All Creatures Great and Small

We humans are creatures great and small.  We are here for a short while, and then, reluctantly, we disappear.  Who are we?  We can be amazingly courageous and caring.  We can sacrifice our own lives for the sake of others.  We can be nice.  We can be mean. We can be selfish and sacrifice someone else’s life so that we may survive.  We have the capacity to act well and not so well.  We love, and we hate.  We care about others but when stressed can become self-centered and self-obsessed

What are we?  We are human creatures or animals.  We are ambiguous and inconsistent by nature.

We are limited, vulnerable, fragile, arrogantly independent and terribly dependent at the same time.  We can be wounded by other creatures.  We are a species that kills its own kind in large numbers through wars and genocides.  We can be courageous and cowardly.  And we remember with plays, books, movies and narratives what we have done, lament the awful terror and madness, and then do it all over again.

We are human animals.  We have been acting like this for a long time.

The Biblical texts compare us to sheep.  We are cute, furry, and independent but not too smart.  We are easily led astray by shiny objects and goals set by unrelenting appetites and desires.  When young or even older, we can be irrational, get lost often and need to be found and to find ourselves.  True for some more than others.  We can be religious and not religious.

We are great and small.  We are here, and we disappear. 

When all is said and done, Joseph Epstein has it right: “All men and women are born, live, suffer and die. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die, or the times and conditions of our death.  But within all this choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live, courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift.  We decide what is important and what is trivial.  What makes us significant is what we do or refuse to do.  We decide and we choose and as we decide and choose, we define our lives.”