Day 26. Little Less Than Gods

Part 2: A Table

Sep 15

*What is man that you are mindful of him, mortal man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than a god, crowned him with glory and honor.*
*Psalm 8:5-6*

Jesus’ Sense of Self was firmly grounded in his identity as the Son of God. Recognizing the great stability this awareness brought to his earthly life, we want to understand what it can mean for our own lives. What is it to be daughters and sons of God? Certainly you’ve heard that you are a child of God. Haven’t you ever wondered what this means? Tomorrow we’ll be examining this important truth. Today we want to look at something more fundamental. Before we go forward to take hold of our divine destiny, we must take a half step backward to grasp our basic human dignity more firmly.

Scripture says that God has made the human person “little less than a god” (Ps. 8:6). That’s reassuring because from our 21st century vantage point, we seem to be little more than monkeys. “See? We’re exactly the same,” says Kala the ape to young Tarzan in a popular children’s movie [1]. This makes for endless confusion, and the message isn’t just coming to us from entertainment. Everywhere we see signs that humans have forgotten what makes us essentially different from animals. It’s been almost 50 years since Peter Singer, a noted professor from a prestigious Ivy League college asserted, “The view that I want to defend puts human and nonhuman animals, as such, on the same moral footing” [2]. Looking around at our current culture, I’d say his view is gaining ground.

“People often say without much thought,” explained Singer, author of Animal Liberation, “that all human beings are infinitely more valuable than any other species. This view owes more to our own selfish interests and to ancient religious teachings that reflect these interests than to reason or impartial moral reflection. Like racists and sexists, speciesists say that the boundary of their own group is also a boundary that marks off the most valuable beings from the rest.”

Just to clarify, we are not the moral equals of apes or aardvarks or algae. And, yes, we are higher. Is this mere human hubris? Self-centered speciesism based on ancient religion? Let’s work this one out on paper. And we’ll do it with no reference to religion – just to satisfy the skeptics. Feel free to keep score at home.

1. Humans are capable of rational thought; of recognizing truth, able to use reason and apply logic.

2. Humans are moral beings, able to judge good and evil and discern right from wrong.

3. Humans understand and respect others’ rights, for example the right to freedom from oppression or the right to own property.

4. Humans are capable of genuine love, which is far more than instinct or desire, and is characterized by self-gift.

5. Human love is capable of great self-sacrifice to the point of death – not only for kin but even for strangers.

6. Humans are capable of compassion and a deep sharing of emotions.

7. Humans are able to ponder and perceive meaning, such as the meaning of love or the meaning of existence.

8. Humans are also able to assign meaning to symbols, events, persons and times.

9. Humans are capable of formulating and using complex language (beyond “food here” and “danger there”).

10. Humans are capable of seeing beauty and responding through wonder and joy as well as through art, ritual, celebration and worship.

11. Humans (well, most anyway) have a sense of humor, can perceive incongruities and laugh at oddities.

Here’s one that may surprise you:

12. Humans can be bored.

“Huh?” you may wonder, “What’s so distinctive about that?” Humans are transcendent beings, so humans can be bored, deeply unsatisfied, with their very lives. It’s much more than the boredom you may experience on a cold, rainy afternoon when you have nothing to do. It’s existential boredom. Humans can be unsatisfied even when all of their immediate needs are met. Ultimately, it means that humans yearn for existence beyond death.

...Which brings us to our final observation.

13. Humans are capable of knowing God – not just knowing about God, but actually knowing God.

By way of comparison, to use one example, our closest animal relatives, apes, are capable of extracting termites from the ground using a twig. This discovery, documented by the famed primatologist, Jane Goodall, demonstrated that chimpanzees can make and use tools. Much was made of the fact that humans couldn't work the same trick. Should we pretend not to notice what humans, and only humans, CAN pull out of the ground? I'm thinking, for example, of the raw materials needed to make a car, not to mention the fuel that makes it go. So who’s higher? You be the judge.

All that we’ve stated in favor of the human person can be perceived by “sight” – our metaphor for things that are evident through natural observation. Only the last characteristic – the capacity for knowing God – is in the realm of “hearing,” of faith, and comes to us through revelation (God’s way of showing). We’ll depart from “seeing” now so that we can better understand by listening to God’s word what it is to be human.

