Friday, May 13, 2022

Playing at the Role of Being Human

The spirits of grieving and of romantic love are characteristically human and lean atheist. Grief claims that there is no way to bring people back from the dead, and romantic love claims that your "exceedingly great reward" is a human being and not God -- two dimensions of atheism.

There is a sense in which such feelings, as real as they are, are spiritually risky, and can set themselves up as more real than God, who is actually the most real. And yet, if we do not feel them, how can we be human? If we are not human, then ... certainly we are not trusted by humans as much, for being alien to them, and maybe one could say that there's something inherently wrong with being a human who is not maximally human, or who is alien to humanness.

Jesus wept, even though he didn't have to. He knew better, but he didn't at the same time. Perhaps for us, we can inhabit the stage play of being human, and inhabit our roles in it, but still know that we have a reality outside it.

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