On Being Human

 

On Being Human

May 26, 2026

 

A question has occurred to me: Just what is it to be human? It is a foundational existential question, of course, but it is one people seldom ask and almost never consider seriously. We just take being human for granted. In seminary, the introductory theology class that I took was called “Christian Anthropology.” That is, the Christian study of what it is to be human. I didn’t understand why that was a theology class at the time, but, of course, the brilliant professor who taught it knew what he was doing. Theology is about God; but, more foundationally, proper theology is about the relationship between God and humans. So to understand that relationship you have to have an understanding of what it is to be human. Here’s my best take on an answer to that question.

The first thing that occurs to me about being human is that to be human is to be mortal. Maybe this truth occurs to me first because I’m nearly 80 years old, but it is truth for each and every one of us regardless of age. To be human is to know that you’re going to die. Most young people know that that truth, but it doesn’t always mean much to them. Not so for us elders. If you’re lucky, as you age you just get used to the reality that you’re close to the end of your life. You don’t know how or when you will die, but you know full well that you will.

Beyond that, to be human is to know that you will suffer. You will suffer both physically and emotionally. That foundational truth is the basis of Buddhism, which is above all else a way of avoiding suffering. Yet I don’t believe that avoiding suffering is possible for us humans. I suppose Buddhist nonattachment helps, but it isn’t a perfect shield against that aspect of being human. We will all at some time suffer. I have already suffered several times in my life both physically and emotionally, and I am sure I will suffer again. I am, after all, human.

Now, of course, some people suffer more than others. I have suffered quite severe physical post operative pain. I have suffered grief stronger than I ever thought possible over the death of my wife of 30 years. Yet I would never compare my pain to the pain of the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust. Or of the Holodomor. Or of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Or of so many other horrific events in human history that have caused suffering on a massive scale. Still, whether our suffering is great or relatively small, we all suffer. It’s part of being human.

That we are mortal and that we suffer both stem from one foundational existential fact about being human: We are creatures not gods. Psalm 8 says that God created us little lower than God, but even that high anthropology acknowledges that we are not God. We are “lower” than God. We are somehow less than God. God is infinite, we are finite. God transcends time, we live in a temporal world. God is both immanent and transcendent, we are earthbound and limited as to time and place. God’s love is universal and unconditional, ours is specific and usually conditional. God forgives all and extends grace to all, we judge and condemn whoever we like. We humans so like to play God. We like to think we know it all, control all, and can do all. We don’t, and we can’t. That we don’t and can’t results from us not being gods, and that is part of what it is to be human.

To be human is also to live as a centered self in a world that appears to us to exist outside of ourselves. It is to live in the experiences of that world that come into our consciousness, apparently from outside of us, with no guarantee that they have any objective reality beyond our subjective experience of them. Nearly all people deny that truth, or ignore it, and that denial and that ignoring are both of what it is for most of us to be human.

To be human is also to have a true Self. It is to have within you a persona, a way of being and of doing, that is who you really are. In religious terms, it is who God created and calls you to be, but you needn’t be a person of faith to have deep within you your true Self. Discovering who that true Self is and living into being that person is the most spiritually rewarding thing anyone can do, but the reality of that Self creates an existential problem for essentially everyone. There are a few exceptions. My daughter, for example, has known that her true Self includes being a teacher for as long as she has known that there is such a thing as a teacher. Most of us by far, however, live a false self for most, or at least much, of our lives.

We live an ego self not our true Self. This is a self that is primarily concerned with two things. One is survival. The ego self will do nearly anything to assure its own survival. It will probably also do nearly anything to assure the survival of a small number of people who are particularly close to the person living an ego life. This is usually the person’s immediate family, especially the person’s children.

The other thing the ego self is most concerned with is “success.” For the ego self, “success” usually means “fitting into and succeeding according to the terms of one’s culture of origin.” Cultures almost always define success differently for women and for men. The important point for us here is that nearly everyone, for a significant portion of their life if not for all of it, pursues whatever their culture tells them is success for them. And that ego success is rarely if ever an expression of a person’s true Self.

The ego self by which live so much of our lives just isn’t our true Self. Because it isn’t, most of us lives most of our lives with a tension, almost always subconscious, between the ego self according to which we strive to live and the true Self that is pulling us in a different direction whether we’re conscious of that pull or not.

And it is easy enough not to be conscious of it. Our egos are very good at suppressing our true Selves. Our egos suppress the true Self because, often if not always, our true Self is not the person our culture of origin is forming us into. If you will permit me, I will use myself and my life story as an example of this existential tension.

When I was 32 years old, I decided to go to law school. I had spent years preparing for a different career, but that one didn’t pan out in terms of job possibilities, so I went to law school. I got a law degree. I was admitted to the bar in my home state. At first, I loved being a lawyer. I remember walking among the tall buildings of the city where I worked and hardly being able to believe that I was actually there. It was all just too wonderful, or so I thought at the time.

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I started to burn out on law. Badly. Really badly. I became clinically depressed. I was making no money and had very little law work to do. I once tried to address the difficulty I was having by doing a psychological exercise I had learned of from a pastor I knew who had also been a Jungian counselor. In that exercise, something deep within me told me I wasn’t a lawyer but that I was a preacher. That, of course, made not one lick of sense to my ego self; so I ignored it and kept trying to practice law with no success whatsoever.

