Tongues of Fire
(Not Fire in Our Tongues)
Open Table Conference - June 27, 2021
Gaby Viesca
Lately, I’ve been paying close attention to the role that language plays in the shaping of our communities, our relationships, and the way we experience God. In the short time I’ve lived in the United States, I’ve seen a significant increase of violence, division, and polarization. And one thing I’ve noticed is that at the heart of so much of this violence and hatred is language: the things we say to each another (or about each other).
As we all know, language is a very powerful thing. It has the power to unite us or divide us, it has the power to inspire us, or put us down, it can bring comfort to others, or it can inflict pain. It’s a very powerful tool for communication. But besides being a powerful tool for communication, language happens to be one of the most powerful markers of identity of a person. Our language locates us within a particular culture, a particular group (oftentimes a particular ethnicity), and a particular context. In a country like the U.S., where there are so many different groups of people coexisting together, this difference in language and culture can be very difficult to navigate–especially when you’re not part of the dominant culture.
I don’t think I need to give a whole lot of examples to prove this point, but I do want to share one sentence that I hear a lot here in the U.S., and that is: “You’re in the United States, you speak English.” I don’t bring this up to be antagonistic. I’m not saying everyone in the U.S. holds this posture, I know that’s far from the truth. I bring this up because I want to trace its history. This is history that Christians need to remember.
We need to remember that, historically, so much of the expansion of Christianity has been intrinsically tied to different forms of oppression, domination, and abuse. That’s not news to anyone, I know. What is worth mentioning, however, is that during colonial times, one of the most common forms of domination and control came through the imposition of the conquerors’ language upon the conquered people.
Here is a brief excerpt from a letter written in 1609 by the London Council of the Virginia Company. This document included “Instructions” (that was the actual name of the document) for the governor of Jamestown to institute a plan, using force if necessary, to educate the children of the Weroances (Algonquian leaders) “in [the English] language, and manners;” for “if you intreate well and educate those which are younge and to succeede in the government in your Manners and Religion their people will easily obey you and become in time Civil and Christian.”1 (Italics are mine)
Do you see the historical connection there? I can’t think of a better time to revisit this history than right now. We’re all looking at what’s happening in Canada in horror, hearing about the burial sites found near boarding schools for native Americans in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. But things are about to hit the fan here in the United States. Two weeks ago, Native American Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, announced plans to investigate the brutal history of missionary boarding schools in the U.S. The violence of our Christian history is about to come out again, it’s going to be exposed again, and I have a feeling it’s going to be very loud. We need to be prepared to talk about this.
As we all know, what happened in the United States happened in so many other parts of the world. A very similar thing happened when France colonized countries in West Africa and the Caribbean, and other parts of the American continent. The difference is that instead of bringing Protestant Christianity, they brought Catholic Christianity, and the Catholic missionaries converted people not just to Catholicism, but to French Catholicism, which involved the imposition of the French language. In West Africa to be truly Christian and Catholic, meant to become a true French.
A similar thing happened in Latin America too, with the arrival of the Spaniards in the early 1500s. In the journals of Cristopher Columbus, there’s a line where he refers to the natives as people who did not know how to speak. And what he meant by that, is that they didn’t know how to speak Spanish. They obviously knew how to speak! They spoke hundreds of languages. But Columbus did not understand those languages, so he rejected them and negated them. What did the Spaniards do? They sent their missionaries. First the Franciscans, then the Dominicans, then the Augustinians, and the Jesuits, and all of them built evangelizing schools where they taught the natives the Spanish culture, language, lifestyle, and religion. And to be truly Christian & Catholic, you had to become Spaniard; dress like a Spaniard, speak like a Spaniard, or else you weren’t truly Christian … or saved.
Looking back at these events, we may say “well, that was 500 years ago”, but don’t we do a similar thing today? Where we attach specific qualities, behaviors, or lifestyles to the term “Christian”, and we lump them all together and say “that’s what it means to be a Christian”? I know I do that.
THE BABEL STORY
Let us turn to the Bible now.
If we are going to talk about language, diversity of languages, and how to live in harmony with God and others, a good place to start is with Babel (Genesis 11). This is the first time in the Bible we hear about the creation of different languages.
At that time, “the whole world had one language and a common speech.” (Gn. 11:1) One day, the people said, “Let us make a name for ourselves” (Gn. 11:4), and they set out to build a tower that would reach the skies. The Lord came down and said, “Let us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand each other (Gn. 11:7). And “the Lord scattered them over the face of the earth.” (Gn. 11:8)
The Babel passage has been interpreted in many different ways. Some scholars interpret it as a curse from God, while others see it as God beginning to scatter his people throughout the earth. Regardless of interpretation, there is one thing that is clear and undeniably true in this passage: there is a shift, from having just one language for the entire world—which brought about understanding and unity, to the creation of multiple languages—which, in this case, caused confusion and scatteredness. And eventually hostility, division, and violence, and we’ve been carrying that to this day.
Let us put Babel on hold for a moment. I want to turn to Pentecost now, the other passage we must look at if we want to talk about diversity of languages. “People from all around the world were gathered in Jerusalem. Suddenly, a sound like a violent wind came from heaven and filled the entire place. Tongues spreading out like a fire descended and rested on each one of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them. When this sound occurred, a crowd gathered and was in confusion, because each one heard them speaking in their own language.” (Acts 2:1-6)
Read that again: “Each one of them heard them speaking in their own language”. Something truly miraculous happened here.
