This week, the birds have seemed especially vocal. In our small patch of earth, Jane and I—from our hot tub vantage point—have watched bluejays screech in competition with crows, as cardinals flashed red among the trees. A pileated woodpecker, having hammered at a dead pine, clumsily landed on our suet feeder, overshadowing it, while baby downy woodpeckers darted between branches of the magnolia. The phoebes returned to their usual spot scurrying on the ground for dropped seeds. Wrens, sparrows, chickadees, robins, titmice, orioles, starlings and cowbirds all played their part. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk circled. On the ground, chipmunks zipped between the garden furniture. Grey and red squirrels vied for the feeders as a woodchuck lumbered into view. Reticent rabbits made a gentle appearance. And each late afternoon a nursing raccoon wandered over for food scraps. Life teemed all around—each creature unique, each one utterly dependent on the delicate weave of nature’s provision.
That notion of dependency has lingered.
Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1999 Dependent Rational Animals, challenged the Western myth of independence. He reminded us that we are not solitary, self-making beings. We are animals first, and our rationality grows within the conditions of our vulnerability. From birth to death, our lives are sustained by others—by caregivers, by communities, by ecosystems. There is no such thing as the wholly autonomous self (there the medical ethicists make a significant mistake). Every form of thriving we know depends on webs of relationship and support. It is not weakness; it is the plain truth.
I am reminded of a striking passage by Jennifer Worth in Call the Midwife (The book the TV series is loosely based on)
“The helplessness of the newborn human infant has always made an impression on me. All other mammals have a certain autonomy at birth… But the newborn baby can’t even [find the nipple]… I have a theory that all human babies are born prematurely. Given the human lifespan — three score years and ten — to be comparable with other animals of similar longevity, human gestation should be about two years.”
It’s an evocative thought. We are meant to be dependent. Not just as infants, but throughout our lives. Not pathologically, not helplessly—but organically, relationally, as part of the whole.
And yet, our culture teaches us otherwise. We are told to strive for independence. We are conditioned to view dependency as weakness, immaturity, even failure. “Dependency culture” is wielded as a slur. But what if dependency is not a defect but a condition of being alive?
The Yijing offers another way to think about this. In Hexagram 30, Li (Fire), radiance is dependent on what it clings to. Fire gives light and warmth, but only by clinging to its fuel. Fire without fuel is impossible. So too with us. The radiant self, the thinking, spiritual being, exists only in relationship with other beings, with earth, with air, with fire and water.
St. Francis had it right. We are sustained by brother sun and sister moon, by the wind and the water and the earth beneath our feet. We do not exist apart. We are embedded. We are entangled.
This insight finds deep resonance in the Buddhist teaching of interbeing, a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh. Nothing exists independently. A flower is made of non-flower elements: sunshine, rain, soil, time, space. We, too, are made of countless others—air, ancestors, language, ecosystems. To be is always to “inter-be.” Our dependency is not incidental; it is constitutive of our very existence. In South African Ubuntu too: “I am because we are.”
This week, I have not just noticed the birds and animals in the yard. I have felt them. Not in the sentimental way of a Disney movie, but in a quiet sense of kinship. Noticing the tiny, recently fledged sparrow hopping in the grass, I was reminded that I too am small, dependent, vulnerable—and part of a much larger, mysterious whole.
MacIntyre called humanity “dependent rational animals.” I would add something else. We are dependent spiritual animals. Our life is not only sustained by the earth and by one another, but by the spirit that animates all that is. In my naturalistic panentheism, the divine is not beyond nature but within it. The same sacred presence that stirs in the hawk’s flight and the raccoon’s gentle scavenging moves within me too. This is not metaphor. It is, for me, the ground of reality: the divine in all being, flowing through all form, binding us into a shared life. From this arises the deep connectedness I have experienced this week.
We are not self-made; we are dependent spiritual animals
+Ab. Andy
Works Cited
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Open Court, 1999.
https://www.amazon.com/Dependent-Rational-Animals-Virtues-Lectures/dp/081269452X
Worth, Jennifer. Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times. Penguin Books, 2012.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143123254