then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7, NRSV)
I learned the other day that the most-liked tweet of all time is the tweet that President Obama posted the day of the Charlottesville protests in August. He quoted a statement from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
This quote gets at the heart of one of the thorniest questions that philosophers and people of faith have asked pretty much since Adam and Eve ate the apple. Are humans naturally good or bad/sinful? I tend to answer that question by saying, “Yes…to both!” If I’m honest with myself, though, it also depends on my mood that day or what I’m expecting from someone else.
I was reading Psalm 103 a few days ago and was struck by these verses: “Like a parent feels compassion for their children–that’s how the Lord feels for those who honor him. Because God knows how we’re made, God remembers we’re just dust” (Psalm 103:12-13, CEB). On the one hand, this seems like a pretty bleak outlook on the nature of humans. Just dust? But it was convicting for me, not because of how I view myself, but of how I view others and sometimes (many times?) have unrealistic expectations, even though we are reminded of our dust-ness every Ash Wednesday (seen above).
If someone doesn’t respond to my wishes and requests in exactly the way I want to them to, I confess that, too often, my knee-jerk reaction is to be be at least slightly perturbed. Why won’t this person just do what I want them to? Why would s/he blow me off like that? Why is s/he insensitive? Why? Why? Why?
God remembers we’re just dust. And so God has compassion. It was and is a helpful reminder that humans are, well, humans. Capable of glorious things and capable of being dust. It’s not to say that we don’t hold others accountable or call out injustice and hate. But, for me anyway, this passage from the psalm is a reminder that the person I interact with is dust, but also the one for whom God feels compassion. And the one for whom I should feel the same.