I wish to offer you a few comments at the beginning of this conference.
First, our question, What is a person? would appear to be a question looking for a definition as its appropriate answer. But in parallel with those in the Gospel who looked for a sign, we may say that this is a question in response to which no definition shall be given.
Working at a definition might be a useful way to get ourselves thinking what a person is. But to find a definition is dangerous, tempting us into thinking or feeling that we know what the person is. We can reduce a person to a few words. And then we do not know them at all.
If a chaplain were offered a definition, a true sound definition, would he want it? Would it be useful for human and humanising work? Would a chaplain armed with a definition be safe on the wards or in the corridor? To have a definition of the person, or to be seeking to find one in relating to persons, is incompatible with listening, which is a fundamental mode of chaplaincy practice. For listening does not begin or seek to end with definition, but is open to whatever is given in the speaking, which may be beyond definition, both in its complexity and its mystery and in its demands for a response. An adequate response to a present person, a person being listened to, is unlikely to be a definition.
In this wholistic age, surgeons are ceasing to attend to the headache in bed 6 and know that they deal with – a person? Chaplains have long since ceased to search for souls, and attend to – persons? That may seem to be an advance, but it is not far enough. For the person in bed 6 has a name, has lived with a name all her (she has gender too, and ‘person’ sounds ungendered) life, and she feels herself as this named person, Mrs Smith. What is a person without a name? But a name points to the person as a respected particular reality, which nevertheless is not to be defined. A name indicates the uniqueness, the unrepeatability, of a particular person, and calls us to respect this one, whereas a definition of a person applies to all who are persons. Now Mrs Smith in bed 6 may never really have thought of herself as a person, in all her life; first she was Molly Brown and then she met Josh Smith, and has now settled into being the matriarch he helped her to become, Mrs Smith, or Gran. Being a person is for her like a dream, in which float all the might-have-beens of life – Mrs Smith might have been Queen if she had had a different father, or Prime Minister if she had grown up in a grocer’s shop – but Mrs Smith has long since stopped dreaming and got on with being her busy self, her named identity which is not her private image only but is the effect of the way she shares her time and her being with her family, and her neighbours. She may not be altogether pleased with being Mrs Smith, as it is turning out, specially now she is in bed 6 and all these young nurses call her Molly, but even now she is not going to pursue the folly of bothering about being ‘a person’. So she doesn’t want any chaplain coming to talk to her in oppressive abstractions about it.
(This story may be quite silly but like many silly things it has its use. I have no experience in being a chaplain though I have a little in being myself. Why have I made up this story about Mrs Smith – would it be the same if it were about Mr Smith?)
Since the question, What is a person? cannot safely or truly be looking for a definition, there must be some other explanation of the importance and fascination it has for us. We are given some clues from the story of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3. The central ‘person’ here is God, but, so long as we are careful, we may take God’s self-presentation to Moses as a clue to the way those created in the image of God are to be regarded. God is here associated with remarkable phenomena: Moses’ attention is caught by the bush burning, he turns aside to see this ‘strange thing’. He is thus already prepared for the instruction to take off his shoes from his feet, for the ground on which he stands is holy. The Bush is not God, the ground is not God: the one attracts engagement, the other establishes a cordon of respect. The person is somewhere here but not defined or confined. Then Moses discovers that he deals with a person who claims and commissions him, who calls him on the way to danger and to service and he wants to know more about this dangerous person. And God tells him, but in a way which resolutely prevents definition: I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE – and you are invited to let yourself be accompanied in the life of obedience and faith, bringing the enslaved people out of Egypt to serve God, and then you will find out something more of this I AM (cf Exodus 34). No definition can be given at any point; no violation of the freedom of God; but nevertheless, God becomes known and thus develops the self- knowing of people like Moses.
Is this truth about the person so strange to us in our secularity? Consider our contemporary interest in human rights, which has been focussed for fifty years by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its many derivatives. As far as I can see, this declaration does not define the person, or the human being. It assumes that human beings are obvious and that we should work inclusively: anything that looks at all like a human being, or can by any means voice a claim to being counted as one, has certain rights. That human rights do not rest on a definition of the person is one reason why human rights have fuzzy edges – it is possible that animals and the inanimate creation might be reckoned as having rights because they share significant characteristics with human beings – that they exist as God’s vulnerable, transitory creatures for instance. Now we have come to ask whether computers should have rights, if they add to their super-fast computing skills, some kind of feeling and a dependent, derived self- awareness. There is indeed real pressure to define the distinguishing border between human beings and computers, in addition to the age-long quest to have a workable, and morally defensible, distinction between human beings and (other) animals. Even so, marking these borders is not the same as defining the person. A person is not simply a thinking being visible to human beings, who is not a computer or one of what we call animals. Human rights have not defined the person, but rather have marked out the space within which this undefined type of beings should have freedom to live and flourish in a variety which will break all definition. In their present form, human rights conventions have the special, essential, but limited function of enabling the legal protection of the space for undefined persons. In human rights, people have the right to life – but what a particular person’s life is only comes out in the living and there can be no definition, until the books are opened by the only One able to read them fully and fairly, at the Last Judgment. In faith, it is possible to know the gist of that definition now: the justification of the sinner by grace is an enabling permission to live with joy in the fellowship of God.
