“Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organized kinship that binds him ethnically or racially or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men and between him, all other men, and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives, and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he seems himself as a part of a continuing breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.”
Howard Thurman (1899 – 1981)
Chorlton Unitarians 