In the beginning…it was months.  And then it was years.  And then it was grades.

Grades turned into the number of people I could get to attend an event, which turned into how much I could put into my retirement account, which turned into a whole new set of numbers in my G.P.’s office.  Glucose.  Triglycerides.  Cholesterol.  And we’re not done.

“You’re going to check where?”  They never told me that when I turned 40…

My life feels much-measured, like I am being dissected daily.  It seems we take each other apart, reduce each other—and ourselves!—to a set of numbers, and claim that this is who we actually are.

We are what we can measure: our years, our grades, our bank accounts, our blood work.

There is, of course, a lot we can learn from taking ourselves apart.  Dissection gives us a great window into how we are made.  But the problem with dissection, with taking ourselves and others apart, is that all that’s left is a corpse on the table.  Sometimes, doesn’t it feel like this is what we’re up to?

The ancient Hebrews believed that we were more than our measurable parts.  In their sacred texts is a story about what we are made of: earth…and breath.  The word for “earth” in the ancient tongue is adamah: ground, dirt, soil.  The Hebrews believed that we are intimately connected to the earth, are, in fact, a part of it.  We are as tangible and measurable as granite and firs and molecules and muskrats and atoms and quarks.  Dirt.  Soil. Adamah.  Adam.

But the ancient story also says that we are “breath”, which, in the old tongue, is neshamah, which can also mean “spirit”.  Just as much as there is this measurable part of who we are, there is also this immeasurable part.  If we think we are only what we can see or measure, we are missing at least half of who we actually are.

There are these moments in our life when we know this in ways that we can’t put our finger on.  Ands that’s just it: whatever it is, we cannot see or taste or touch it, and yet it is more tangible than anything we had ever left our fingerprint on.

That moment we fell for him.  The time engraved in our being when we held her newborn life in our unbelieving hands.  That waning afternoon when we reached the top and peered down into Yosemite’s expansive belly.  When we heard them play that song to 25,000 people.  When we found out he had cancer.

In those moments, we find ourselves in touch with something untouchable, something immeasurable, something more real and true and profound than the measures we’ve attached to ourselves and others for longer than we can remember.

Eventually, these moments of clarity seem to fade, and we soon enough tend to lose sight of these deeper realities.  Debt is hard to see past.  Conflict, hard to see past.  The final score, hard to see past. An anomaly in our blood work…hard to see past.

And yet…if we really want to know who we are, if we really want to explore what is really going on, if we really want to live as if we are more than just a clod of dirt waiting to crumble back into the ground from which it was formed, we have to remember that

there is a spirit-ness to our soil.

We are more than just the outcomes of our week-to-week work.  We are more than the successes or failures of our children.  We are more than a letter grade or tax-sheltered annuity or a some-number-over-some-number our doctor has recorded on our medical chart.

We are more.