THERE ARE BUT TWO TYPES OF HUMANS: Is this a clue to what God is like?

In a recent Lectio Divina meditation, the topic of television, YouTube, short-form content, and podcasts came up as I reflected on how difficult the concept of God is for humans and how we each have our own ideas, shaped by the assumptions we make about the value of life around us. The Podcast spoke of how political parties (all of them) try to determine what each of us needs based on what they perceive our needs to be.

There are two types of people, in my experience: those who tell others what they need but don’t want anyone telling them the same, and those who let others’ needs come from the individual and then ask what they can do to help them achieve them. I know, it is oversimplifying!

I realized that this often-overlooked dynamic between humans might hold a clue to the meaning of God. God is an elusive idea because any concept that humans use must be human. Put another way: Whatever is received is received according to the disposition of the one who receives it. I know, it sounds like theoretical Catholicism, and I guess it just might be true. Because I am still alive and breathing, I still process what is against what I have experienced and decided what is good or evil for me. In terms of needs, I have them as an innate result of my humanity (which I hold to be grounded in the one who sets boundaries but is not confined by them). My notion of God, or yours, will differ because each person processes information, synthesizes it, and then tries to fit it into the six steps of the Divine Equation, based on the intellectual and emotional tools they have acquired. “I am not you, you are not me; God is not us; and we, most certainly, are not God.” Each nature has characteristics. The problem is that human nature cannot know these characteristics, which are divine in and of themselves. We only know what our limited human intelligence and reasoning reveal to us.

Whenever I try to discover a bit more of the mosaic of how I am not God, God is not me. Still, I am made in the image and likeness of God (I carry God’s DNA, as does each atom of matter). I use a human frame of reference to help my poor, limited brain process what can never actually be processed. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his masterpiece of theoretical Catholicism, the Summa Theologica (www.newadvent.org), assumes at the very beginning of his work that humans can never know God. “Who has known the mind of God and who has been His Counselor?”

We have neither the capacity nor the ability to know who God is, yet clues to this vexing puzzle are all around us in nature, in our innate desire for hearts that are restless until they rest in Absolute Truth. (St. Augustine). The notion of needs and how humans use needs to either fulfill human nature or try to control it is one such clue. Are we stuck in a cosmic loop with no way out but to do what nature tells us to do through instinct? I asked that question, and what I got back from the Holy Spirit was to look at me in terms of being in the image and likeness of God. Specifically to address the notion of free will and how God, if there is a God, would want us to for it to Heaven, but would not make it magically happen, like getting on a boat at the beginning of life and knowing that Heaven is automatically there?

I remember reading about Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (his view of the innate needs each person has that must be addressed to progress to higher, successive levels of maturation). Top of the list is “Self Actualization,” which is my need to know to meet my needs as they appear and disappear in my lifetime.

THE TWO TYPES OF HUMANS BY NEED

I realize I am oversimplifying a deeper idea. Still, this notion corresponds to my dual-citizenship hypothesis (St. Paul’s notion of the Earthly and its deeper human expression, the spiritual characteristics of the Spirit).

1. THOSE WHO TEND TO TELL OTHERS WHAT THEIR NEEDS ARE. –This type of person is very opinionated and acts as though they want to tell you what your needs are and then criticize all aspects of success or failure if you don’t meet their standards. No one can ever meet these standards. Ironically, these types do not exercise the same judgment when considering themselves and their needs. If you try the same approach (my way or the highway) on them, they get angry at your intrusion into their space. It only works one way. I see these types as very possessive of their own view of life and as holding others accountable for failing to meet their standards. This approach may happen with each gender, each race, each work environment, everyone you meet, even at Church. It gets intense when two people hold the same type. Any personality traits or anger management issues exacerbate all of this. More heat is usually generated than light.
2. THOSE WHO TRY TO DISCERN THE NEEDS OF OTHERS AND THEN HELP THEM TO REACH THEIR GOALS.– These types either do or do not realize the needs and characteristics of others, but instinctively want to help others discover who they are through mutual discernment, allowing the other to be free to discover the processes that lead to meeting their own needs. These types are often seen as weak and powerless by those who believe they control others’ needs.

GRANTED, THIS IS JUST A DISCUSSION PIECE. HOW DO THESE TWO VASTLY DIFFERENT TYPES OF APPROACHES TO HUMANITY TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT WHO GOD IS?

