Don’t you love it when a quote rattles around your head for a time, and you get to ponder it? I’ve been haunted this week by two quotes from two American female authors, which is kind of appropriate since it’s Women’s History Month.
One of the quotes is from Celestine Sibley’s essays in Especially at Christmas (Doubleday, 1969). I was introduced to this book thanks to Earl Poplin, who shared it with me because it was a favorite of his and his wife Hilda. Sibley worked for the newspaper, and as a wonderful writer who captures difficult and powerful truths from Atlanta’s past, including a pathological liar named Mrs. Arizona Bell and the homeless yet once prominent Miss Lucy.
Throughout the chapters she reminds us of the great needs that surround us, and how many people fall through the cracks. All we can do is try to help, to listen, and to pay attention to them. We are tempted to ignore the problems around us because they interrupt us and our best-laid plans. It’s much easier to dismiss or ignore people, and we are quick to judge others and ourselves. But as Mrs. Bell asks, “Ain’t it hard for us human beings to be human?”
This idea is a subtle way to capture human sin. We are at our best when we are truly human and humane – respectful, kind, understanding, and patient. But it’s oddly hard for us to be truly human. We find it hard to do those things and so we fall into difficult choices, patterns, habits, and lifestyles. Jesus said in Matthew 11:30 that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” and when we are at our best (as God created us to be) then things are easy. But it’s also so easy to fall into being our worst selves and less humane.
Our guide to our humanity is God’s pattern and instruction, as set forth in the Old and New Testaments and especially in the life of Jesus. We are to exemplify what the American author Marilynne Robinson says about the book of Genesis (and the other quote that keeps rattling around my skull): “An argument that I make in the book,” Robinson says, puckishly implying a counterargument to contemporary mores [beliefs], “is that God is patient, loves human beings, suspends judgment and is not inclined toward punitive behaviors.”