Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church – Unitarian Universalist

Being Multilingual

Leslie Takahashi Morris

March 9, 2008 

I want to start this morning with the words of the Rev. Rob Hardies, minister of All Souls Church in D.C., who preached to his congregation:

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This year David and I have been co-teaching a weekly Wednesday night class called Jewish and Christian Scriptures for Times Like These.  In this class, we have been discussing the ways that many of the key stories, parables and events related in the Christian context were designed to connect back to the Jewish frame, to give these new texts authority and grounding in that tradition.  The early disciples of Jesus established their authority within the stories of the Jewish scriptures because the proto-Christians were Jewish, just as Jesus himself was and always aspired to be.  In the early days, they did not even see themselves as the inventors of a new religious language, of a new culture, of a new multilingual identity.

So the story of Pentecost, from the Christian book of Acts, gets its authority by being the antidote to the story of the tower of Babel in the Hebrew Book of Genesis.  In that story,  the people have grown too confident, they start thinking they are invincible and to prove their power is as great as God’s, they begin to construct a tower which went higher and higher until it’s taller than anything else around.  Their actions anger God and God divides them by confusing them with different languages so they are no longer able to work—or conspire— together.  We today, living in a world of many languages, a world where many people see the world as their neighborhood, might see that more as an excuse for language learning software and multicultural marketing—yet the more mundane interpretation is that this is meant as a punishment.

Pentecost is the answer, it proves that this new prophet, Jesus, is the one who can release a truth large enough to overcome the differences.  In a bit of ad hoc research, I have concluded that the story of Pentecost is probably the leading contender for Christian-text-that-some-minister-is-most-likely-to-try-to-make-meaningful-to-a-bunch-of-skeptical-UUs-on-a-Sunday morning award.   In a recent sermon, the Rev. Kathryn Rolenz, another esteemed colleague once a regular preacher here, asked “Is Unitarian Universalism a religion of Babel or a Religion of Pentecost?”  Are we a religion that sees diversity as a punishment or one that understands the miraculous power that can be released when people find a unity in their diversity? 

Kathleen also tells a joke that travels around ministerial circles, about a Unitarian Universalist who invites a religiously conservative friend to attend church with her one Sunday. A little way into the service, the member asks her visitor how it is going.  The friend says, “Well, the people at your church seem nice enough, but I’m wondering, where are your Bibles? I don’t see any in the pews and you didn’t read any Scripture at all.”  (Perhaps some of our visitors this morning are wondering the same thing—feel free to any of those kinds of questions, by the way.)   Anyway, the UU just says, “We’ll talk later.” During the sermon, the UU noticed her friend getting pretty agitated, clearly disturbed more than comforted by the ideas being shared.  After the sermon, the UU asks the visitor, “So, how did you like it!” "I can't believe half the things that minister said!" gasped the outraged visitor."Oh, good,” said the UU, “Then you'll fit right in!"

So in that spirit, I would ask you to consider for a moment which of the two stories you find more incredulous—the idea that some higher power can make people not understand one another or the idea that a divine being has the power to allow people who speak many different languages to understand what is most important for them to know in common. 

Pentecost is celebrated in May in the Christian liturgical calendar, so why talk about it in March?  Because the idea of Pentecost is needed in an all-too-often Babel world. Clearly some in the broader U.S. culture we live within still see different tongues as a sign of sin.  Geraldo Rivera was interviewed this past week for his new book, “His Panic:  Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S.”  He is the latest to document how this fear has been used as a political football, an insidious aide to an economy dependent on cheap labor, and as a social bludgeon.  In the NPR interview, Rivera said. “"It's a hysterical whipping up of a mob frenzy on an issue that should be recognized [as] part of a process that makes this country unique,  And by exacerbating the differentness of the newcomers, what they do is a gross disservice."

I was in California at the end of this past week and in my very brief stay there, I was reminded of the growing multicultural nature of our country and its tensions. First, I sang our hymns in Spanish for the first time, and in my few forays beyond the retreat center, the extent to which our country is being changed was clear.  I had both a Pentecost and a Babel experience.  One conversation was with a successful white business man, who told me that he was learning Spanish.  As a young man, he had wanted the stimulation of living in a country where multiple languages were commonly used.  “And then,” he said, “I woke up a few years ago and realized that opportunity had come to me.” The decision to learn and speak Spanish was like noticing blue cars on the highway, suddenly everywhere he turned he found opportunities.  He even found someone working in his building who was trying to learn English and they decided to tutor one another, creating maybe not flames over their heads but a new spark of friendship they would probably never have known otherwise.

