Staying Human

On the day the twin towers fell, while the steel and concrete rained down and the clouds of white dust rose, when we still knew nothing, I watched on a small, boxy television in the corner of my first-period class as the news anchors groped for words. Girls cried. Boys sat atop their desks instead of in their chairs, as if nothing about the day could be normal.

Biga de la Passio, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

My English teacher that year was Mr. Ault, a man who arrived at school every day with his tall frame folded into a faded Volkswagen Beetle. He was the sort of teacher who encouraged us to look up curse words in the dictionary and taught us tai chi on the football field and never bothered assigning seats.

A few months after 9/11, he brought in a photocopied newspaper article about a group of Maasai herdsmen in rural Kenya who, in an extraordinary gesture of compassion, had donated 14 cows to the American people. Yes, the gift was by some measures impractical, Mr. Ault said. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was that the Maasai, living on a remote plain without a skyscraper in sight, had no trouble speaking the universal language of grief. They responded with self-giving generosity. They stayed human. In the face of a tragedy too bitter for speech, while the rest of us were all scraping a space inside ourselves for a world capped by the day’s body counts, they did not say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Instead they gave their most valued, sacred possessions, extending them in solidarity to strangers an ocean away. The question for us, said Mr. Ault, was how we would choose to stay human, too.

On days when the darkness seems, once again, to engulf everything, and clouds erase the very stars, I lie awake and think about that day in English class—about what it takes to stay human.

How easily the pain of others can turn us inward (or is it just me?). We hoard our sacred selves against the day of tragedy, cocooned, as if reaching out our hands would infect us. We trade courage for safety and compassion for apathy, and in the exchange chip away at our own humanity.

I have begun to think of Christmas as an invitation to become more human, with all the aching it requires. After all, God’s response to the endless tableau of suffering (admittedly confusing to the recovering fixers among us) was just that: to wade into the muck of our experience as a fellow sufferer. To welcome the frailty of our frames, bear our wounds, and die our death. And, somehow, to make us whole.

I know a woman who, after her husband died, used to lie all night in the garden of a Catholic church in front of an image of Christ crucified. The only thing that gave her peace was knowing that, long ago, He had sounded the depths of her pain. Like her, if the continued brokenness of the world ever makes redemption feel like a fable, it is the suffering of Jesus—not His victory—that restores my hope. I am like Thomas, to whom He said, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into the wound in my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

So this Christmas, as we remember the coming of own "Man of sorrows," may we risk ourselves, if only a little. May we give space to our own yearnings and the world’s deep wounds. May we sit with the grieving and give them no advice. May we set aside our choice anaesthesia and offer our sacred selves, generously and without recompense. May we pay the debt we owe to love one another, and never look away from the image of God in ourselves and our neighbors. In short, may we stay human, and may He make us whole.