"What It Means to Be Human"

Most Sundays, you hear familiar words welcoming you to the service, James Luther Adams's elegant declaration that "church is where we get to practice what it means to be human." I've repeated them so often, from time to time I hear them echoing back in your words, becoming part of our common language, like scripture. They seem to resonate with all of us. Adams's simple, yet evocative description of community conveys acceptance - we are practicing, not perfecting - and connection - we are coming together, remembering what we have in common. He reassures us that however baffling or difficult it is to be alive, we know deep down what it means to be human, and that knowledge makes all the difference.

What else James Luther Adams may have meant, I cannot say. I don't know where the quote comes from. As long as I've known them, these words have stood alone, a single sentence, referring to nothing other than itself.

Preparing to write this sermon I did a panicky little search for the quote once again, but no luck. I've read many of Adams's essays and sermons, and never come across this particular sentence. Perhaps he never even wrote it! But it sounds like him: James Luther Adams was an ethicist, theologian, and minister, a well rounded and very likeable person, who exemplified what it means to be human.

So we are free to explore on our own the meaning of Adams's suggestive words. How do we understand what it means to be human? And how does church help us to practice it?

Every time I think about these questions, I come up with a different idea to explore. Does being human mean that we are self-conscious, living with the awareness of our birth and the certainty of our death? Or does it mean that we are constantly struggling to get the upper hand on impulses in conflict with our better selves? Or does it confirm that we are essentially good, as our own very positive Unitarian and Universalist traditions have insisted, despite much evidence to dispute it? And how can we be so sure that being human has any meaning at all?

After thinking about these questions so long that I could not decide which to pursue, I turned to one of my favorite authors, Ernest Becker, long dead and out of print, whose words, like Adams's, always manage to lead me somewhere good. He had a grasp of what it means to be human that always speaks to me. "Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead," Becker writes, "or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force." Becker's frank acknowledgement that life is largely confusion and anguished searching always helps me focus, for some reason. What it means to be human, in Becker's world, is to stand tall in what he calls "the nightmare of creation," and to make something of oneself. This act is an expression of human dignity and perhaps even faith that our effort makes a difference, even if it is only in the way we comport ourselves before forces that are more powerful than we are. What it means to be human, in Becker's view, is to make meaning where there may be none. If church is where we get to practice what it means to be human, then what we are practicing is meaning-making, a creative and sometimes heroic task in a world that often makes no sense.

In our children's story today, a little girl lives in a neighborhood that is dangerous and sad. Someone painted the word "die" on the front door of her building, and a homeless woman sleeps nearby in a cardboard box. Her world is a menacing place, degraded by poverty and violence. But even in such surroundings, she is drawn to beauty.

Once she begins her search, she learns that what is beautiful takes different forms. Many of them are humble but they are precious all the same. She sees how people find beauty wherever they happen to be and create something beautiful out of what at first seemed to be nothing at all.

This is the kind of heroic activity Becker had in mind when he wrote about fashioning something - an object or ourselves - as an offering to the life force. Just as the people in the children's story took the simple things they made, like a sandwich, or loved, like a child, or carried with them, like a smooth stone, and gave them beauty, so do we give life meaning in the way we look at what we do. To practice what it means to be human is to learn how to give life meaning.

Still, the search for meaning, played out in the details of our individual lives, can be a lonely undertaking. Even public events with collective consequences have a personal as well as communal impact. Much of what it means to be human involves solitary effort and interpretation.

Paul Auster's story about how he saved his sister's best friend at the age of nine shows how events experienced by several people acquire their own distinct meaning for each one. In Auster's case, only he fully understood the implications of what he had done. The girl whose life he saved never even realized what had happened. But he, Paul Auster, got a taste of what human beings could do - of what he could do. He was capable of heroism, acting reflexively and without hesitation, to save another's life. This event became a "defining experience" for him, because it gave him a glimpse of something precious in himself. That it meant nothing to others made no difference in the end.

Each of us carries memories of experiences that we have given meaning, and that have given life meaning for us. As our experience accrues, so does our sense of meaning. But life is rarely a steady acquisition of positive experiences. Most of us find our sense of meaning can be threatened or even invalidated by all the things that can happen in life, from personal trauma to collective tragedies.

Everyone has times when loss or sorrow can make us feel that life has no meaning. This experience is also part of what it means to be human. To be human is to search for meaning, but it is also to lose it. Our human constructs are fragile, and so are we.

We need the company of other humans to be strong and to remind each other what gives life meaning. Though much of our search for meaning is individual, perhaps even solitary, we are not meant to be all alone. James Luther Adams wrote, "Church is where we get to practice what it means to be human," because he believed that we become who we were meant to be by belonging to a community. Here in church, we ride out the ups and downs of life together. We become more fully ourselves in relationship to one another.

Community life is not always full of meaning. It can be messy and imperfect and exasperating. Sometimes we practice what it means to be human and still don't get it quite right.

But church is not a showcase. It is a neighborhood. It is not dangerous or sad, like the neighborhood in which the little girl in our story undertakes her search for something beautiful. But it offers opportunities on the search, just like any neighborhood. In the story, the little girl finds something beautiful because she searches. And because she searches, she finds beauty everywhere. The same is true for us. This community is where we search together for what it means to be human. It takes work and it takes patience. But once we get started, we find that meaning is everywhere we look, and we have much to learn from each other.

"Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead," or what it will mean to any of us. What we can do is make something of ourselves and what we are given; and shape it, like a work of art, into something we believe in. It will be something beautiful. That is what it means to be human. It will be something we give to the world each time we come together in community.

Readings for this sermon include Something Beautiful, by Sharon Dennis Wyeth, The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, and The Red Notebook, by Paul Auster.