One Tuesday night, I found myself cleaning layers of human feces from under someone’s fingernails. At least ninety years old, Joan* suffers from cognitive decline, and she had soiled herself in her room on the fourth floor at a local hospital. Calling for her son, and in an attempt to find help, she in her confusion decorated her bed, the railing, the floor and some equipment with excrement as she stepped out towards the hallway. We found her with searching blue eyes, clean gown in hand.

Someone came to disinfect the room and floor, and we helped Joan clean up and change into new clothes. The worst seemed to be over until I noticed her hands. Under every crack and crevice of nail and fold was dried human waste. I was disgusted by the unfortunate, humiliating situation. She hardly spoke English and was cognitively unable to ask for help. But the knowledge of what had happened was apparent on her face.

Because she was identified as having an infectious organism I was already wearing an isolation gown. I also had other barriers and tools with me: many pairs of gloves, towels, disinfectant and hygiene sprays, warm water and a disposable toothbrush. We sat at a table in the deserted TV lounge as I cleaned her hands. It was after 10 o’clock and the other patients had gone to bed. The latest news and election updates flickered in the corner, accompanying our silence with an electric pianissimo of persons, places and politics du jour. Embarrassed, she sat patiently, allowing me to scrub hands that once held the treasures of her world, such as the son that she was calling out for.

Transhumanism tells us that moments like this will soon be obsolete. We will progress beyond subjective individual realities with the use of technologies that debride our fleshly weaknesses, training us to become unified within one rational, objective reality. With the advent of scientific breakthroughs that manipulate genomes of living organisms into chimeras of super-beings a la carte, illnesses like Joan’s are projected to become extinct, along with associated human vulnerability and shame. The transhumanist gospel, Professor Bob Doede explains, is an innovation-replaced humanity living in a technologically-enhanced Eden rooted in human re-creationism.

It appears idyllic. But in accepting only a quantifiable world, would we be “cutting the crap” to reveal our true humanity? Or by accepting a delusion wherein the individual human experience is swept aside in favour of a glorified trajectory of the “human” species, would we be covering up our human essence by the denial of an immeasurable subjectivity?

Secularization attempts to distil human needs down to its essentials. In a recent visit to TWU, author David Walsh admits that while not entirely a perfect framework, exemplified by Hitler’s rise to power, liberal democracy dominates as the accepted political framework. Within this secularly accepted system, the dignity of each individual person created in the image of God remains an inherent if unacknowledged principle. Walsh alerts us to remain rooted in safeguarding this foundation.

As I cleaned the crevices of Joan’s nails, images of John 13 breathed into my consciousness and came alive: John’s gospel, the whole holy book, the lives of martyrs, the entire Christian meta-narrative as revelation of a love story. Of love that forgives and washes clean. Love that is present pragmatically from conception to natural end, that hangs about when s*** happens. Love that reaches down and allows the human person to experientially encounter the Divine Word that declares, “See, I make all things new.” All things – from everything that catches the eye to everything that encompasses the “I.”
Layer after layer, Joan’s hands became more supple. Hands rinsed and moisturized, the quiet gratitude evident in her eyes humbly reminded me of another woman I encountered, who, after being helped into her first “real” shower in weeks, exclaimed with simple joy, “I feel like a human again!”

Is it technology and a reliance on human evolution in a projected future that will eliminate shame, cast off physical imperfections and erase human vulnerabilities?

I reflected on the God of the universe personified, with the working hands of a carpenter, carefully cleaning someone’s crud-covered hand.