by Amy Peterson
We all share this vocation, but we live into it in different ways. Maybe your way is through cross-cultural evangelism. Maybe it’s to be a first-grade teacher. Maybe it’s to be a linguist and a Bible translator. Maybe it’s to be a stay-at-home dad. Maybe it’s to be a doctor in the suburbs, the inner city, or an African village. I don’t know, but what I do know is that all of those vocations are valuable, and in all of those vocations, you can put love where love is not.
30
Speaking Faith as a Second Language
During my first year teaching overseas, I felt my ability to speak eloquently (or even articulately) in English slipping away from me. Most of my conversations used only the same, simple hundred words or so—whatever I said was stumbling, stilted, reliant upon body language, context, and tone to actually communicate meaning. It worried me: my neural pathways for language were overgrown with weeds, and for a writer, that’s kind of a serious problem.
At some point, though, I began to appreciate what happened when communication was reduced to the lowest common denominator. We didn’t hide behind fancy words anymore. Beauty existed in that simplicity; we agreed on the most basic of things, and didn’t have to push beyond them. When words failed us, we took action. When my electric motorbike ran out of battery power on a lonely stretch of rice field, a pregnant woman had plugged in my bike and chopped open a coconut for me, patting me on the arm and handing me a drink when our ability to communicate with language ended.
Soon, too, I began to hear the poetry of words I had grown up with arranged in new ways, strange and lovely ways from both clumsy and careful language-learners’ lips.
When Elisha was trying to recall a phrase he had read, he stopped me after class. “It’s a locution,” he told me, “a locution your grandparents might have used.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You mean it’s an old phrase?” I asked.
“Yes!” he said. “The phrase is ‘low and . . .’ something.”
“Lo and behold,” I guessed. His face lit up.
“That’s it!” he cried. “I love it. It is so beautiful.”
As I taught English as a second language, the beauty of our “locution” became ever new for me. I listened fascinated as my students used unique sentence constructions or outdated vocabulary words, unwittingly assigning new depth or stronger meaning to them by their new context. I fell in love with language all over again.
“I’ve received your e-mail,” Avril wrote to me in my second year of teaching, “and I’m very cheerful to hear that you’ve organized Thanksgiving. It was jolly, wasn’t it? I wanna send you my regard. . . . I imagine there is snow in the US now and there are many animated Christmas activities.”
What native speaker would have called my Thanksgiving “jolly” and my Christmas activities “animated”? And yet, what better way could there have been to describe them? What better holiday gift to receive than a student’s “regard”?
I had discovered one of the enduringly lovely gifts about teaching English to language learners: their speech makes old, tired words suddenly new and full of possibility. Somehow the grammatically incorrect structures open up the poetic meaning of the words; a surprising word choice can enhance the message rather than distract from it.
I was also learning that English—though my native language and one of the great loves of my life—didn’t belong to me. It didn’t belong to me, or to America, or to England, or to native speakers anywhere. As a language, English is a tool—not to be wielded in domination or colonialism, but used for negotiating meaning. Together. Limiting my language and hearing it in new contexts, in unexpected ways, even in grammatically incorrect ways, had actually expanded my love for it.
But the transformation of my English forced me to realize something even more important: my understanding of the language of faith needed to undergo the same kind of deconstruction and reconstruction for me to love it and use it rightly.
I used to think that I spoke “Christian” as a native language—that it belonged to me. I was born into a Christian-speaking family, and I “asked Jesus into my heart” practically as soon as I could form a sentence. I memorized creeds, catechisms, and large portions of the Bible; I sang hymns by heart and praise choruses with hand-motions. As a native speaker, I trusted my comprehension of the language and doubted the legitimacy of anybody who understood the words differently than I did.
But in my second decade of fluency in the language of faith, I found that the words were stale. Familiarity with the Bible had dulled my perceptions, and the deepest truths had become tired clichés to my evangelical ears. I needed the language to become new for me just as English had, or I was in danger of losing it altogether. I needed to find people who spoke this language differently than I did, people who could help me find new ways into the well-worn truths I wanted to hold on to.
Reading Bible stories with people who had literally never heard of Moses, Esther, Mary, or Paul made them new for me. Simply hearing the words of Scripture in the new context of Southeast Asia gave them fresh meaning. Before that, I sort of understood what it meant for Jesus to be “the bread of life.” But not until I lived in a place where every meal began with a bite of rice to honor the food that brought ancestors through famine, where every meal relied on rice (and, for many of my students, was little more than rice), where “how are you” translated literally as “have you eaten rice yet?” did I begin to comprehend what it meant for Jesus to be the bread of life. Here, he was the rice of life.
