To be human involves body and soul

The season of Lent, for us as Christians, is a time of reflection, a time to ponder what it means to be human in the midst of the world in which we live. The two stories of creation in the book of Genesis talk about us being created from the elements of the earth, from the very elements that created the universe, the stars, the planets and everything that exists. As we are reminded on Ash Wednesday: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Another part of our humanness is the breath of God, the breath of life itself that is illustrated in the story of how Adam and Eve came to be. For we are animated by God’s own breath, the ‘ ruach,’ the wind, that danced over the waters of chaos, the spirit of life that filled the lungs of the first human beings.

To be human, then, means to see ourselves as originating in the creative will of God, the creative will of the spirit of life, the creative will of the spirit of the universe.

The first chapter of Genesis talks about everything that was created from the beginning of time itself as being good. In the words of the writer, at the end of each day of creation, and in particular, the sixth day, we are told: “God saw all that he had made and indeed it was very good.”

All that God created, all that originated in the creative will of God, was made good and whole and complete, for all of life is holy, all of life is sacred.

To be human means seeing ourselves as having a whole nature, as living beings made up from the dust of the ground, the dust of the universe and from the breath of God, the wind, the spirit of life.

The author of Genesis writes: “Yahweh God fashioned man of dust from the soil, then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and thus man became a living being.”

In so doing, humans are given the breath of life in which both body and soul together are created to make humans whole and complete

Most of us have been raised in a culture which tends to separate the body from the soul, the physical from the spiritual. But in the Hebrew Scriptures, this kind of dualism, this separation between spirit and body is not found.

Rather the Hebrew Scriptures would say that the soul is the result of the spirit of God giving life to the body. And it is both body and soul together that forms a basic unity, a basic fullness and completeness that is often described as personality.