Another way of making the same sort of point is to ask, What is the difference between a torture chamber and a hospital? This is a joke question with serious intent and could be partially answered with a bit more serious jokeyness: A hospital differs from a torture chamber because it has an ethics committee. Do ethics committees have or work from a definition of the person? Empirical research would tell us. I suspect we would find they do not. Their work is much more adequately described by saying that in various ways ethics committees protect the space for the indefinable in situations where the space for the person gets very small, thanks to natural mortality and vulnerability and the pressures of finance, technology and other organised practice. Hospitals are hospitable to persons because they leave definitions of the person to others. Torturers need definitions in order to ease their conscience and their suppressed, distorted but surviving humanity – it is easier to torture those who have been defined out of the human community, or are deprived of the right to be treated as persons.
Now that the point of the indefinability of the person as a being living free in sacred, protected space has been sufficiently laboured, we are brought to a question which lies at the heart of what it is to be a person. What am I, a person, to do with such freedom? Persons are not merely to be affirmed, as though being respected puts them beyond critical enquiry. Is the freedom within which the person lives the freedom to be an irresponsible, a-social individual? That such freedom can at least be imagined means that being a person is to be exposed to fundamental temptations to dishonesty and folly: people may conceive themselves as self-sufficient, despite the inescapable dependency of all human being. Once we fall for that illusion, we may stumble into the path of being self-serving, self-possessing, self-assertive, even self-loving (which is now given respectability by some superficial pastoral practice driven by a proper objection to people’s being self-loathing and self-abasing.) Even legitimate self-protection is limited by the possibility that sacred space of the person is to be used for self-giving. Jesus’ dangerous invitation to lose life for his sake and the Gospel’s has been exploited by some to strip away the cordons of respect within which others can live and flourish; but when we hear it as a call addressed to ourselves, it illumines the mystery of our own personhood and gives light for our path in life (cf John 21.21-22; Romans 14.4) We are called to self-giving, not as a covert form of self-aggrandisement, a means to achieve a highly virtuous individuality of which we can boast proudly, but one which gives space to others and lives in relation with others. We are as persons called to be hospitable to strangers, to make space within our own space for others, and thus to find ourselves with others: this is the structure of love. Miroslav Volf has explored these questions in his notable book, Exclusion and Embrace (Abingdon 1996). In this area, I, with many others, owe a large debt to Paul. Behind this paragraph lies his distinction between living according to ‘flesh’ and Spirit, developed in, for example, Galatians 5.13- 26.
I come to my second comment. I do not know what we are about to receive as I have seen only the programme of this conference, which is like reading the menu; I can only guess at what its positive content and peculiar excellences will be – that I shall learn as the meal arrives. But from the shape and wording of the programme, I risk the suggestion that there’s a hole in our programme.
We are to consider perspectives at the beginning and at the end of life – but what about what is in between? Are the beginning and the end of life points at which it becomes clear what a person is as a whole? Is the programme medically modelled, despite all that chaplains and others say about the limits of medical models? For the beginning and end of life produces more business for healthcare professionals and raises more difficult issues than life in between. Here they deal with life and death issues most frequently and their power to determine life and being is seen to be at both its most helpful and its most dangerous. A high proportion of medical care and research and ethical consideration cluster round the beginning and end of life.
It may be that this focus on the beginning and end of life is the best way to explore the person, when we tackle that question through the experience of healthcare practice.