But it wasn’t just those who had never heard the stories, or those from a different culture, that I needed. I realized I needed those who had grown up speaking the language but using the words differently than I did. Take prayer, for instance. Where I grew up, prayer was ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. It was individual, personal, disembodied, methodical, and conversational.
After two decades of ACTS, I needed to learn about prayer from the Catholic church, where it 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 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.
Putting prayer in any of those new contexts gave the word fresh meaning, enriching both my language and my faith.
I had long been the girl with the answers, the girl with the most verses memorized, the girl with the theological arguments well-honed, the one who raised her hand first. But living cross-culturally had made me question all my assumptions. As I emerged from the dark night of the soul I’d experienced in Cambodia, I was less likely to try to put my beliefs into words. I was less likely to offer the right answer, and more likely to listen to what might be wrong answers, to see what I could learn from them.
When my card-house construction of God collapsed, and I began to see that he was farther beyond my understanding than I had ever realized, I was actually joining a long history of Christians who celebrated the inscrutability of the divine. I had begun to learn what Christians had always known: that God cannot be captured with words. When ancient and medieval writers tried to explain the impossibility of saying something true about God, they often quoted Psalm 116:11: omnis homo mendax. Everyone is a liar. Augustine, persistently worried over language, lamented the fact that there was no way of speaking and writing about God that was completely true. Martin Luther expressed the same idea in his Christmas Day sermon in 1522, when in the middle of exposition, he stopped and said:
You see from this babbling of mine the immeasurable difference between the word of God and all human words, and how no man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words. It is an eternal word and must be unde
rstood and contemplated with a quiet mind.
I, who had been raised to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15), had fewer and fewer answers to give. I was more likely to preface my answers with an honest “I’m not sure, but maybe it’s something like this.”
Letting go of my ownership of the language of faith was sometimes frightening, unmooring. Instead of being the person with the answers, I became a person with questions. Instead of colonizing, I worked to cooperate. But in seeking to agree on the most basic of things, like the meaning of the word prayer, I found a simplicity of language which lent itself to coordinated action. My words took on gestures, form, and meaning in the real world.
Letting go of my ownership of the language of faith meant recognizing that I could only speak it as a second, and learned, language. The words of faith didn’t belong to me, or to anyone but God, who was himself the Word made flesh. It was in this recognition that the language of faith was transformed for me, and it was in this that I, too, was transformed.
Epilogue
No Longer At Ease
After dinner, Jack and I locked our five hundred-square-foot apartment and walked down the hill. The sky was pink, and the October air still warm; we were in the South, where “muggy” is the best description of the weather for at least six months out of twelve. The year we’d spent dating in Southern California had spoiled me, and I was always looking for moments that felt like Los Angeles did, all sunlight and 72, all beauty and color and yearning. Jack had proposed to me on a beach in Santa Barbara, and after the wedding in Little Rock we stayed in Arkansas, living near my family while we tried to figure out what to do next.
Ambitions had paled beside our need to simply be together, but now that we were, I struggled to know what my vocation was and how to live a meaningful life in the States. We weren’t rich by American standards, but we had more than enough, and we were surrounded by people who looked like us: privileged, white Americans who could hear the gospel at one of the dozens of churches within a fifteen-mile radius. Our life together in Arkansas was beautiful and comfortable; and so, of course, I was conflicted about it. It was hard to feel like what we were doing was important.
I was working at a private high school as a librarian and teacher, and slowly reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. As Jack and I walked, I tried to describe the way the book was altering my understanding of what it meant to live a Christian life.
“I just can’t believe, sometimes, that teaching these rich white kids about essay construction or the imagery in The Giver is meaningful. I mean, they already have everything they need, in abundance. They don’t need me. How can this be as important as teaching the Bible in Southeast Asia, or even teaching English there, to students who really needed it to have viable career options?”
Unconsciously, I sped up as I spoke, my internal struggle punctuated by the slap of my footsteps on asphalt.
“You don’t really believe that, though, do you?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. I feel it,” I said, slowing down as we rounded a corner out of the neighborhood and toward our closest grocery store, the Fresh Market.
I paused to try to express the thought more clearly.
“People in church used to say, ‘Only two things will last: the word of God and the souls of men,’” I began. “But that’s not in the Bible. The Bible says all things will be made new. That Jesus is coming back here, to stay, to bring the fullness of the kingdom that he ushered in when he first came, to build the new heavens and the new earth here.
“If that’s true,” I continued, “then everything matters, not just evangelism. Any way in which we are helping to usher in Christ’s kingdom matters. Any way we can find to contribute to making things new, to mending what is broken or healing what is sick or bringing wholeness to what is torn apart is kingdom work of value. There’s no hierarchy of vocation.”
