Today I have an essay at The Curator about how teaching English as a Second Language changed the way I speak the language of faith. I hope you'll read it; it means a lot to me.
In the essay, I mostly talk about how my understanding of language and ownership changed while I was overseas. Living overseas was the catalyst in pushing me toward ecumenicism, the understanding that each expression of faith weaves some unique color, some essential pattern, in the tapestry of Christianity.
Because of ecumenicism, I am forced to confess that my faith language is always under construction. I can never assume that I have the final say on what things mean.
Take the word prayer, for example. Growing up, prayer was
ACTS: Adoration,
Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. It was individual,
personal,
disembodied, methodical and conversational. It was good.
But I also needed to learn about
prayer from the Catholic church, where prayer was something communal and
liturgical and sensual. I needed to learn about prayer from the desert
fathers and mothers, where it was constant, a way of life, and bound up
with
mundane tasks like weaving and gardening. I needed charismatics to
share
their new languages with me, to help me become open to emotion and to
the power
of the Holy Spirit in my life. I needed to learn about meditation from
Buddhists, and to learn from Muslims how posture and practice affect
prayer.
And so my faith language shrinks and grows, by turns. But read the essay, and let me know what you think.
Have a jolly Thanksgiving!
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3 comments:
Your essay is beautiful, Amy. I am in the middle of reading Lamin Sanneh's Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West, and he highlights the correlation between the growth of faith in certain areas with the translation of the Scriptures into the various local languages. I love how the Spirit's outpouring on Pentecost was accompanied by the proclamation of faith in a multitude of languages. It's like your experiences of navigating cultures and languages prepares you to adapt in those moments when the Kingdom of God breaks through in seemingly unintelligible, inexplicable ways.
Really enjoyed your piece. I taught ESL in another lifetime too and what you described was strikingly parallel to my own process of maturation--both as a believer and an English speaker. I particularly appreciated your observation about the fluidity and creative capacity of language that we native speakers often miss. A lot a my development as a writer has related directly to my time in ESL--even in something as simple as exploring new ways to use expected idioms or choosing verb structures/tenses based on the energy and motion I want to convey within a sentence.
Thanks, Hannah. We really should meet IRL someday, huh?
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