It is no great secret that I am a language nut. I’ve been a writer my entire life and took the first opportunity I had in the 7th grade to learn a second language. I was intrigued not only by how much I learned about the culture of the people who spoke that language, but also about my own culture through the differences between them.
This early enlightenment prepared me for the first step of my spiritual journey. I had been raised in the Catholic church and my mother and her parents were very devout. In about the 9th grade I had an experience of becoming curious as to why, as a Catholic, I could not marry a Christian. Christian. Weren’t we all Christians? I asked my mother and she said that our children would have to be raised in the Catholic church if I did that. And I asked something along the lines of do I have to or is that required, and she said you wouldn’t be a very good Catholic if you didn’t. And I agreed with her. At the time it was all I knew.
Fortunately, in a rare and likely inspired moment of clarity, my mother gave me a copy of an easy to read, Catholic Bible in paperback called The Way. It was perhaps one of the earliest Bibles written for lay people. My mother had grown up in a time period of the Catholic church where all masses were still held in Latin and she didn’t understand a word of what was going on. I at least had the opportunity to hear the teachings in English, and that allowed me to relate and understand what I was learning instead of having it be all about devotion.
Well I took that paperback Bible and started reading it. And somehow, I can’t say that I recall exactly how, I came to the realization that I needed to know the meaning of the word Catholic. And through some effort I learned that it was a Greek word that meant universal.
Universal? My curious young mind immediately wondered, If it was so universal, why was it so exclusive?
That was the first time that language impacted my spirituality at an incredibly deep level. I carried that lesson with me as I eventually Left the Catholic church entirely and moved into non-denominational Church communities.
I studied the Bible in depth through the original languages. I owned many large volumes on the Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew languages, as well as concordances and other study tools. I would spend hours and hours pouring over the meanings of words to better understand the scriptures.
At the time I felt it was all in service of my growth as a Christian. And yet one thing that was cemented in my mind over and over was the fact that the original languages and our modern interpretations often didn’t align as one might hope.
I found this especially disturbing, as I considered the fact that so many people live their lives with deep dedication to the words they read in an English version of the Bible. And especially that some people will read the King James version while other people will read The New international version or The New American standard, and in spite of all the variations, they all think they are reading the true words of God. And yet, these words have been handed down and have morphed over multiple generations and through different translators and translations over time. Even some of the earliest manuscripts, such as the Greek Septuagint were translations of the original languages.
In my mind I knew very well that we were not getting the whole truth. And it bothered me.
Through the same time. The America I lived in was experiencing more and more connection with other parts of the world. We were of necessity becoming less america-centric and more globally oriented.
This was exciting to me, as a lover of languages and cultures. I grew up around people of many different races, creeds, and cultures. And importantly, many different languages. It was not uncommon to hear languages other than English spoken around me. I was quite simply immersed in the reality that different people had different words for the same thing. Whether objects, or concepts, or feelings, humans simply had different ways of expressing the same ideas.
Even within the Bible itself, there were multiple different words for God. Each one with a slightly different meaning or connotation. God was Emmanuel, Adonai, etc. When I learned that someone had a belief in a God just like mine and called him Allah, it didn’t take me long to figure out that we were talking about the same God. And yet for some reason, so many Christians around me were trying to convert people who believed in Allah to believe in the Christian God. Somewhere in the back of my mind, this didn’t make sense.
Similar language. Conundrums played in my understanding of the world. But it took quite some time before I broke away from the Christian church entirely. And through that painful and arduous process, and all of the grief that came with it, I truly began to investigate and embrace the way other languages and cultures talked about the concepts I had grown up with as a Christian.
I recall fearing the practice of yoga because it was allegedly a dangerous and different spiritual practice. There were all sorts of unusual words involved, which, according to people around me, were somehow demonic. Why? Because they were not English?
My first reaction, of course, was to translate them. And then they weren’t scary at all. Tadasana was simply “mountain pose”. Asana meant pose. Nothing freaky or demonic or spiritual about it.
I quickly lost patience with those who made Kristin yoga practitioners out to be some sort of deviants. Ridiculous.
I won’t go on with all the words whose meanings, when translated, are simply the same everyday words that we use in English. English. Suffice it to say that the examples are as infinite as language itself.
Furthermore, as I studied both ancient and modern languages, I began to understand that language evolves over time. Christians seem to have an aversion to the concept of evolution in any form, which I find equally ridiculous. Everything evolves. Let’s not get attached to whether we believe in creation or evolution… Just consider the absolute facts of science which demonstrate that everything evolves. If we didn’t evolve internally, we would be stagnant. If life didn’t evolve, it would be stagnant. If language didn’t evolve, we would all be speaking Sanskrit. Or perhaps not speaking intelligible words at all!
The main point here is to understand that human language is diverse and disparate, but it is only a construct that allows us to communicate with each other about the world around us and our internal worlds.
Words carry vibrations. Positive words in any language carry a higher vibration than negative words. It is also simple and yet we make it so complicated.
My greatest encouragement to you on this front is not to be scared of words that come from other languages. They are simply words. If the concepts they convey are positive, they are just as positive in another language as they are in English. Likewise if they are neutral or negative. Look for the meaning, not the language itself.
Spiritually, this will allow you to be open to the commonalities between people over the course of the history of humankind, and open to understanding that there has been spiritual wisdom growing and being passed on from generation to generation since the beginning of humanity. And there is some truth in all of it.
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