THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART
Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna en el cielo… at hearing these words of the liturgy, I bowed out of years of habit. In contrast to the serenity these words inspire in English, as I heard them in Spanish, I felt a cry almost escape my lips and tears welled up in my eyes. With great effort I stifled that cry and those tears because I was visiting the Seminary of the Southwest and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I composed myself and with a happy heart I approached the Holy Table and there I was offered the Sacrament in my own language: el Cuerpo de Cristo, pan del cielo–Amén; la sangre de Cristo, cáliz de salvación–Amén. I couldn’t say what the final hymn was, but I do remember my heart swelled to the sounds of Spanish and the rhythms of the guitar. In fifteen years of attending the Episcopal Church I had never attended a service in Spanish. I was not expecting to be so deeply moved and it was this experience that cemented my decision to attend the Seminary of the Southwest.
Our maternal tongue forms us in ways that are almost inconceivable. According to linguistic studies of infants, babies under six months were able to recognize the language spoken by their mother. The evidence seems to show that even though they cannot speak, yet the babies are able to recognize the intonational patterns of their mother tongue. Before they are five, children have an astonishing linguistic plasticity that allows them to acquire languages with great facility. After that age, it seems like this plasticity diminishes gradually until in adolescence the majority of people lose that facility and learning other languages becomes quite difficult.
Like many other second-generation immigrants my first words were those of my mother’s tongue, but at five years of age when I entered kindergarten, I already spoke English. Thanks to older cousins and to the media I absorbed this language before the age of linguistic maturity. As the years of my childhood went by, English became more and more my primary language, the one I spoke with my brothers, my cousins, and my friends. I continued, however, to speak Spanish with my parents and all my older relations.
English became the language of learning for me because it was the language of instruction at school; it was the point of contact with Anglo society. The one exception was religion, where from the beginning my instruction was in Spanish. As a young child my family wasn’t particularly pious, so I would occasionally go to Roman Catholic catechism classes or Bible classes at the Pentecostal church with the children of family friends. Later during my teenage years, Spanish was the language of worship at the Pentecostal church we attended and of the Bible that I studied. In my heart, Spanish was the language to express my theological thoughts and of liturgical devotion. It was in Spanish that I would happily worship the Triune God with the sound of guitars, and it was in Spanish that I would confess before I would take the Lord’s Supper as the pastor read solemnly from the First Letter to the Corinthians.
When I left the Pentecostal tradition behind, I also said goodbye to worship in Spanish. I started attending the Episcopal Church because as a gay man it was much more welcoming, more inclusive of my sexual identity, but I had to give up worship in my mother tongue. In some ways it wasn’t so hard because my whole formal education had been a long acculturation to Anglo culture.
The thing I found hardest and the one thing I found shockingly hard was English hymnody. It took a long time for the change from contemporary Christian music on guitar to classic English hymnody on organ and piano to become comfortable. The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers recounts a similar experience to mine in which she heard, for the first time, a black gospel song at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York; it was her first experience of welcome in the Episcopal Church in which she found a piece of herself that had been outside of the church finally embraced and welcomed in. (1) It wasn’t until I heard Spanish in a chapel of the Episcopal Church that I felt a fundamental part of my identity was embraced. As with Canon Spellers, I hadn’t realized that an important part of my identity felt outside of the church that had otherwise welcomed me, even though I had taken refuge in this church and I had given myself to discernment for ordained ministry.
I could talk about demographics and the missed opportunities for the Episcopal Church and all the mainline Protestant churches, but I prefer to speak about the idea of Radical Welcome that Canon Spellers defines as a call to “welcome the voices, presence and power of many groups—especially those who have been defined as The Other, pushed to the margins, cast out, silenced, and closeted—in order to help shape the congregation’s common life and mission.” (2) The Church has the opportunity not only to open its doors but to open its heart to embrace Latinx people whose maternal tongue is Spanish. A significant part of later generations of Latinx immigrants are bilingual and even though they have reached a certain level of acculturation to Anglo society they are still deeply rooted to a Latinx way of worshipping.
In the Diocese of San Joaquin from which I came to seminary, I can count the times I heard a Spanish song in worship. Outside of a certain Taïzé chant, no Spanish hymn was used with any frequency. The first time I heard a villancico, a Spanish Christmas carol, in an Episcopal church, the lyrics had been translated into English. I well remember the excitement I felt to hear those Spanish rhythms and then the bittersweetness that the lyrics were in English. I was told that Spanish wasn’t a language of the worshipping community, but I thought to myself maybe it isn’t of this congregation, but two blocks away it was the language of the majority.
There is a real opportunity for our churches in places where there is a preponderance of Latinx people to attract them with services that are truly bilingual. Congregations that establish bilingual services have the opportunity to be the place of worship for Latinx people of the second and later generations because they already live a multilingual and multicultural reality. (3)
True change requires courage and effort, but if we truly wish to become a spiritual home for Latinx people it has to be our congregations that change. If we wish to be places were the Latinx heart is fed spiritually, we have to speak the language of their hearts. We have to explore bilingual liturgy and hymnody where both the hymns of Charles Wesley and Flor y Canto can be sung, and where we can offer the Sacrament to each person in the language of their heart.
Spellers, Stephanie. 2006. Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation. New York: Church Publishing. pp. 3-6.
Spellers, Stephanie. 2006. Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation. New York: Church Publishing. p. 15.
Rodríguez, Albert R. 2019. “Transcultural Latino Evangelism: an Emerging Paradigm.” Anglican Theological Review 101 (4); 673-683.