The Psalm quoted at the beginning of this reflection continues: You (God) have “crowned them (human persons) with glory and honor. You have given them rule over the works of your hands, put all things at their feet: all sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field,” (Ps 8:6-8) even, it’s safe to say, monkeys. God set up this order, and when He had completed it, he declared that it and everything else he had created was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Has anyone ever told you this? That you are “very good?” I spend so much time feeling bad because I do things that are bad. It’s good to be reminded that we are still essentially good despite the evil that we do. Yes, our sins offend God and are not to be treated lightly, but we must realize that no sins, not even the very worst sins, can remove our basic goodness. The goodness we were given “in the beginning.” God doesn’t make junk.

Beyond this, we stand out among all of God’s creatures. What’s so special about us humans? In all of creation, only human persons reflect the very image of God, “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). In what ways do we reveal God’s image? Look back over the list. Like God we are moral beings capable of knowing good and evil. We are rational and able to perceive meaning. We are capable of self-sacrificing love and deep, interpersonal communion. We are immortal beings whose spirits will never cease to exist. In these and many other ways we reveal the face of God to the rest of his creation.

Accept the honor. Take the compliment. Recognize your own awesome dignity, your incredible worth. You are good. You are noble, made uniquely in the image of God. Being human is infinitely, no, eternally more than being mere high-grade monkeys.

One parting shot. When someone tells you that we are no different than apes, he has told you little about apes, but much about himself.

**Novena Prayer**

**Jesus says:** “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
**Pier Giorgio responds:** Our life, in order to be Christian, has to be a continual renunciation, a continual sacrifice. But this is not difficult, if one thinks what these few years passed in suffering are, compared with eternal happiness where joy will have no measure or end, and where we shall have unimaginable peace.
**Let us pray:** Blessed Pier Giorgio, teach me that I must be able to mourn if I will be able to rejoice. Show me how to face my sorrow, and not avoid it or pretend that it does not exist. Help me to enter into any present sorrow, so that my soul can empty itself and be filled with God’s peace.
Blessed Pier Giorgio, I ask for your intercession in obtaining from God, Who is our Consoler, all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare. I confidently turn to you for help in my present need: (in your own words, ask the Father to enable you to see yourself in his eyes, with his loving gaze).
*A Book of Prayers in Honor of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, by Rev. Timothy E. Deeter*

Make it My Own

Daily Discernment Workbook

SAINTS SAID IT

1. Fallout? What fallout?

Read and reflect on the following passage from St. John Paul II’s prophetic encyclical “The Gospel of Life.”

When the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned, as the Second Vatican Council concisely states: "Without the Creator the creature would disappear… But when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible". Man is no longer able to see himself as "mysteriously different" from other earthly creatures; he regards himself merely as one more living being, as an organism which, at most, has reached a very high stage of perfection. Enclosed in the narrow horizon of his physical nature, he is somehow reduced to being "a thing", and no longer grasps the "transcendent" character of his "existence as man". He no longer considers life as a splendid gift of God, something "sacred" entrusted to his responsibility and thus also to his loving care and "veneration". Life itself becomes a mere "thing", which man claims as his exclusive property, completely subject to his control and manipulation [3].

Based on the passage above, what are at least three bad consequences of losing our sense of God?

A QUOTE TO NOTE

2. Forgetting Ourselves.

It’s easy to think that the transcendent side of our distinctive human nature, the side that elevates us to touch God, is too abstract, or too sublime, or maybe just too impractical to matter very much. Who cares if we forget our worth? What difference does it make? G.K Chesterton offers a glimpse of the cost of forgetting.

G.K. Chesterton writes…

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget” [4].

According to this quote, what are some ways we can remember who and what we are?

EXAMINE MY HEART

3. Mirror, Mirror

We live in a culture that is happy to supply us with a materialistic identity if we fail to grasp our value as beloved children of God. Do any of these common ‘identities’ apply to me?

I’m a consumer – my worth is in what I can buy.