Two Languages in One Mouth
Updated: Sep 2
“Taking her by the hand he said to her,
‘Talitha cumi,’ which means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise.’” Mark 5:41
You begin a sentence in one language and finish it in the other. It happens without planning. The words simply arrive from whichever side of you is closer to the surface that day.
Some thoughts have always belonged to one tongue. Others will not fully cross over. There are feelings that sound true only in the first language you learned, and there are prayers that come more easily in the second.
You live between them. Not as a visitor in either, but as someone who carries both the way a person carries two keys on the same ring.
Jesus spoke more than one language. Aramaic at home. Hebrew in the synagogue. Most likely Greek in the streets and in the places where people bought and sold. The Gospels do not make a drama of this. They simply show him moving between worlds without becoming a different man. When he raised the child, he did not use a grand religious phrase. He spoke the words of the house. The Church kept those words as they were, because something would have been lost in a tidier translation.
Most people who live in two languages know the quiet cost. You are never completely from here, and never completely from there. Something is always slightly out of place: an accent, a pause, a word that has no exact match. You search for a sentence and find that one language holds the fact, while the other holds the feeling.
There is also a grace in it. You learn that the truth is larger than any single set of words. You discover that love can be spoken in more than one way and still be the same love. God does not wait for you to become simple enough for one vocabulary. He meets you in the mouth you have.
This is also what happens at Mass. The Church has never spoken with only one tongue. Scripture is proclaimed so that it can be heard. Prayer moves between languages older than we are and the language we use at the kitchen table. Christ is the Word made flesh, not the Word made into one accent. When we listen, and when we answer, he is already at work in both.
Tonight, when both languages fall silent, you remain. The same person. Holding both. Belonging, somehow, to more than one place at once.