Laura Ferris

The Language of God

— Originally published in print // Permalink

There are no apostrophe keys on Mexican keyboards, I realized after hunting for one halfway through typing an e-mail. I speak Spanish; I know that possession and contraction are indicated differently, and yet I still spent thirty seconds looking for something I should have known wouldn’t be there.

I think this one embarrassing moment halfway through a ten-day trip to Mexico City exemplified the sort of experience I was having. I had signed up through my fellowship group for a travel seminar with Partners in Hope, a trip designed to expose American college students to urban ministry in Mexico City, in hopes that I’d cross cultural boundaries and hear the voice of God. But I was resigned, even before I left, to the fact that I ultimately could not understand the culture, poverty, or people I’d encounter.

A “travel seminar,” the mode of ministry that Partners in Hope supports, is pretty cutting-edge missions theory. As the Global South increasingly becomes the dominant voice in the global church, leaders in Africa, Asia, and South America alike have made clear their dissatisfaction with the classic “come in and fix it” model of western and particularly American evangelism abroad—a model identified with western imperialism and exploitation. These leaders call for partnership, for a relationship that better approximates the reciprocity that should characterize the universal church as the Body of Christ: many parts forming one body, where the eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you” (1 Corinthians 12:12–21). Programs like travel seminars are geared to do exactly that: force Americans to learn from and observe Mexican culture before they can participate in the community’s solutions.

And so our small team was thrown headfirst into the vibrant, overwhelming life of La Ciudad de México, the largest city in the world. We ate in local restaurants, spent hours on public transportation, spoke Spanish with varying degrees of fluency, and listened. We climbed to the top of the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacán, ate lunch with the children of Lomas de San Isidro, a poverty-stricken community abandoned by the Mexican government, attended a home church in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Latin America , and mopped the floors and fed children lunch at a mission for severely developmentally challenged orphans run by Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity. I haven’t even begun to fully process the experience I had there: I don’t think I’ve seen so much, thought so hard, or felt so deeply in my life.

But everywhere I went, as I tried to cultivate an appropriately “Berkeleyan” receptivity and sensitivity, I was confronted, again and again, by my own limitations. I don’t just mean my personal limitations: blanking on how to conjugate that one verb, snapping at a team mate when I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, keeping awkward silence when I should have been forming relationships with the people I met. I was also confronted by my cultural, and even my spiritual, limitations. The fact is, I had a hard time keeping an open mind. I typically consider myself to be, in my heart of hearts, a radical, sold-out follower of Jesus Christ, but I have to admit that the loyal American consumer in me privately approved of the lavish economic development in the center of the city even as it devastated the poor on the periphery. The erudite intellectual in me balked at relocating to and working in a community that wouldn’t need or appreciate philosophical insights and an increasingly expensive brain so much as open hands and an open heart. The staunchly orthodox Protestant in me rejected Liberation Theology out of hand before I considered how Jesus would view the social transformation that it inspired.

In some ways, I feel like I spent the whole trip speaking a foreign language badly. While that might sound like a trite, Lost in Translation sort of metaphor for my experience as an American evangelical abroad in the developing world, I find it to be apt. I ask what’s wrong, who’s to blame, what we’re supposed to do about it, but I do so in the embarrassingly thick accent of my own experience and education. Regardless of how many times I go to church, how much time I spend reading the Bible, how many prayers I pray for those enduring suffering I can’t imagine, I have to face the fact that the language of God is not my native tongue. God’s language is love, His vocabulary is grace, His syntax is humility, and too often we stutter our way through the defective textbook of our own cultural dialect instead of imitating the life of Jesus Christ through immersion. But even though I now know just how bad my accent is, I will continue to try speaking this divine tongue; I hope every Christian will. For when we realize the poverty of our language, we discover the richness of God’s mercy, because, as the apostle Paul reminds us, we have not been left without an interpreter.