I Believe It In One Language

The word for it in his head is not the word he would have to say.

That is the whole thing and it took him about six years to be able to state it that plainly, and even now he can only state it to himself, at a stove, stirring something, with the extractor on.

He came here at eleven. He is thirty-seven.

He is fluent. Nobody hears an accent and he has been complimented on that in a way that people think is a compliment. He argues in this language, does his job in it, dreams in it about half the time now, which he noticed one week and found slightly sad and then got over.

But the thing in his chest is in the other one.

It is in the language his grandmother used at a stove exactly like this one, and it has her cadences in it, and when he prays it is not a decision, it just arrives in that language the way water finds a slope.

And here is the difficulty, and it is not sentimental and it is not about identity in the way people write about identity.

Everybody he would have to say it out loud to speaks this language. His wife, who was born here. His two closest friends. The people in the room he goes to. If he says it out loud in a room, it will be in the second language, and the second language has never once carried this and he does not know what will come out.

He suspects it will sound like a translation. He suspects, more specifically and much worse, that it will sound like somebody else's faith described accurately in fluent English.

So he has not said it. Not once, out loud, to another person, in either language, in twenty-six years.

The tongue is not the gate

I want to start by taking one anxiety off you, because it is the specific one and I do not think anybody has ever addressed it.

You are afraid that saying it in the second language will produce a translation rather than the thing itself, and that you will hear it happen, and that hearing it will do something to the thing.

That is not a neurotic fear. It is a well-founded one and any bilingual person would recognize it instantly. A sentence carried in a language it was not formed in does arrive differently, and you have known that since you were eleven.

So let us not pretend otherwise. Let us go and see what Scripture actually asks for.

What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.1 Corinthians 14:15

Paul is in the middle of the one passage in the whole New Testament that is explicitly about which language a thing gets said in.

And notice what he does. He does not rule one out. He says also. Both. He is unbothered in a way that has surprised readers for two thousand years: what matters to him is that the person praying is understanding themselves, and that a room, where there is a room, is not left out.

You are permitted both, and Scripture is the place that says so, and that is not encouragement for a man at a stove, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the twenty-six years rather than on a chapter you have almost certainly read.

Now let me apply that to your actual position, and here is where it gets simpler than you have made it.

The confession does not require a room.

You have been assuming a single event: saying it out loud, in a room, to people, in the second language. And that assumption has bundled together three separate things, and one of them has been making the other two impossible.

Take the room out. What is left is a mouth, and a language, and it can be your grandmother's, at a stove, with the extractor on.

You are not being asked to say it in a language it does not live in. The word says pray with the spirit and with the understanding also, and understanding is a word about the speaker rather than about the audience, and the Spirit of God has been arriving in your first language every time you pray for twenty-six years without ever once objecting to it.

I want to say something about your grandmother's cadences, because you mentioned them and then moved on.

The thing in your chest has her rhythms in it. That means that whatever else is true, this did not come to you at eleven in an airport. It came from a woman at a stove, in her own language, before you were old enough to have a second one.

You have been carrying something older than the difficulty. Scripture puts the choice of tongue outside the qualifying conditions entirely, and the Spirit is the seal on a man rather than on a vocabulary, and the version of this in your chest is the original and not the translation.

You are permitted both, and Scripture is the place that says so rather than the place that rules one out. The word says pray with the spirit and with the understanding also, and the Holy Spirit has arrived in your first language every time you have prayed for twenty-six years.