Have you ever had the good fortune to go to a place where few people could understand you? Notice, I called such an experience good fortune. Such an experience can be a time of learning and growth.
I have been fortunate enough to have done this a few times. As a 17-year-old recent high school grad, I went into the interior of Mexico with a Mexican exchange student who had lived with us. Another time on a church trip with other ULC folk, I found myself in Hungary where I did not recognize a single word on menus, signs, and billboards.
The experience, however, that comes most to mind is one in a small hilltop town in Portugal. Tourism had only recently come to this town and area. Most English-speaking Portuguese in this region were the young. We were taken into a bakery, known for an unusual four-cornered bread. The chief and only baker was an older Portuguese woman who knew no English. We spent some time there watching bread begin as flour and ingredients, moving to become dough, then shaped, and put into a brick oven.
During this time some of our group, including wife Mary Beth, volunteered to be taught how to make this bread. Working with her, not a word that was understood was exchanged between baker and “apprentices”. Yet the communication was perfect! Cooperation, smiles, gestures, the moving of eyes from one target to another, and the rhythm of rolling dough and forming it into bread shapes together did all the speaking and communicating. Without an understood word, she had Mary Beth put the newly formed dough on a large wooden paddleboard to be inserted into a brick oven.
Watching all this it became obvious to me that while our baker friend did not seem to know any English, she was very fluent in humanity. She led the posse of four corner bread mentees not by her tongue, but by her heart. No barker of orders was she, instead leading by her warmth, smiles, pointing, and passion for her craft, and sense of human community.
Mohammed once said, “Don’t tell me your education, tell me your travels.” One does not have to have the ability to go far to do this. The internet and television offer great opportunities. PBS, Discovery Channel, even the Food Network can help us get a sense of common humanity shared with those living and doing differently than us. Like Israel wandering in the wilderness or the disciples leaving all to follow Jesus into the unknown, most of us have some traveling experience as we journey through life.
Having so traveled, do we push those experiences away failing to see the common thread of humanity in others or do we learn from them and grow from them? Were we tourists in our travels more interested in taking photos and acquiring signs of conquest called souvenirs or were we instead explorers, adventurers, and learners?
God does not call us to go through life so much as God calls us into life to experience it through our humanity. Often, we best discover our own humanity as we discover the humanity in those most different from us. May we all work to become more fluent in humanity. We may all better recognize God as creator of all when we do so.