Canter Bridge

The Spanish of Latin America’s madre patria—her distant motherland—is a dialect away from the daughter continent’s accent and cadence. The Spaniard beside me speaks it now, as we remove our pens, take off our belts, surrender our wallets, place our laptops flat on the belt and step through the metal detector, please. It is the first of a hundred micro-humiliations to be endured in what will be a long day of travel.

At the end of a holiday in Costa Rica, I speculate, she endures this traveler’s rite with less joy than I. She wishes she were already home in Madrid or Seville, not taking off her belt beside the stranger to whom she now turns and says, ‘Ay, they make us do a strip right here!’. You know a Spaniard immediately when she speaks, her consonants all but discoursing that she comes from where this all began anyway, her vowels closing fiercely around themselves. It is a dialect whose main features become all the more pronounced when its speaker is in a bother.

I smile, mumble something meant to sound friendly without agreeing, and finish restoring my belt to its accustomed role. Perhaps my face will sympathize with her plight if my words cannot approve her complaint.

Minutes later, I come upon her again in the departure lounge. Face to face with a bemused knot of German tourists, she struggles to ask where she has met them before. What will be the common tongue? English, of course, as the tallest of the Germans (are they all tall these days?) replies ‘at our same hotel!’ Germans so often sound as though they are smiling when they speak English, their inventory of sounds merging mischievously with those required by English.

Finding the common tongue so often takes us to English or Spanish in the airports and public spaces I frequent, German elsewhere, French in a distant place, Cantonese or Mandarin well beyond my horizon. It is the clumsy linguistic dance of strangers in places like this, the practice of wisdom in many others.

I shared lunch this week with a colleague who has yet to master this task, has not yet found the gentleness which the search for a common tongue requires. He nodded sagely as he regaled me with tales of a conversation he’d had years ago with a larger man than he who had given his life for the poorest of Central Americans. In this man’s voice, my friend heard ridicule of the people he had served. He interpreted gestures as disdain instead of deeply textured knowledge.

My lunch companion didn’t recall—how could he?—that I had been there those years ago, had seen those same gestures, heard that voice, interpreted it all so very differently than he. My friend had not found the common tongue. The two had spoken as strangers, locked in mutual incomprehensibility, each one deaf to the other.

It is too often this way where distinct peoples mingle, where their languages collide. Query is taken for disapproval, affection mistaken for paternalism, confidence for boorishness, silence for disdain. A decade and a half in to living as an adoptive son of this place, I have arrived at a conclusion: there exists an inverse relationship between people who discourse about ‘mutuality’, ‘contextualization’, and ‘cultural understanding’, on the one hand, and those who live the labor of finding the common tongue, on the other.

I am not certain that Jesus was a management guru or a successful personality or a dispenser of strategic leadership principles. He was certainly a seeker of the common tongue. Whether facing off with his adversaries in the heat of rhetorical contest—‘You have heard it said … but I say to you…’—or probing the heart of an outcast with the strength of a question—‘Where is your husband …?’, ‘Peter, do you love me?’—he engaged the person. He took up the dialect of his partner’s soul. He looked her in the eye. I wonder if they thought he was too many things, that he gave too much away, that he really should have found his voice and stuck with it. It seems most appropriate that they sign-posted his capital crime in three languages.

Paul was quite another man, in his letters if not in his unimpressive person. Always the daring rhetorician, his intellect a megaphone for the truth he taught, he spoke inimitably: ‘I have become all things to all men’—did they read his exertions as pretension, dismiss him as chamelionesque?—‘so that I might by all means save some.’

The apostle’s indelicate self-disclosure, as so much of his impassioned life, assumed that grace and truth were served by his costly search for the common tongue. Indeed, he links salvation—that radicalizing, transformative, richly-faceted work of Heaven—to his own undivinized quest to speak the language and to touch the heart of the other.

Finding the common tongue requires me to value the other more than I do myself. It insists that this person right here matters intensely and forever. It is nourished by self-giving, supplied by patience. It is slowly cumulative in its pace, constructed upon manifold misapprehensions. It is embarrassingly self-denying and serially flawed. It resists the urge to demand. It laughs both at its own clumsiness and its practitioner’s incompetence. It suppresses the totalitarian urges of my own language and exalts the hegemony of my partner’s.

Though it costs a lifetime, its first dividends are paid early. It is the most rigorous of human pursuits, yet in its essence a most amazing grace.