Seeing people through the vision of faith received at baptism

Some years ago, one of the Nuns in my Community published a biography of Pope John Paul I. It was called “The Smiling Pope” and it had a moderate success. It was translated into German, and in due time, Sister received copies of the German book reviews. I was asked to translate the reviews, which were positive about the book and very enthusiastic about Papa Luciani! The reviewers raved about his “Menschlichkeit” and how very “menschlich” he was! That was where I got stuck in my translation. Menschlichkeit and menschlich come from the noun Mensch. Mensch in German means “a human being”, any human being, like “homo” in Latin. The dictionaries translate menschlich and its noun Menschlichkeit as “human, humane” and “humanity, humaneness”. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to fit. We can say with approval that someone is humane, but we don’t usually rave over how very humane they are.

The German Mensch came across the Atlantic and began to be heard in the USA, not where German is spoken, but where Yiddish is spoken. Yiddish is the language that was spoken by the Ashkenazi, the Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Its basis is medieval West German, but it came to contain elements from other languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic and Romance languages. Jewish immigrants to the United States brought Yiddish with them, and, as with numerous other immigrant languages, it enriched the common American English spoken across the 50 states.

There are various Yiddish words that one frequently hears in the USA, some of the most common being chutzpah (shocking self-confidence), glitch (a minor malfunction), schmaltz (sentimental music or art), and bagel (a firm doughnut-shaped roll). I myself have heard mensch used in ordinary American conversation, and when its meaning was explained, it was clear why the Germans applied their form of the word to Pope John Paul I. A mensch, in Yiddish, is someone who shines out by their integrity, their kindness, morality and dignity, someone who is respectful and caring. To be a mensch is to be what a human being is meant to be.

We are reminded of Hamlet’s description of man: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” We are also reminded of St. Irenaeus’s declaration, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” For both writers, there was something glorious in being human.

Yet this sense of essential human greatness seemed to have evaporated in the English language. It obviously did so, if we need to borrow from another language to translate menschlich and Menschlichkeit. Now when we think of human beings, we are more likely to quote Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922): “I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought ‘What Jolly Fun!’” In English, to say that someone is a human being is far from being a compliment. It is to describe them by the phrase that is the lowest common denominator of humanness. 

The word mensch in both German and Yiddish doesn’t mean someone who is outstanding by their abilities or by their possessions. It simply means someone who is fully and wholly and notably human. The fact that English doesn’t have a word to describe such a person shows that we don’t believe that such qualities are part of being human. We don’t have such a word because we don’t need it; we don’t need it because we don’t have the concept that mensch expresses. We see human beings through drab and debasing glasses. Such vision lies at the source of wars, euthanasia, abortion, human trafficking, racism and all the other ways in which we debase members of our own human race. We see human beings as being mere objects and we treat them as such.

It has happened that this degrading vision of human beings was stunningly changed at a certain moment for certain people. Caryll Houselander, the English Catholic author, describes in her autobiography “A Rocking-Horse Catholic” the experience she had one evening in the underground.

I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging – workers of every description going home at the end of the day... not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them – but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too...

Thomas Merton had a similar experience in 1958 when he was doing the monastery shopping in Louisville.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

Merton speaks of a “peculiar gift”. Is this “gift” only given to certain people? Is this an extraordinary grace? Yes and no. These insights show us with a special intensity what we know by ordinary faith, that we are made to be intimately united with God in Christ. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in #2014, “God calls us all to this intimate union with him, even if the special graces or extraordinary signs of this mystical life are granted only to some for the sake of manifesting the gratuitous gift given to all.” The experiences described by Caryll Houselander and Thomas Merton are simply spiritual highlighters to remind us of what we claim to believe as Catholics. Such a way of seeing should be normal for us as believers, but is it? If we all choose to look at people through the vision of faith received at Baptism, we will see them as God sees them and treat them as He treats them. Then There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

Sr Gabriela of the Incarnation OCD is a Discalced Carmelite of the Carmel of Mary Immaculate and St. Mary Magdalen in Flemington, New Jersey, USA.  She is a regular contributor to Where Peter Is and has a regular column, A Place of Springs, on the local diocesan paper, The Spirit.