To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failure to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that ‘I’m only human’ does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as a blessing and not a curse in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.

When I ask people to tell me how Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine, they often describe a kind of laminating process, in which his humanity was encased in divine plastic. The last thing to occur to most of us is that to be fully one is to be fully the other. What is it about fullness that we do not understand?

–from Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World