In a week when Oceania has seen a huge change, I was fortunate to see an art show that strangely took me back mentally to the massacre in the mosque in Christchurch. The note ‘They are us’ written by Jacinda Ardern captured the essence of our multicultural societies and the shift to a more inclusive community.
Dr Daniel Connell, in his art show CoViv, captures this sense of community. How frustrating it must have been to have lived within the shadow of a temporary visa during covid times, challenged to find employment, uncertain about the future.
Both Ardern and Connell remind me of our shared humanity. Additionally, in preparing a lesson on Easter I listened to a Youtube by Fr James Marchionda OP last Easter in which he addressed the struggle of Easter in war-torn Ukraine. We are all human. Connell captured it beautifully on the canvas, Ardern cited her humanity in her need to step down, Fr James honoured the suffering across the globe in spite of humanity. We are all innately human. How we express our humanity matters greatly. Words matter. Images matter. Artistic expression matters. They matter because they speak to something deep within us, our humanity.
Within the Catholic Tradition we are taught from an early age that Jesus was fully human and fully divine – a challenging concept to rationalise. We also learn that he was the perfet expression of humanity. We tend to mess it up a bit. And we say well – we are only human. But to be fully human is to be like Jesus, so perhaps, in our flaws, we are failing our humanity, not giving in to it. To what extent do we use everything we have in our own human existence to be the best we can be? We seem to be a bit Augustinian saying ‘Not yet God’. We want to have our cake and eat it too. Maybe later, God, we will do more, be more. Later I will be the amazing human you created me to be.
Perhaps this is our escape. We say ‘only human’ to give ourselves a way out, an excuse. In doing so, however, have we then negatively impacted how we view our fellow humans – that being human is not, on it’s own, awesome? Is this why we tend to offer respect not to simply a fellow human, but to a fellow scholar, a fellow religious, a fellow familiar?
If we painted our view of our global brethren in humanity would we see beyond colour, race, ethnicity? For how long will we continue to operate in a ‘they’ and ‘us’ world?
The Female Theologian 