Jack nodded. We stood in front of the freezer case, surveying an array of mostly small-batch, organic, locally made ice creams, each of which cost more than almost every meal I’d ever eaten overseas. “Do you want Häagen Dazs?” he asked.
“Is that even a question?” I said, grabbing a pint of chocolate peanut butter. We took it with two plastic spoons to a park bench outside the store.
“So working with these privileged kids isn’t less important than working in Southeast Asia,” Jack prompted.
“Maybe. If I can help Nathan understand his identity while his parents are divorcing, or help Hannah develop a healthy body image and relationship with food—then I’m helping to repair the broken world. I’m ushering in the promised Kingdom. Even washing dishes, or mending clothes, or planting a garden—even these tasks are Kingdom work. Cleaning the kitchen brings order to chaos. Altering hand-me-downs brings new purpose to something discarded as worthless. Weeding a vegetable garden nourishes new life.”
“I guess I should read the book,” he said, and I smiled.
It was hard to believe that small things done with love could be enough. I knew that I was beloved apart from my performance or my usefulness, but I also knew that I could never be fully at peace while others suffered. How could I celebrate the good and the beautiful without giving up on the fight to right injustices? How could I rest in my status as the beloved of God without becoming complacent about the work that still needed to be done? How could I give up my savior complex without also giving up?
We climbed the hill back to our apartment as the sun set. Those are the kinds of questions you just have to live with.
* * *
With a new name and a new passport, I made it back into the country. I hadn’t been sure it would work. When the organization called and asked if Jack and I would lead a team of American college students in conducting a summer English camp at a high school in the capital, we explained my situation. They said it was worth a try.
And I made it without even a hiccup through customs, back to the heat and the rice fields and the motorbikes and bowls of noodles fragrant with mint and cilantro. Our team stayed for a month in a hotel on a busy city street, walking to the high school to teach English courses every morning and afternoon, and to lead “cultural presentations” every evening. I tried to appreciate every moment we had there, not letting any detail of the experience pass me by: the sweat trickling down my back at seven in the morning, the huge iron wheelbarrows, women in pajamas sweeping the street with straw brooms, barefoot girls in traditional pink dresses slipping under a locked gate, a small beggar boy holding a cup and knocking at the café window, wooden sandals lined neatly outside the temple door.
In the off hours, Jack and I met with the American college students on our team, counseling them and offering training and support through their culture shock and first classroom experiences.
But again and again the experience disappointed me, beginning at team leader training, where the organization had prepared materials for Jack but not for me. They’d somehow forgotten I existed, not even assigning me a room. He was the team leader; I was a wife. I’d gotten over that hurt, just as I’d faced my fears of being turned away at the border. But spending a month leading an English camp, Jack and I found, was nothing like our previous experience; it was nothing like making a home in a foreign culture. Our responsibilities at the school kept us so busy that we rarely got to spend any time with students or other locals. All day, we taught English and American culture, never getting to really experience the Asian culture we’d grown to love.
Not every part of the trip was bad. I reconnected with Camille, befriended high school students who would one day come to college in the States, and prayed for the country’s future. We even celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary with a quick night away. But the true highlight of the month was probably the night Jack and I had a long dinner with a student and her family in her home.
We’d simply wanted to enjoy the local culture, the slow pace of life, the deep relationships. Instead, the frantic activity of English camp drained us and the focus on teaching American culture made us sad. Some of the college students we worked with had emotional needs that we weren’t equipped to meet, and trying to serve them exhausted our energy. Because our English camp students were so young, their parents didn’t allow them to spend free hours with us, so our opportunities for building relationships were limited.
I knew all along it would be unwise for me to revisit the city where I’d lived, but I hoped maybe Veronica could meet me in the capital. Though our contact over the previous three years had been rare, I e-mailed her nearly as soon as we landed. I was around—would she be able to meet? She responded quickly. She would take the train.
But the next day, she contacted me again. The police had “happened” to drop by for a visit shortly after she’d e-mailed me, she said; her parents didn’t think it was a good idea for her to come to the capital. Of course they were right, but it baffled me. It had been three full years since the police had first questioned Veronica about her beliefs. Were they really still reading her e-mails?
Guilt like a gut punch, again. Had I done more harm than good? Had I made Veronica’s life better, or worse? Had I ruined her relationships with her best friends? Had I put her family in continual danger? Did she have any job prospects, or would she always be on the outside of her community, thanks to me?
Why did new life have to feel so much like death?
A few months after the trip, I would pose those questions to Lisa, and her answers would be swift and certain: What you did was good, she’d say. You brought salvation to her. She knows God because of you.
