Human Beings Being Human

The fact of being human means we’re so capable of forgetting what being human entails, as we’re just so capable of being errantly human within our human beings. There is nothing so common as human beings being human. What more reason do we need for the compassion of grace than that?

The key fact of life so far as ‘human beings being human’ is concerned is that the broken bring up the broken; the blind lead the blind; two wrongs don’t make one right.

The only hope that humanity has against the incomparable backdrop of despair—the broken state of human beings being human—is the grace of God, known relationally through the extension of forgiveness of one to another.

Only in forgiveness is there the abiding sense of commitment toward compassion.

The Compassion in Forgiveness

To understand the brokenness in human beings being human: this is our role as compassionate human beings under God.

In such an understanding we comprehend the colossal chasm between God—who is perfect in divinity—and our humanness—for our fundamental lack of all-inclusive moral reasonability, rationality, and logic.

We only have to know ourselves personally, as we detect our own falsity and fallibility, to know how the next person is situated. Our moral position is highly compromised, and always will be.

Given 1) our lack, and yet, 2) the sheer perfection of grace, we hold both truths in tension.

The certainty in us hurting others, and the certainty in God providing the way for healing, means that compassion toward forgiveness is the key.

As human beings we’re all different, yet strangely we’re all very much the same.

As we imagine how we recoil from hurt, by various forms of anger, we suddenly understand where other people are at when they are hurt. And yet there are many worse off; many who have not been graced by the privilege of a loving upbringing; those who are challenged all the more by grace, compassion, and forgiveness.

We are highly impressionable. We have become who we are according to how we have been brought up. We are objects of our experience. And so how can anybody truly empathise with another person other than God? Yet, we’re called to understand—to experience grace, to draw upon compassion, and to extend forgiveness.

Our only hope for understanding is to invest, via faith, in the compassion of forgiveness, because of our imperfections.

We draw benefit in the perfection of God’s healing when we submit to the truth: we need compassion and we need to be compassionate. In cases of human beings being human we need to forgive and be forgiven.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.