Our Common Humanity: What We Share

It occurred to me as I watched people coming into the courtroom this morning that we human beings are all so much like each other, but we are obsessed with our differences. Of course, it is nice that we have differences. But, the truth is we share almost all of our DNA.

Somehow it just hit me in the depths of my heart this morning: we are so much like each other. Maybe if there was another race populating our earth who could do about what we could do, and we didn't take our alikeness/our commonality so much for granted, then maybe we would be glad just to see another human face, to hear a human voice, to be glad that we had someone who walked like we walked, talked, shared the same types of experiences of sickness, joy and death.

John Donne's poem "No Man is an Island" comes to mind.

"No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee."

We only come to appreciate our differences if we first have a deep sense of our sameness, that we are bound to each other in the depths of our flesh and blood and spirit.

This morning, I had three clients that I was particularly concerned with. One was a woman who has a very low intellectual capacity, one has been diagnosed as schizophrenic (with paranoid features), and another was a very small man who seemed just fine but was in jail for driving without a licence and the federal government had a hold on him for being an illegal immigrant (he is from Guatamala). And, what hit me as I talked and listened (I actually did that this morning!) to these three clients was just how much like me that each of them was. The woman who was "mentally retarded" wanted to stay with somebody who cared about her, and was nice to her; the man with the mental illness wanted to be out walking on the roads - to be free again, to be left alone; the man from Guatamala just wanted to be able to talk to his family members.

From the scientific point of view, we share 99 plus % of our DNA with every other human being (of course, we also share not too much less than that with all kinds of other non-human animals as well!). Sometimes beginning from science can be a real help. If we would begin our way of approaching others with a deep sense of our commonality, then we would properly understand and appreciate our differences. But, when this deep sense of solidarity is absent, everything goes wrong. This deep sense of solidarity is at the very heart of true faith from God. Where that sense is evident, I believe real faith is there in that person whether they know it or not.