What Does It Mean to Be Human?

a reflection on Til We Have Faces and U2

What does it mean to be human?

Is it to create - to built and to paint, to write or to sing? Is it to learn - to look at the world around us and wonder at the unexplainable, to try to whittle the metaphysical down to theories and hypotheses?

Is it to live the way man was created to live, in a world wonderfully made, all the while denying the existence of his Maker?

Some can find a temporary high in fame or fortune. They revel in adoration, craving attention, to love and be loved. Yet, rich or poor, they all find the same end. Those who have climbed to the top find nothing but emptiness and oblivion before the cold promise of death and the passing of time. Many waste their lives striving after the promises of a broken world. They feel within them a deep longing for fulfillment, for something - or someone - great and powerful who can answer their desires.

This longing, unique to mankind, is an echo of the imago dei - the Image of God, graven into every human from the day the first word of their story was written.

But mankind refuses to acknowledge this. In their relentless attempts to “be true to themselves,” they blot away the Image of God.

In his book, Til We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis describes this through the words of Orual, who declares that all men and women are born with an ugliness of the soul. It is this ugliness which keeps them from acknowledging and understanding the ‘Word’ created in them, with which they may speak to the gods. It is this ugliness which Orual spent a majority of her book attempting to hide.

In a sense, the veil which hid her from the the world also obscured her from fully perceiving the Divine. Yet she was not ignorant. She saw the beauty of Psyche and heard the voice of the god speaking to her on the Mountain. Psyche’s longing for the place of beauty was also her longing, though she would not (at the time) fully realize or understand it.

There are lines in the song “Mysterious Ways” (by U2) which echo the final chapters of Til We Have Faces. Throughout this song, the singer speaks of a woman, a ‘sister,’ who is never physically described or explicitly explained. Yet several lines give hints at a deeper meaning.

“You’ve been running away, from what you don’t understand...

“One day you’ll look back, and you’ll see
Where you were held now by this love
While you could stand there
You could move on this moment
Follow this feeling.”

These lines echo Orual’s words when she first beheld the god of the mountain. They also reflect the way the modern world views the Divine. The very idea of God, in His true holiness and power, both repels and enthralls them. In the face of His terrible beauty and hallowed presence, they find everything they ever longed for yet reject it all the same.

Perhaps this woman is to the songwriter (or, Johnny) as Psyche was to Orual and as the imago dei is to all mankind.

“Johnny, take a dive with your sister in the rain
Let her talk about the things you can’t explain...”

As Orual realized, as Lewis wrote, “How can we speak face-to-face with the gods til we have faces?”

How can we know what it means to be human if we deny the image of God?

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