What is the human spirit anyway?
 
I ask this question, yet I know I cannot fully answer this in Christian terms, which is my only religious tradition and background, me, permanently lapsed Catholic. One could explain the spirit of humans in Christian terms, the spark of divinity in us all that is our Soul, our alma that will outlast our mortal shells that temporarily house this soul until we die and crumble to earthy dust, food for worms. Too unbearable I think for the sad primitive psychology of humans, for the child, of the child part of us we retain, the memory of a more happy time in our childhood, the wish that our parents would never have to die, but then they do and we are left looking skyward, beyondward, for something more powerful than us that will somehow resolve the dilemma of the impending eternal darkness that awaits us upon death. We need hope, could not live without it, could not establish moral systems without a notion of the good, the ideal, a pure form. There must be something about all of this buzzing blooming mess we perceive through our conscious minds that we can call eternal, beyond just what we can see and measure, indeed, something we can have faith in. We are like children in this sense-conscious and aware but not really, in that we see limits, darkness beyond the curtains, serious unknowns, not only do we see as through a glass darkly, we know we have these limitations, so we cry out for something. Give us hope, because we don’t have it ourselves.