Rector's Letter September 2007

Dear Friends,

“Well, I’m only human!”

How many times have you heard that said? What does it mean? Usually the phrase is uttered as an excuse for some shortcoming or another, and implies that the person is not God, is not super-human, is not and never will be, perfect. But is that all that differentiates us as humans? What is a human being?

These thoughts were running through my mind after having watched various animals. Last night we were in a house with an assortment of dogs and cats. The collies spent the entire evening watching the antics of a kitten, their whole bodies concentrating, perfectly benignly, on its every movement. We had a collie which would do the same with a football – when actually playing the game with the boys, she would have stood comparison with David Beckham; she was brilliant – but why did she feel the need to watch the ball when it was still? Other breeds of dogs do not exhibit this kind of behaviour. It’s been bred into them – it’s what makes them sheep dogs as opposed to retrievers or hunters. But they’re all dogs and will more than happily interbreed and so re-muddle these instincts.

If a human being were to act like the collies, we would label them obsessive – a derogatory term. Yet some people’s ‘obsessions’ have been the making of them – Bill Gates was probably obsessed with computers. You have to be kind of obsessed to be a concert pianist and practise for hours on end. I wonder what the world would be like if we only allowed musicians to breed with musicians, mathematicians with mathematicians? Would we end up with distinct breeds like the dogs? We rightly hold up our hands in horror at any such experimentation.

It is worth noting, though, that if breeds of dogs have different instincts – the spaniel was totally out of tune with the collies – so we, too, react and behave differently according to the type of person we are. I’ve always maintained that I’m wary of Personality Tests like Myres Briggs – they’re fascinating and certainly when I did such a test, uncomfortably accurate, but they can label people. I felt I’d been pinned down and labelled – a Westie rather than an Alsatian and that was that.   

It does reinforce the warning about being careful of giving advice to others, and even worse of declaring that you know exactly how someone else feels in any given situation. We can genuinely sympathise but we only know, or can imagine or think we know, how we ourselves would feel in similar situations. Human beings have an enormously greater range of emotions, thought patterns and above all choices than any dog. No matter how much one says, “Well I’m only human”, we do have the choice to give in to our instincts or resist them. 

I don’t think any of these thoughts have brought me much nearer to answering the question ‘What is a human?’ Perhaps we just hold on to the reassurance that we are made in God’s image, that God thought so highly of us that he was willing to send his Son for us. We are in other words not only human.

We can learn much about our own behaviour by studying and caring for other animals (like Johnny Morris’s and Desmond Morris’s different reflections), but we are called to be like Jesus and can ask for the Holy Spirit to be active within us. We then have a different and far more responsible role in the world.

Janice

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