Dallas Willard puts it this way 'The poets as well as the writers of Scripture were vividly aware of the contrast. Humankind aspires to beauty and power, to purity and dignity, to knowledge and endless love. And yet we are wantering heaps of protoplasm - bits of "portable plumbing" as the poet Stephen Spender says. The sober truth is that we are made of dust, even if we do aspire to the heavens. And though the glow of youth will conceal that truth for a time, all of us will, if time allows, realize as the poet Yeats did in 'Sailing to Byzantium' that 'an aged man is but a platry thing, a tatterred coat upon a stick'. Clay, dust, powder - yes. But then there is the other side. What a spledor to it! Shakespeare makes Hamlet exclaim 'What a piece of work is a man! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals' but for all this Hamlet still concludes 'And yet, to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.' Yet as creatures go we are different. We are made for highter things. Our aspirations hint of such a truth.
The Spirit of the Disciplines p. 46
We were made in the image of God. Genesis 1:26-27
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