Chris Ewing is a United Church of Canada minister, serving in Saskatchewan. In an
Ecunet online forum, Chris was sharing an experience from the time when her first child
was born. Back then, she was living and working in Montreal, serving a French-speaking
church. The people of the church encouraged her to speak to her young son, Ian, in
French, and to let her husband speak to him in English. That way, he would grow up
bilingual.
"I tried," Chris wrote. "Really I did. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't speak to my own flesh and blood in my second language. It wasn't that my French was poor; it wasn't.... The barrier was not in my grasp of the language but in my soul.... I feel the same way about [all] my acquired languages: though they help me grasp and participate in the world better, they are still an object interposed between me and that world; and for genuine intimacy, all objects need to be out of the way."
That's the kind of thing God desires for the church, on the Day of Pentecost: God wants, for one brief and beautiful moment, to sweep all barriers away: to allow men, women, and children to hear one another -- to truly hear the language of the soul -- all in their own language.
"I tried," Chris wrote. "Really I did. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't speak to my own flesh and blood in my second language. It wasn't that my French was poor; it wasn't.... The barrier was not in my grasp of the language but in my soul.... I feel the same way about [all] my acquired languages: though they help me grasp and participate in the world better, they are still an object interposed between me and that world; and for genuine intimacy, all objects need to be out of the way."
That's the kind of thing God desires for the church, on the Day of Pentecost: God wants, for one brief and beautiful moment, to sweep all barriers away: to allow men, women, and children to hear one another -- to truly hear the language of the soul -- all in their own language.
