The holiday season. Lots of young families with little children. Feelings of nostalgia for those days of innocent children and more energy than I now possess. If only I… Easy to think but would we really do things better if we had another time around. Probably. We can learn from our mistakes. The trouble with being a parent is that the baby does not arrive with an instruction manual. You have to learn on the job, making it up as you go along. Then you arrive at the stage when they have minds of their own and your influence is more wishful thinking than real.
I keep thinking about the need for a theology of what it means to be human. I suppose the nearest thing we have to it is moral theology. But this is a practical guide to the do’s and don’t’s of living. It is not a metaphysics of human existence.
Part of the problem is that we have inherited the idea that a person is an individual entity, an ens, an individuum which inheres in the body, soul, person or whatever; that there is an irreducible substratum which is the real me and which perdures through all the growth, development and decline of the body. However, I don’t think there is an unchanging kernel. I think the Buddhists are more correct with their doctrine of anatta. Whatever ‘I’ am it is not a thing, an ens. First of all I am an agent; I act. Secondly, this agency is drawn into conscious existence in the first two years after birth. It is at first inchoate, blind, dumb and uncomprehending. Then, gradually, it becomes the nexus of a whole series of relationships which help it to refine its gross gropings, expand its perception and teach it to communicate both to itself and to others.
I say ‘I’ and ‘it’ for lack of better words. These terms are misleading if they are taken to imply an ens, a thing. They apply to the subject whose essence is that it is not a thing but a relationship. Here, again, the Buddhist idea of co-dependent origination can help.
One of the advantages of teaching is that sometimes you get asked questions which have been nagging away at the back of the mind without a satisfactory answer. But the asking of it in class and the need to produce a response of some kind sometimes elicits a solution. Lately we were discussing what it means to be human and comparing the Freudian, Sartrian and Christian interpretations, among others. I was trying to get across the idea that we are a process rather than an enduring entity such as a soul; that this process is a complex of constantly changing and interacting relationships; that it is not possible to say that we are, that we exist, in our own right independently, but that we are in the process of becoming what we are and are going to be; that this process cannot be considered apart from all the relationships which constitute it. ‘No man is an island etc.’ I was then asked about reincarnation and I suddenly saw clearly, for the first time, that reincarnation is not possible. I could not have existed in a previous incarnation because the unique set of relationships which make me never existed before. I was then asked – what about babies who die shortly after birth? They are inchoate, not yet fully persons. I saw that there is more to this tiny bud which has not yet opened and experienced the richness of life and relationships. Here too is a complex of relationships, smaller and simpler than the rich intricacy of an adult, but beautiful nonetheless and with a place in the living tapestry we weave with our lives.