They were giggling like any other teen-age couple, but it sounded different. Amid the exuberance came snatches of this language, foreign to our ears, but certainly not out of place in a McDonald's restaurant in a city like Boston where so many languages can be heard. My husband leaned over, "You should see her face," he said quietly.
When we stood up to leave I saw her face. It was pure joy. The young woman and I exchanged smiles, and I felt a kinship that cut through generations, languages, cultures. It is our common humanity, I thought. Genuine joy that takes nothing to call it forth is Christly. And then I understood more deeply what is behind the concept of a common humanity. It is our common spirituality. The Christ-spirit is forever saying to each of us that we are God's man and that God's man is one.
This common spirituality supports the moral quality of humanity that allows kindness, mercy, sympathy, to sweeten our shared experiences. But the commonality is in Spirit. What really unites us is not even the most delightful shared human experience, nor a universal problem, but a deep recognition that the genuine fabric of all being is spiritual.
