Several years ago
I was standing at the International Airport in Portland, Oregon waiting for a
shuttle to take me to the campus of George Fox University. I was there to
attend a conference and present a paper. A group of us gathered to wait for the
shuttle. A gentleman asked me:
“Are you here for
the FAHE conference?”
“I am,” I said.
“You teach?”
“I do,” I said. “Theology.”
He shook his head.
“Well, that is a monumental waste of time.”
The problem is I
had already had a number of conversations like that one at PDX. In each of the
encounters I felt I was doing more than simply arguing a case for the
importance of what we theologians do; I was trying to legitimize my own sense
of worth, my own calling as a person of faith. And each time I walked away
wondering if I really was wasting my time—and, by wasting my time, also wasting
my life.
Even in the seminaries
where I teach: most students come with an interest in spirituality or pastoral
studies; many have reservations about theology—a mild distaste for it—the area
of study in which I had invested so many years. I know very well that it can be
dry and theoretical and embarrassingly clueless, but no student has ever been
as blunt as the retired philosophy professor I met in Portland. The nagging
doubt never quite went away.
I withdrew as much
as possible and spent less time with students and co-workers. After dismissing
class, it was not unusual for me to hurry to my office, close the door, and
thank God I didn’t have to interact with anyone for the rest of the day. I was
ready to retool and find another career…to do something that mattered.
For any of you who
might be able to relate to this thus far, you know very well that such crises are
not simply professional ones. They have that appearance; but they are deeper.
They can eat away at one’s soul; cause one to question one’s vocation; and they
can cause one to question one’s faith. They are spiritual crisis. It angered me
that I might have been pouring my life into something meaningless…and worse!
that I was justifying it all for God. I thought maybe God had sucked out the
energy of my life, exploited me, for too many years, and now it was time to do
something important…which obviously meant it was now my time.
Then I traveled
with a group to Honduras in January 2006. What happened in the ten days I was
there has changed my life forever.
Without warning I
fell in love with Honduras. I fell head over heels with Latino culture. And to
my surprise, I fell in love with Spanish. As I look through the notebooks from
my days there, I was learning words like: brother, sister, up, down, to walk,
to eat, to do, and so. Basic. As an adult I knew how to count and say “hello,”
and that was about all.
When I returned I
began studying in earnest with a Columbian student of mine who sat patiently
with me as my stilted conversation became a little more confident and as our
weekly hour together shifted from mostly English to mostly Spanish.
Since then, I have
returned to Honduras seven times, the last time I was accompanied by some of my
own seminary students. I spent a sabbatical there too, rather than where I
thought I would: in the Bodlean Library, University of Oxford, writing an
important book. Since then, I’ve taught courses in New Testament theology and
contemporary theology at an institute in southern Honduras, I’ve taught in
Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, and at la Universidad
Iberoamericana in Puebla, Mexico—all in Spanish, and I’ve been a scholar in
residence at two different organizations in Mexico City.
Absolutely none
of this was on my radar screen a few years ago. I saw none of it coming.
I began by mentioning
the nagging question of whether my work was a monumental waste of time. You’ve
been patient with your time as I have narrated this personal story. But what is
the point?
I want to claim
that, for me, learning Spanish saved my life. This is a kind of
linguistic soteriological love story.
I’ll make four
points briefly:
1.
Learning Spanish awakened a delight in other people
Speaking Spanish meant I had to listen, really
listen, to the people with whom I was talking. I don’t always do that well.
Knowing English the way we do, we can listen without listening…not really pay
attention. We can text, read, and talk, while trying to listen. Because I
didn’t know the language, I had to listen carefully to what was being said. I
had to ask questions. I had to look at the person with whom I was speaking. In
short, by learning Spanish, I discovered, in a new way, how to delight in other
people. I fell in love again with my human family.
Bernard Lonergan, one of the most important Catholic
theologians of the twentieth century, would name this a conversion—a conversion is a kind of falling in love, he said.
Conversion,
as lived, affects all of [one’s] conscious and intentional operations. It
directs [one’s] gaze, pervades [one’s] imagination, releases the symbols that
penetrate to the depths of [one’s] psyche. It enriches [one’s] understanding,
guides [one’s] judgments, reinforces [one’s] decisions. (Method in theology, 131)
2.
Learning Spanish allowed me to risk, to stretch
beyond what was familiar and comfortable
I like to appear competent in the eyes of others,
especially when I speak in public. However, each time I open my mouth to speak
Spanish, I make some mistake…I’m becoming fluent, but I’m not native, and as
much as I’d like to think I am Mexican these days, I’m not fooling anyone! So,
each and every conversation I have requires risking not appearing competent.