The way I see it, Pentecost is a reversal of Babel. In Babel, the multiplicity of languages is what brought about confusion and separation, the entire people of God were scattered. But in Pentecost, the multiplicity of languages is what brought about unity. And not just unity, but understanding.
Let us look at Babel one more time. The reason why God confused their language was because people wanted to make a name for themselves. Their self-idolatry was being materialized in a very specific way: they would build a tower that would place them at the very top of their world, or at the very center of it. They would be the point of reference for others, the ones in control, the standard against which the rest of the world would be measured.
It seems to me that many of us continue to do this today. We put ourselves at the center of our world. We put our perspective, our language, our culture, and our views at the very center (or at the very top) and they become the point of reference for the rest of the world. Anything that is different, anything that doesn’t conform, or sounds ‘like us’, is kept at a distance; it gets rejected, judged, ostracized, silenced, or at the very least, ignored.
But then Pentecost comes and completely destroys this idea of center. In fact, our entire experience of God gets de-centered, because God says I am no longer going to reveal myself through one group of people, through one culture, through one language. I am now going to reveal myself through every language, through every culture, in fact through every person because I’m pouring out my Spirit onto every single person. Every-single-one.
One of the most beautiful moments in this passage, in this event of Pentecost, is that people were able to see (with their physical eyes) the Spirit of God in the form of fire resting on each person that was there. Every one of them. And that, I believe, is a prophetic vision for us today, the big revelation for us today: that the only way we’ll experience true unity in this hostile and divisive world, is when we allow ourselves to see God in the other. Whatever the other looks like, or sounds like.
MY STORY
I’d like to briefly share the story of my journey learning English. Having been born and raised in Mexico, I did not grow up speaking English. I started learning it at a later age. As many people know, learning a second language can be a very painful process. You need to be willing to be wrong, to make mistakes (often), you need to live in constant awareness of how much you don’t know. You need to be humble enough to allow others to correct you, to show you a different way, especially if you really want to grow in your understanding.
That experience has been a great model in my own journey of discovering God. It taught me to be okay not knowing everything there is to know, being okay with people correcting me on a regular basis, changing my paradigms as often as needed in order to get to greater truths.
But there’s more to this story I’d like to share. When I got to a state of fluency, I made it my number one goal to get rid of my accent. At that time, I didn’t realize that everybody had an accent. All I knew is that my accent “betrayed” me, because it showed people that English was not my first language (I eventually deal with my own mental colonization and my desire to assimilate).
One day, when I was in grad school, a friend of mine told me about a class that theatre students took to learn new accents. My eyes grew wide. “There’s a class that can teach you how to change your accent!?” I was ecstatic. I immediately spoke with the professor and asked him if I could join his class. He agreed immediately, but he asked me why I wanted to do that. I responded to him: “What do you mean why? I want to get rid of my accent!” He had a sad look on his face. He was quiet for a while and then he said to me, “why would you want to do that? Your accent is one of the best parts of you. The way you talk and the way you sound is so beautiful, it makes you who you are.”
I had never heard that before. And I realized it was so true. But I also realized that that was true of everyone. The way they talk, the way they sound, the way they uniquely reflect God, is one of the best parts of them. It’s beautiful. It makes them who they are.
This ability –this invitation– to see how God uniquely reveals himself in the other, in that which is different from me, is a very loud and clear invitation for all of us in today’s world. And I think we should take this invitation seriously because it matters. It matters for many reasons:
- It matters because some of us are slightly obsessed with wanting to hear Christianity and God being talked about in a very specific way, a way that sounds familiar to us. Otherwise, it’s deemed wrong, or heretical, and the easiest thing to do is simply to reject it (or at the very least we try to change it)…. but we forget that God reveals himself in many different languages and in many different ways. And we may not speak all those languages.
- It matters because some of us only seek the wisdom of the educated, the knowledgeable, the people we respect; and we don’t realize that God might be bringing His greatest revelations through the illiterate, the uneducated, the poor, the one that is not seminary trained. God speaks through all of us just as powerfully.
- It matters because when we go to other countries to evangelize and do ‘the work of God’, we need to pay attention to the ways God is already at work there, already revealing himself to people through their language, their costumes, their worldviews; instead of just imposing our own version of Christianity thinking it’s “the only way”.
Do you see all the different implications there are to this one invitation? The invitation to see God in the other and with the other?
Today I’ve spoken mostly in terms of language, culture, and difference. But I believe this invitation to see God outside of us (outside of what we know or makes sense to us) applies to everything else in our lives…the struggle in our relationships, the wait that keeps extending, the obstacle, the illness, the thorn in our flesh. I believe that God’s constant invitation is for us to seek Him, and sit with Him in those very places, because often times God’s greatest revelations are found in the most unlikely places.
[1] Instructions to Sir Thomas Gates (1609), quoted in Alden T. Vaughan, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975).
Thank you for these wonderful thoughts and invitations. Bless you Gaby! -~Simona
Posted by: Simona Nedelisky | July 24, 2021 at 07:57 AM