 

The Babel experience was more sobering.  I had a very early flight and arranged for a cab to take me to the airport at 4:45 a.m.  I successfully managed to pack up and zip my suitcases without waking others on our hall of nun’s cells and the cab was just a minute late.  I thought all was going well until the driver suddenly pulled the cab into a bank parking lot.  “The police,” he explained in polite, accented English.  The officer approached and asked for identification and then he asked the driver about the rear-view mirror, which was shattered.  “Were you in an accident?” the police officer asked with a smile. “No, no,” the man assured him.  The officer smiled and took out a flashlight and began to inspect the front of the car reporting into his radio that he had detected leaves. After the arrival of at least three more officers, verification that I was neither a criminal or useful as a witness in any way, and a conversation about whether Unitarian Universalism might be a good religion for one of the officers, it was explained to me that the driver had confessed to being involved in a hit and run involving a small tree.  He was not under the influence. He had apparently been dodging someone else who had crossed the yellow line.   The biggest crime was he left the scene.  “Hey, you don’t want to lie to us,” one of the officers said and, perhaps because I was there, the officers helped the man tell his official story in the best possible light.  Still, the driver was shaking so much he could not get the insurance paperwork out of the glove compartment,  Clearly, for this man, a recipient of the culture Rivera spoke of, the idea of trusting a system that he knew was not likely to trust him was so foreign he could not hear it. And I was incredulous that, in a state whose newspapers were full of how a funding shortfall means slashing school funding, no shortage of officers existed to meet this public safety crisis.

Mundane—or bizarre—as these two stories are, they illustrate the ways our world is changing. We, like these two Californians, discover, in both Babel and Pentecost senses, that we live in multilingual worlds.  If we start to acknowledge the many ways that this is true, we can be overwhelmed—that prowling, unpredictable beast known as the global economy; the growing complexities of who lives in the demographics of our city; and also the sorts of emerging languages Ed spoke of—languages of technologies and products we barely imagined even a generation ago and a generation whose elite see the world as their playground.  Even within religion, we find rather strange and unexpected dialogues going on.  This Unitarian Universalist retreat I attended this week was run, as I mentioned before, by a Catholic order known as the Sisters of Mercy and also the home to a strong Zen Buddhist community started years ago by a priest with an interest in learning a different religious language.  Attending a predawn silent mediation in a stained glass chapel, I had the uncannily moving experience of hearing a Buddhist gong, and then hearing the nuns singing Buddhist philosophy.  When I looked carefully, I realized that wooden lotus blossoms framed the niches on either side of the crucifix. In some ways, our Unitarian Universalist heritage prepares us well for this synthetic time we inhabit.    As early as the mid-1800s, the Transcendentalists among us were experimenting with the joys of being multilingual. Henry David Thoreau had a strong relationship with Buddha and the use of wisdom from other cultures was so prevalent that Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist and the editor of the influential Dial magazine, felt compelled to write about the ethics of translation.  We have a long history of looking for inspiration from many sources. 

We also have history in our social action work where we have been willing to cross lines to form new partnerships with those whose experience, orientation and daily needs might be different from our own. This church has a proud legacy of many such endeavors over the years—being part of the first integrated preschool in the city, working to name and help solve issues of systemic racial disadvantage in the schools and in the court system, working to honor women’s voices and rights, defending the civil rights of those whose only crime is one of identity, reaching out to the homeless, contributing to the sweat equity of houses we would never live in.  Unitarians and Universalists were strong supporters of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. In 1962, UUA president Dana Greeley said as part of establishing a UUA office to advocate for the United Nations: “In this disastrous and shrinking world it is no longer possible - if it ever was - for local communities to be more secure than the surrounding world. Our ultimate security therefore lies in making the world more and more into a community.”  Since then the United Nations has helped us hold the huge truth that the real way to make the world more secure is to fight the poverty and disease that are the breeding ground for discontent.

Thinking globally and acting locally, we see this as well in our IMPACT coalition.  In this second year of our participation, it can seem more like Babel than Pentecost.  Some of us have found that our highest ideals are untranslatable by those who talk the language of private property rights.  Others have seen liberal sensibilities challenged by those whose language of change seems not to speak in anything but an agonizingly slow drawl.  And our religious vocabulary is quite regularly brought up short by those who speak an entirely different language of faith.  And yet, here is an example of how we can turn Babel to Pentecost, by remembering that the bright burning above this initiative is the need of the people who have been so sorely neglected, because they literally speak another language or because they live in a part of the economy foreign to the experience many of us have. And when we gather for the Action at U-Hall tomorrow at 6:30, the work that will be presented reflects the leadership of this congregation, our values in action. 

I am well aware that some are tired of hearing me talk about IMPACT. Yet, like Pentecost, it binds us more fully—if imperfectly—to the multifaceted truth of our community and it and NOT more police officers to investigate tree-related crimes, is the answer to having a healthy and secure community.  It allows us to reach out beyond ourselves—first to those we hope to be served by the Actions we take, and also to engage with the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and other faith participants.  Perhaps most importantly, it is also an opportunity to exercise one of our most important religious skills—to teach ourselves to listen for that overarching truth that rises above the din of our divided tongues. 

Our challenge in these years to come is not just about hearing the sound of different voices.  It is about hearing truths which transcend the language difference.  It is the willingness not understand all the words spoken—in the Pentecost story, in the moment of understanding, everyone still spoke in their own language—and yet to be open try to the voice you may have trouble hearing.  The Pentecost experience is not about simply tolerating one another, it is about creating something new in the synergy between multiple minds, multiple tongues, multiple cultures.  It is about being willing to be transformed by that higher power of creative good which cannot exist in a monologue—or a monoculture.

May our overarching message be one of love and care for all the people who cross our paths, no matter what religious, ethical or everyday practical language they speak.  In this sense, we can be people possessed by the Spirit, envisioning the possibility of a better world for all and the ones working to make it happen.  Amen.