St. Francis The Episcopal Church In Potomac

Once upon a time, when I was taking a required seminary course in homiletics (preaching), a busy-body who thought her role was to criticize everyone else in the class decided to put me in her spotlight. She opined to the group, “I did not mind what you said, but I am concerned by your accent.” My immediate response was that I, too, was concerned about it: I feared that if I stayed out of the South too long, I would lose it. That was not what she meant, but it is most assuredly what I did. I suspect Red Barber and Ernie Harwell, to mention two, would allow me the grace my classmate begrudged.

   If I had an entirely new academic discipline to pursue, it might be something on the mystery of how human beings acquire language. When I was in high school, I went to France for the summer to study French. I was hardly sophisticated in these matters, and so I thought it was cute (if I used such words) to hear little French children speaking this language I was working to learn. Of course, what did I expect them to speak? 

   That summer expanded my linguistic horizons on another front as well. At the university 

where we stayed were other students learning various languages. Among them was a couple from the Congo. French was one of their two primary languages, so they were working on English. We would often dine together and help one another in the ways of these tongues. It just amazed me to hear people of color speak with “British” accents, by which I mean they sounded like they were from the BBC. People of color did not sound like that in South Carolina, which was all I knew at that point. There was a good reason for my friends’ accents: The tapes they listened to in the lab were produced by BBC announcers. I was even further amazed, as were they, when they told me I had a “northern” accent, by which they meant that my French had Parisian elements, taken from the tapes I listened to daily. Our “accents” had nothing to do with geography, and everything to do with the models we heard and mimicked. 

   I am mindful of these things as we near the Day of Pentecost [May 11th] and especially as we administer Holy Baptism. Among the many gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of language. The gift of the Holy Spirit is perhaps more fully understood (in this sense) when we think of spirit as breath. We cannot live without breath. Nothing gives clearer evidence that life has left a body than the stillness that shows one is no longer breathing. It is by the breath of God, which is one of the images of the Holy Spirit, that we are alive and are able to speak a word of Good News.

   Little children learn to speak first as they mimic the sounds they hear from their parents. It is for that reason those little French children outside of Paris spoke such splendid French, and also why mine was a bit more labored. Or consider this little variation: I learned to sing as Cranston Gray’s grandmother sat me down at the piano and said, “Make this sound.” She would play a single note, and I would try to match it. And when I did that, we moved on to a second, and a third, and then all three in order. There was no fancy pedagogy involved in that, but I received a gift of joy which has lasted many, many years. 

    In Baptism, we join the family which takes its life from the Lord, and receives the gift of breath and of language from the Holy Spirit. The language we learn is not French or even Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, but the vocabulary of faith and the grammar of discipleship. The disciple’s prayer expresses this in simple and sweet language: “O let me hear thee speaking in accents clear and still, above the storms of passion, the murmurs of self-will; O speak to reassure me, to hasten or control, O speak, and make me listen, thou guardian of my soul.” (Hymn 655) As we take in that gift of breath from the Holy Spirit, we abide in his life and love. And as we abide, so, too, we are finally able to speak with faithful accents: “Jesus is Lord!” is what we say. Apart from that breath, we cannot speak, and we have nothing to say.

—WMS