The missing middle does not necessarily harm our exploration, since all questions may be implicitly asked and answered through the beginning and the end. But perhaps not. There is a real difference between beginning and end, and middle. Focussing on the beginning and the end means taking the patient, or the recipient of healthcare, as the research material in our enquiry. Suppose, however, that the person is known when a responsible self-giving being comes to him/herself as a worker, acting for and with others? Is using the power of science or management or moral suasion merely a technical add-on to the essential being of the person? Is the person a private essence hidden within the outer masks of life, or is the person as much in the outward relationships and activities, as in the secret parts? Ask yourself, would you prefer to go back to being a baby, or do you find your personhood in anticipating whatever decrepitude may come to you in the fullness of time – or maybe earlier? Or do you not prefer to think of yourself as you are, in the middle of life, active not patient/passive?
Since chaplaincy is increasingly a ministry to healthcare staff, let us find out what a person is in the perspective of healthcare workers, people in the middle of life. Ethics in healthcare are designed to protect patients from abuse – by putting responsibility on staff and experts. So there is a side of ethics which tells us something about the workers. We may learn about the ethical worries, even distress, of responsible people and about their failures and frailty, but this route may not adequately highlight their positive power and achievements. Looking at another session in our programme, I wonder whether the psychological perspective will reinforce the patient-orientation of our quest for the person – though of course it could apply also to staff, for everyone has a psyche and even when it is not damaged and burdensome, it will be puzzling and play tricks on us. Sometimes people who have no need for specialist psychotherapeutic care know the relevance of religious ways of dealing with the complexity of their personal being, lamenting that ‘the good that I would I do not, and the evil which I would not, that I do’. And sometimes we talk and write at length about ourselves and others, because we are so fascinating.
If we were to seek to fill the missing middle in our programme, the ‘disabled perspective’ may do the job. For as I understand it, people with disabilities are concerned to be respected as they are and not to be treated as patients (‘Does he take sugar?). They witness to us all about being who we are in the active middle of life, not only taking responsibility for oneself but being of significance for others. Disability is sometimes turned into a clue or a symbol for understanding what it is for anyone to be human. Too easily everybody confesses to being disabled in some way or another. I hope we can avoid that – no one should make more of their limitations than they have to.
It is a false self-dramatisation for many of us to pretend that we are disabled, in body, mind or worldly estate. It is distasteful when well-off people say they know what it is to be poor, as they have only had one overseas holiday this year. This tack is akin to that sniffing out of good people’s sins which Bonhoeffer denounced as a false pastoral method. Those who are free of significant disability should be not exaggerate their minor difficulties. It is in quite the opposite direction that disabled people give the clue about what it is to be truly human. They live as fully and freely as possible, pursuing what they want or are called to do, solving problems and breaking through boundaries in the process. Disabled people are thus exemplars for finding ourselves as persons in the active middle of life.
In arguing this way, to flag the hole in our programme and to suggest it be filled, I am not implying that the beginning and end of life lack importance in our quest. The children and parents, the old and the dying, are fully human and deserve more than respect – we owe everyone the debt of love. It is dangerous and wrong to make distinctions between human beings on the grounds of their being at different stages of life, but there are real differences which must be considered. At the beginning of life, the person is largely potential, at the end of life, largely memory (hopefully with the individual’s own happy memories, but often only through the memories of others and sometimes not even that). In the middle, can the person be seen as a balanced relation of potential, which has not yet fully closed down, and memory, which is richly alert with a growing but not yet final stock? Potential and memory are the components of the person in the middle, who is thus always a relation between the beginning potential and the final remembered harvest. Is the person in the middle, however, only the mixture of these two? Is not the mature person really different from the child, who dreams in unconfined potential (the four year old grandson thinks I could, and should, build him a ladder to climb up to the moon – it will not be long before he knows enough about me and the cosmos to limit his ambitions to something more practical – and more interesting.)? And does the person in the middle not know memory as a tool enabling effective action (‘I have seen a case like this before so I know what to do’) which is very different from the remembering of the old, which is released from the obligation and opportunity of action?
So I would argue, however precariously, that in trying to answer the question, What is a person? we must attend to the active middle of life, where, as it happens, all of us in this study conference find ourselves at present. It would be bad if we behaved like powerful manipulators, whose basic and most evil device is to keep themselves hidden from scrutiny, as though they have no significance in the situation, while they examine and direct and define others who are the frontmen, under the spotlight. Part of the oddity about this question about the person is that truly working at it requires us to be free from self-concern, but at the same time, to take ourself as the primary material for thinking about the question. Know yourself – but also, don’t let your right hand know what your left hand does. We must not hide ourselves, which is an early step in the downwards spiral of fallen humanity, as the Genesis story reminds us, but rather come into the light and to walk in the light with others.
Given as the opening talk at the conference of the College of Health Care Chaplains in 1999. And was published in The Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy Oct 1999 (3/1) pp2-6.