It’s possible only with the English language; it’s the marvelous characteristic of our great transatlantic tongue.
Perhaps you’ve experienced it, that everyone can understand it, that even those who don’t speak English can understand English. I was reminded of this almost daily in Italy a few summers back. All I needed to do was to look into the eye of whatever Italian I had in the grip of my conversation and just speak louder. Often, of course, I had to shout my English, but eventually I was understood; eventually they were able to conjugate my verbs and parse my meaning and bring me my gelato—all thanks to the universality of my native tongue. It is the remarkable feature of the English language, a blessing for which I am eternally grateful.
But of course, it doesn’t work in reverse. When Italians tried their language on me, shouting at me in Italian, it didn’t work. They remained utterly incomprehensible until I raised my hand and said, “English, per favore.” It’s near miraculous, and that’s because no other language is like ours, so universally intelligible. A great blessing as I said.
Now I’m speaking nonsense, undoubtedly. I’m being humorous. I try humor on occasion; it helps me not get so bored with myself. It also defrays any embarrassment I have about my own linguistic ignorance. But I make the joke to make my point here at the beginning—an important point—about the nature of language. And that is, the measure of language is often the measure of social belonging, the measure of our participation in any one society or culture. I don’t know Italian, for instance, and so I will always only be a tourist, tolerated because I am a paying customer. I will never fully be Italian because I’ll never fully know the language. This, of course, is the result of an ancient accident, rooted way back in that proud tower of Babel, that sinful project to which God said, “Let us confuse them!” making one language many, scattering humanity even unto this very day.[1] This is the legend of this truth, that language unites and language divides. Even if you speak English and think all you need to do is shout.
Language can even reveal or conceal the humanity of others. Wittgenstein, that remarkable philosopher, made this point. A person speaking Chinese, he said, will seem only to be blabbering; unless you understand Chinese. “Similarly,” Wittgenstein said, “I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.”[2] There is something deep about language, some profound power, arbitrating all reality—in the beginning was the “Word,” in the beginning God “spoke” light into existence.[3] Now, we are in waters too deep for a homily, I know, but I simply want to conjure up the mystery of this universal thing, that our ability to speak and to be understood and to be recognized as human, recognizing others as human in return, is the divine gift of language. That our language is the medium of human community, that belonging is the point of human speech.
It’s the basis of culture and of cultures, the beautiful diversity of our earth, the colors of our many-colored humanity, a diversity intimidating only the small of mind. As with language so too with culture: it unites as well as divides, and that is a good and natural thing. As a boy, for example, I listened almost obsessively to Stevie Ray Vaughan, for example (talking about culture)—“Pride and Joy,” “Texas Flood,” “Little Wing;” still that guitar nigh moves me to tears, and still I think Stevie Ray Vaughan is the coolest thing about living in Dallas. Now, if you don’t agree with that, or at least understand it, then I hope you are enjoying your visit to Dallas. You see what I mean? Culture unites as well as divides. The family, the neighborhood, the state—these cultures of particular loyalties and loves are what make the world work. My daughter, for example, learns about love because her mother and I love her, and this prepares her to love those outside our home. Our particular love for her forms her to be a healthy social and political individual. This is but ancient political wisdom from Aristotle to Edmund Burke; again, water too deep for a homily, but a truth worth trying to grasp.
But I talk about language and culture because I want to talk about the Church and about this feast of All Saints. And my point, here at least, is very simple, and it is this: the Church has its own language and its own culture, and the measure of our belonging is the measure of our ability to speak the language of the Church and to inhabit its culture with understanding and integrity. Today we celebrate all the saints, this “cloud of witnesses,” saints you know and don’t know, patrons and intercessors.[4] But this feast is not the liturgical equivalent of a hall of fame; rather, this feast bids us rejoice in the personalities of the sanctified because they all belong to Christ and to his Church, and because they all speak the language of Christ, the unique language of these beatitudes you just heard—a language of poverty, gentleness, mercy, purity, peace, and suffering.
And it is a distinct culture with its own demands, its own jealous loyalties and commitments. Rabbi Naftali Brawler, a rather brilliant contemporary Jewish mind, tells a story about visiting a well-known synagogue in Jerusalem for Shabbat. Sitting down, he asked the person next to him how long the service would be. To which the man answered, “If that’s the kind of question you ask, you really don’t belong here.”[5] What if we had that guy in our welcome ministry? We’d probably faint for the rudeness of it. Yet communities of virtue, communities of culture and wisdom, make demands and lay claim not only upon your time but also upon your loyalty. Any culture of value—your family, your nation, your Church—makes just such demands. That is, if those cultures matter. And that really is the question for you and me today—the question of the quality of our celebration of all the saints who from their labors rest. What does any of this matter to you? Do you speak the language? Are you a native speaker? Or are you a tourist just visiting the Church? Sometimes people can’t make it to Mass on Sunday; they’ve got too much going on, you see. Do you belong to the Church? “We’ve got a tournament this weekend,” I’m often told. That’s one way to answer the question.
Jacques Ellul was a remarkable twentieth century French thinker, a Christian, involved for a time in local politics (some say he was responsible for the phrase “Think globally, act locally”). His greatest contribution, however, was his writing; and one particular book called The Presence of the Kingdom has for a long time now influenced me and the way I see things. Writing after World War II, he asserted rather provocatively that although we had won the war on the material level, we had nonetheless been “spiritually defeated.”[6] And his larger point was that Christians no longer possessed what he called a “style of life.” That is, to put it bluntly, although there remained many who identified themselves Christians, they were nonetheless functionally pagans, shaped in all essentials by “sociological conditions” rather than by their spiritual condition.
What I am talking about is the Church and the deeper moral meaning of today’s feast. These saints we celebrate are not heroes simply to be admired. They are saints who speak the language of Jesus Christ; and not just the words of Jesus but his deeds as well. The saints are those in whom the Word has become flesh and who shine in this dark world like inexplicable lights above our now lonely path—surrounded suddenly by shallow atheists, comedians, Twitter followers, and the other fashionistas of society. And these saints should teach us—with understandably a little adolescent resistance on our part—our native mother tongue, a beautiful, peaceable language. The language of God, the language of “[b]lessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might,” the only language in which any of this means anything at all.[7]
And so what language do you speak? What language do you understand? Do you speak a Christian language? Or is this a strange land, and are you a stranger? These are questions, as Jesus said, of blessedness. And they’re questions for you. Happy All Saints’ Day. May you be blessed as well as they. That is the Church’s deepest desire for you. Amen.
[1] Genesis 11:7 paraphrase
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1e
[3] John 1:1; Genesis 1:3
[4] Hebrews 12:1
[5] Naftali Brawler, A Brief Guide to Judaism, 140
[6] Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 17
[7] Revelation 7:12
© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