• We can glimpse who God is by looking at who we are as individuals.
• Which of these two types is most like your notion of God?
• Does God deny us freedom, even the freedom to fail our humanity, by dictating how Adam and Eve look at reality, or does God give them a choice to know good from evil (the highest level of our human attainment)? Read Chapters 2-3 of Genesis.
• We have reason for a reason. We have the freedom to choose what is right or wrong for our progression of consciousness and complexity (Teilhard de Chardin).
• Even though God is God, I can tell Him to for it to Hell and get thee behind me, as Jesus said to Satan.
• It is the power of our evolution to deny self (the center of my life that I choose to be God and hate to be told by anyone). This is an act of will that runs counter to the human tendency toward self-fulfillment and self-actualization (Maslow). It makes no sense.
• When thinking about who God is, which humans can only do by looking at who humans are, then extrapolating the analogy, the argument from many agnostic friends is that if God is so good, he would know what humans need and give it to them without them having to extract it from the experiences of life.
• If God is so good, why doesn’t he make humans do what is good and be done with this spirituality nonsense? Here I make God into my own image and likeness, but with a peculiar twist. If I tell others what they need and force them into my patterns of thinking and doing, then my notion of who God should be is based on my disposition.
• In creating Adam and Eve (all of us), God is the second type of person who wants us to be able to choose good or evil without consequences (at least not until our final judgment).
• God creates the human species, according to the Archetypal Story of What it means to be Human (Genesis). Then there is a text, one so very innocent as to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the warning that, if you choose to eat, you will surely die. The freedom to choose is at the core of what it means to be human. Adam and Eve, we know, chose poorly and ate of the fruit, but only because the Snake (Satan) put other options out there and used their human nature against them.
• We know the results. We experience them every waking day, and we are tempted every day to become mere humans without God by that same snake who tries to seduce us into making poor choices (sin).
• This second type of person, one who asks what needs are and then helps us reach them, is the Christ Principle. Jesus comes to us to help us without the need to know more, love at the deepest level of our humanity, and to know and love the truth that is outside of the corruption of human nature, wounded by the sin of our origins.

God gives each of us (no barriers, no favorites, except maybe the Blessed Mother)the right to make choices based on our reason. That actually sounds like the Devil, who “…roams the earth like a lion seeking whom he may devour.”

The discovery of who God is, when viewed through this duality of approaches to human needs, seems contradictory. If God is such a powerful Being, why doesn’t God reveal the truth to us through infused knowledge? It is certainly easier on humans. It is that pesky gift of freedom to choose between good and evil that lies at the core of human existence. God can create Adam and Eve so that they do not have to make a choice (unfortunately, the wrong one), and would not that be the more loving way to do it?

Catholicism is the way of life Christ authorized for us. Self or others? In choosing God’s will to be done, we, ironically, use Christ’s power and energy to lift us to the next level of our evolution, becoming adopted sons and daughters of the Father.

Like Christ, the Church is both the depository and repository of what Christ wanted each individual to experience, so that we would be free to choose to move beyond a human existence weighed down by the trappings of a multiplicity of strange gods and vendors selling their way as the truth.

I am that nexus that must choose to move to a deeper level of my evolution with the assistance and energy from the living Christ (Eucharist) not only to choose to be an adopted son or daughter of the Father, but to take up the cross of martyrdom that comes from trying to live out my destiny while still tied to the effects of the original sin of Adam and Eve.

To reach us in each age, in each of our hearts, the Catholic Church is the vehicle Jesus chose to convey the authentic way, what is truth absolutely, and to lead a life that culminates in existing at the highest level of evolution in a different place, yet consistent with our human experiences.

Because each human is made in the image and likeness of God, we can catch a glimpse of who God is by heeding Christ’s words in Scripture and the teachings of the Magisterium, as guided by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus tells us that God knows what we need, better than we do, but it only takes asking, seeking, and knocking, sometimes many times, to place ourselves in the presence of Christ in that upper room of our inner self and wait. Jesus wants us to want to be on that deeper level because it brings us closer to what Heaven will be like after we die.

Jesus knows our needs. All we need to do is be in that Divine Presence before the Blessed Sacrament or in the silence of that upper room of our inner selves and wait, then “Do What He Tells You”.