September 8, 2007
Symbol
I regret to inform you that English is no longer (nor actually has it ever been) the Mother Tongue of the Kingdom of God. Take Pentecost. When you add all the patois and gibberish and jargon and semaphore and shop talk since then plus the DNA which needs only four letters to say a lot more, you get the idea. And since the Kingdom is not even a place, but a relationship (according to the theologians), there’re surely more ways of communicating therein than one can count or even Berlitz can imagine altogether with the Spirit to make of them the greatest verbal collage of all time. Babel, if only you’d been more patient.
All this comes to mind because the New York City public schools have just announced that they plan to offer Arabic in their language curriculum this fall. Just the hint of this possibility set off the usual self-appointed Grammar Brigades rising to the protest faster than you can order a BigMac with the hortatory subjunctive.
It’s the symbols we live by that so often seem to drive us the most swiftly to the banana farm. And it’s the fact that they are symbols — outward and visible signs of something not so tangible, but no less real and maybe even more so — that our fundamentalist-literalist culture seems least to understand. All the flap
In all its subtle catholicity, language is perhaps an even more powerful symbol than flags. For it is language and the literacy it enables that makes us human. And it is ignorance about language and its illiteracy subsequent that makes us violently something less. Lest Christians forget, it was the Word that became flesh, that just might have been God saying, “Let’s hear it for language!” As we embrace that Word are we, as well, all the more becoming, our mission all the more winsome, and our language all the more heavenly.
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