Then a local Catholic university in my home city began to offer fully accredited Master of Divinity degrees to Protestant students. Somehow I knew that I had to go get one of those degrees. I didn’t know why. When my wife asked me how I was going to afford it, I said I didn’t know how. I just knew I had to do it. So I did. I enrolled in seminary and began more than three years of study for that MDiv degree.

As part of my seminary experience I served for one academic year as a pastoral intern at a local church of my denomination. Not long after I began that work I looked up to heaven (not that heaven is really “up”) and said: “You’re kidding, right? This is it? This is what I’m supposed to be doing?” And indeed it was. It turned out that, at least with regard to my professional life, my subconscious had been at least partly right. My true Self was not a lawyer. Rather, my true Self was a pastor, which, of course, included being a preacher. I got a call as pastor of a small church. I will never forget the feeling I had the first day I walked into that church as its newly called pastor. I knew as surely as I have ever known anything that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer, and, indeed, I was. My true professional Self is pastor, not the lawyer I had nearly killed myself trying to be.

It took a real shock in my life for me to realize who I really am. Experts in the field, like Fr. Richard Rohr, say that is often the case. I had to crash and burn before I would face the truth that I had been trying to live as someone I am not, that is, someone who my true Self is not. Rohr would say that I was moving into what he calls the second half of life. However you term it, as a pastor I experienced a wholeness and a satisfaction with my life unlike anything like I had ever experienced before. I was finally living a big part of my true Self.

Being the pastor of a small church isn’t prestigious like being a lawyer. It isn’t even all that respectable in society anymore. I was being paid but only a pittance by lawyer’s standards. Most of my culture of origin would not have considered me a success at that point in my life. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t, but none of that mattered. It didn’t matter because I finally was living, or at least striving to live, my true Self. As a person of faith I will say that I was finally being who God created and called me to be. I had experienced and survived an existential tension between my ego self and my true Self, a truly human tension nearly everyone lives with if only subconsciously as it had been subconscious for me for so long.

There is another thing that characterizes us humans and, as far as we know, distinguishes us from all other animals. We humans are meaning making creatures. We humans often agonize over the meaning of life. One of the true existential dilemmas of our modern, or postmodern, world is whether life has any meaning at all. We want life generally to have meaning, and we want our particular lives to have meaning. So many of us humans look for meaning as something objective. Something outside ourselves. Something that is universally true for all of us human creatures. At an unconscious lever at least, so many of us live in despair because we can’t find any real meaning in our lives. When I was a lawyer I worked with many other lawyers who were, but the world’s standards, truly successful. They were partners in big law firms. They were respected. They made a lot of money. And the alcoholism and divorce rates among those people were very high. I am convinced that so many of these “successful” lawyers had troubled personal lives because in their depth they knew that their success was not giving their lives true meaning.

And I am convinced that these people dealt badly with their failure to find true meaning in their lives because they didn’t realize that the only meaning life in general or any particular life can have is the meaning we create. Life has no objective, absolute, universal meaning. It can, however, have meaning that we give it. And we humans are driven to give life meaning. Doing so is just part of what it is to be human.

Though we cannot establish that life has any objective, absolute, universal meaning, there is a truth about the meaning of life that a great many wise people from cultures and spiritual traditions across the globe and across the centuries have discovered and created. Our lives, it seems, have more meaning when we live them for others than when we live them only for ourselves. We may conceive of the “other” for whom we live to be God, but that hardly needs to be the case. Most of us find meaning in living our lives for other people. Indeed, many of us believe that in doing so we are also doing it for God. So if you’re struggling with the meaning of your life, try this: Do something for someone else. Do it repeatedly. Do it for people you know, and, if you can, do it somehow for people you don’t know. It may be easiest to do that through some charitable organization that works in a field that is important to you. Maybe you’ll find that your life has a meaning after all.

Finally, here’s one more thing about being human. I first heard about in the Christian Anthropology class I mentioned above. To be human is to strive for connection with the transcendent. With transcendent reality. With the ultimately beyond. With ultimate truth and ultimate goodness. Many of us call all of that God, but not everyone who strives for connection with it does. Indeed, not every individual human feels a need to strive for it. In our western culture in particular, a culture formed primarily not by faith but by the rationalism and philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment, many people don’t strive for that connection at all because they don’t believe that any such transcendent things are real.

Yet some of us have experienced the reality of the transcendent, the ultimate, in our lives. We also know that every human culture there has ever been has had a way of expressing that striving. We know that because we know that every human culture that has ever existed has produced or adopted a religion. That is, every human culture has had a system of myths and symbols through which it expresses its understanding of the transcendent and through which it seeks a connection with the transcendent. Humans have done so in an enormous variety of ways. People have understood transcendent reality in more ways that we can really keep track of. The important point, however, isn’t the ways in which people have sought connection with the transcendent, it is that they have always done so in one way or another. As far as we know, no other animal has any conception of a transcendent reality and therefore has no desire for connection with it. We humans do have such a conception of it, and the great theologians have all understood that we, not necessarily individually but as a species, strive to connect with it. To do so is truly one of the things that makes us human.

So being human is quite a complex thing. Our smart brains and out higher consciousness enables us to do incredible things both for good and for evil. Yet being human is also a great blessing. We can think and create in ways no other creature on earth can. We can know beauty. We can know love. We can even know something of God. So rejoice in being human. Live fully into being the full, complete, blessed human being God created you to be. May it be so.