When we take a
risk, it is easier to take another…and another. And it becomes easier to trust that
God is present even in the places of challenge and stretching. But our
institutions—churches, seminaries, other religious organizations—are
conservative, no matter how progressive we claim to be; in one sense, these
institutions’ first order of business is survival—how do we keep going. Risk is
hard enough without complicating it with this survival instinct.
I think we
believe: “See, I am doing a new
thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” But we will never see the: “I
am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” if we are
hunkered down in enclaves of familiarity, comfort, and stasis. (Isaiah
43:19) Learning Spanish has helped me
risk taking risks.
3.
Learning Spanish opened my eyes to the urgency of
what I do…but in a different perspective.
I was in Copán Ruinas, Honduras waiting to begin a
workshop. People trickled into the church a few at a time, walking from various
parts of the small town and the mountainous region surrounding it. Shortly
before time to begin a little Toyota pickup truck pulled in carrying nine or
ten people. The pastor told me that these folks had driven all day from El
Salvador to participate in the workshop I was offering.
I was overwhelmed.
I—literally, not metaphorically—
locked myself in the bathroom and prayed (in the spirit of nearly every call
narrative in the bible): “God, you have the wrong person! I’m not cut out for
this. What I do is not important enough to ride in the back of a pickup truck
for nine hours.”
When I spoke with
a Honduran friend of mine about this he shook his head and said, “Don’t be
crazy! What could be more important than what we are doing here tonight?”
I realized the
questions I was pursing were born more out of the academy than out flesh and
blood. Why? Because I wasn’t pressing into life with the kind of abandon that
allows one to know the “joys and the hopes, the
griefs and the anxieties of the men [and women] of this age.” (Gaudium et Spes, 1) Learning Spanish taught me this. In so many
ways we play games. We’re institution building, reputation building, ego
building. In the midst of all this inflated self-importance we forget Jesus.
While trying to become the “best of these” we forget about the “least of these.”
There is an urgency about what we are doing here; but believe me, it sharpens the
mind and focuses the resolve when you see, coming up the driveway, a pickup
truck packed full of people arriving to hear what you have to say. You have to
quickly separate wheat from chaff, truth from bullshit.
4.
Learning Spanish helped me to see the invisible,
particularly the exploited and the impoverished.
Our world aches with the suffering of untold
millions of people. However, most of these people are invisible to us. Even in
our religious institutions. Like many Christians, I was aware of poverty and
would say that praying for the poor was part of my Christian duty … or
volunteering in a soup kitchen, or something of the sort. But, again, like many
Christians, even though I would say helping the poor was important, I did not
know anyone who was poor…really destitute. “The poor” was a category; it did
not have a name. I did not know the name of anyone who works for pennies a day
to sew cheap socks and underwear for people like me who stuff them in Christmas
stockings next to my fireplace. But to paraphrase Jacques Lacan: The poor do not exist. Neither does the immigrant, nor the refugee, nor the
Iraqi, nor the Republican. As
categories, they do not exist.
We can travel the world—get the passport stamp to
prove it—and post our photos on Facebook; we can travel the world and not see a
thing.
Learning Spanish has opened my eyes to the world,
its joy, and its suffering as never before. This was the point of so many
feminist writers in the 70s around the theme of “raising consciousness.” We’re
not invited to see something new or novel—but simply to see what is. That’s
harder than it sounds and there are powerful interests benefiting from us not
seeing. But once we see, really see,
we either have to consciously choose to ignore what is before us, or allow our
life to be forever changed; after being brought to our consciousness, a reality
uncovered will be made visible again and again, even in places we thought we
knew well. Something happens when this happens; as Frederick Herzog observed: “You don't understand what
theology is unless you have looked in the face of suffering, unless you have
become an atheist in the presence of pain.”
Learning Spanish made the invisible visible, and it
gave me a voice with which to speak with the world.
There is much affluence and abundance in the
countries I’ve visited, but it has been my time with those on the margins that
has made my theology more edgy. It has given a risky and frisky quality to my
teaching. It is no longer adequate to simply talk about this teaching or that
doctrine or about some abstract moment in the church’s history without drawing
a deeper connection or offering a more textured critique. Rather, my work is
today more impassioned with a deep concern for how we as people of faith can interrogate
our own practices and our own commitments and how we can evaluate whether we are
contributing to the world’s suffering, or whether we are speaking a word of hope
and life.
In short, learning
Spanish saved my life. It opened
me to the joy of other people, it has helped me learn to take risks; it has
helped me see how my work really can be meaningful. It has made me aware,
directly, of realities I would rather have overlooked.
I no longer worry whether my work is a monumental
waste of time; I worry these days whether I will have enough time to do the
monumental work that lies before me.
May the grace of God:
open our
eyes,
loosen our tongues,
and set
our lives right in the middle
of all
the action,
in the
places where
faith,
hope, and love are most needed.
