We are always human becomers……

David Runcorn’s Spirituality Workbook continues to give me good cause to pause, and ponder. He writes:

At a very confused and painful stage in my life I remember saying to a friend, ‘I don’t think I believe any more.’

‘You don’t sound to me like someone who has lost his faith, she replied. ‘You sound like someone who is having to live out of a new part of himself. You are still a stranger to this "you" that is emerging. So it is not surprising if you don’t yet know what faith means.’

This honest, and compassionate recognition that we are all persons in process, that we are not yet definitively who God calls us to be, and that indeed what makes us human, loveable and fascinating, is our capacity to grow and change. Of course there must be a fundamental continuity that gives content to our personal identity, but there is also something necessarily provisional in who we are at each stage of life.

Earlier in the book Runcorn indicates what he call ‘core truths about what it means to be human’. Amongst these is the statement,

‘We are becomers. We are unfinished. We are lives in process. On the wall of Chartres cathedral in France there is a sculpture of God creating Adam. Adam has half emerged from the dust of the ground and is resting, (or has slumped) against God’s knee, which he is clutching strongly with his left hand. The sculptor has chosen to freeze the action at mid-point. Adam is not yet a complete human being. He is halfway between death and life, being and non-being, dust and divine image. And so are we. We are always human becomers – growing, journeying, exploring.

Amongst the many implications of such a dynamic view of human being, becoming and identity is that as a human being I can come to temrs with incompleteness. And all those experiences that evidence this truth about who I am becoming, such as my mistakes, failures, limitations, discontents, desires, regrets, fulfilments, frustrations – why cite the entire lexicon of human finitude – they are simply the truth and reality of what it means to be me, but also what it means to be me with potential, me in process of becoming.

Earlier I was reading that remarkable ending to 1 Corinthians 13 – ‘Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’ Till then who I am, only God knows. According to 1 John 3.2, ‘Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’

And as a Christian, that is what defines me. Not my sin; not my finitude; not my achievements. But, ‘we shall be like him’; we will know ourselves, even as we are fully known. Till then we are being formed of the dust of our finitude, by a grace infinite in possibility, and endlessly original in creativity.