From the Director - We are only human?
Every Christmas I meditate on a quote from DH Lawrence. He once wrote, ‘All that matters is that men and women should do what they really want to do. Though here as elsewhere we must remember that man has a double set of desires, the shallow and the profound, the personal, superficial, temporary desires, and the inner, impersonal, great desires that are fulfilled in long periods of time. The desires of the moment are easy to recognise, but the others, the deeper ones, are difficult. It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of our deeper desires, not to keep shrilling our little desires into our ears..... Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.'
What impressed me most about the passage is the confidence that DH Lawrence shows in human nature. He is convinced that deep down we are good, and what we want will also be good. We may have difficulty knowing what we really want. We may often be confused and live in the kind of madness that comes from living always from our shallow, superficial needs but we are good and our basic instincts are good and the moral task is to know what we really, most profoundly want.
I wish I had such confidence in my own humanity.
I am frightened of what I might do if I did what I really wanted to do, but have come to realise that this is not Christian and reveals a radical self-doubt and a profoundly negative attitude to being human.
This is not the message of the Incarnation, God becomes human because being human is good. I suspect that we have no problem believing that God has taken on the good things of being human; the Incarnation also means that God is present in the tragedies, the disappointments, the weaknesses, the mistakes, the sins, and even the things we dislike about ourselves and wish had never been. So this Christmas, I will personally avoid excuses like, "I am only human" because Jesus revealed that being human is God-like.
Fr Noel Connolly
director@columban.org.au
