Are You Human?

Dear Eugene,

Can a person truly love another person while hating someone else?

Do you find my question weird?  Somehow I think if there's a person who would allow a question such as this to blaze across his mind that person might be you.  How lucky I am to have a weird pastor!

Can a person truly love another person while loving someone else less?  Now this gets yet closer to what I am asking.

And you know I don't mean a rival lover, a love triangle.  I mean to ask Can a person truly love any person while loving anyone else less?  Can a mother truly love her child, any child, while loving some other child less?  Can I be fair to a human being while being unjust towards another human being, any human being, in all mankind?

 Undivided loyalty, fully completely given to everyone at all times, that seems to be what love is asking of us.

How so?

Christmas is a season of giving, they say.  But why?  Who says?  Why give?  To whom do I owe a giving?  To what extend should I give to satisfy the call?  At what level can I stop giving without betraying my half-heartedness and finally--or more like, right from the beginning, my hypocrisy?

If we are to stop loving, then why start loving?  Why not be thoroughly cynical for the sake of honesty?  If not everyone is having a seat at the table, what moral right do I have to pull out a chair and claim my place?  To do so I must believe in some sort of privilege or entitlement given to me or earned by me, either way a game of survival of the fittest.

This is no clever mind-bender.  The question is as straight as it is cold.

I can't see any ifs ands or buts, no nuanced gradient to fine-tune our divided commitment to all mankind and cure our dis-ease of unfaithfulness.  We can claim a degree of mitigated callousness, but not the title "Imperfect Lover."  Love is anything but imperfect.  How can we put a limit on what is meant to be limitless and still claim to have answered the limitless call?


In Toni Erdmann, one of the most extraordinary movies in my recent memory, a father asks his daughter a most bitter question in a manner almost sweet, "Are you human?"

He must have an idea of what "being human" is, or from what pedestal is he to judge?  Or is his alienation from this father-daughter relationship mutual and his loneliness shared?  He finally needs the distance of becoming something "not human" to go deeper in his search.

Toni Erdmann has towering ambition for the pettiest human grumble.  Can a person truly know what she is dissatisfied about without making a case for her silliest, most trifling discontent? the movies seems to ask.  It's a story about Greek gods.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Yours, Alex

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