Editorial Introduction
Andy Singleterry
Servant Partners Press
This issue of The Mural is called “Humans of _______.” The title comes from the long-running blog “Humans of New York,” a collection of profiles of New York citizens. Each piece introduces you to some of our neighbors, either individually or collectively. Servant Partners exists to love our neighbors. We are happy to present some of them to you.
This theme has got me thinking about the nature of humanity. We are all “humans of” somewhere, but what does it mean to call ourselves human? My favorite answer is that we are angels who… excrete. Feel free to substitute your preferred synonym for excretion—any of the words make the point. Humans are angels who excrete.
We are not literally angels, but we are like angels—spiritual beings with tremendous capacities for insight, communication, beauty, beneath only the divine in our elegant complexity. In the words of Psalm 8:5, we are “little lower than God, and crowned… with glory and honor.” The NRSV translates elohiym as “God” there, but the Hebrew is plural and could be rendered “angels” or “the gods.” As Shakespeare said, through the mouth of Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”
But, though the paragon, we are still animals. That’s the meaning of the excrement—we are animals, with all the needs and limits of any other creature. As high as our spirits might reach, we are anchored to bodies which must do all kinds of animal things like eat and procreate and, ultimately, die. The excrement is such a scandal because it reminds us that, one day, we will die. In the words of Psalm 103:14, God “knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust.” Hamlet knows it too: in the next line after the one above, he calls us the “quintessence of dust.”
We humans of _____ are great and beautiful, but we are dust. Let us introduce you to some other humans who exhibit the same shocking contradiction.
Andy co-leads the Servant Partners site in San Jose, California and is Editor of SP Press.