of the planet into cars and aeroplanes and skyscrapers. We have contained electricity to make smartphones, laptops, and invisible wireless networks of data. We have art galleries, cinemas and museums; political and legal systems, codes of ethics, monetary means of exchange and value; we gather in the thousands to hear the arrangement of notes and lyrics that our fellowman has composed, we allocate our country's wealth to send a man to space or a robot to a nearby planet. We have libraries filled with ideas, universities feeding insatiable minds, and it all stands on thousdands of years of recorded history of what we as a species have done and thought. We are uniquely complex kings of the earth.
But the human dominion of the planet doesn't stem from a great war in the past, it was not born from a power struggle against the nearest competitor, but from the information and substance at our disposal we play the role it seems we were assigned.
And yet even in all of this beautiful complexity and this urgent creativity we can come up empty to the question still – what am I? We can't account for all our faculties of art, philosophy, music, ethics, relationships, logic, etc. We are like Stoppard's "demented children" play-acting for the unpopulated air.
Into this confusion the bible speaks clarity. To understand ourselves we must investigate beyond ourselves. Yet even the celebration of humanity in Psalm 8 finds the reality falling short of what we see and experience and how things should be. But the solution to the puzzle is found years after that song was written.
The New Testament affirms that our answer of what a human is, is seen in Jesus. Jesus displays humanity in full flight, the perfect expression of rational, moral and relational faculties. He is affirmed as not only the display to us of what it means to be human, but he is also the means by which we come to understand and attain our true humanity.
He is both the answer to our wondering and the goal of our longing. But until we humbly seek the answers he provides we will continually come up empty on our quest, trying to understand our place in the whole based on the sum of our parts. We need to know ourselves in relation to our maker and in relationship with Him.
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html