About a month ago I went with a group of 30 pilgrims to visit both Fatima and Lourdes 

We landed in Portugal mid-morning, and set off for a full afternoon of touring. By the time we arrived in Fatima, I was so tired I couldn’t imagine staying awake for the candlelight procession at 9:30 that night.

Dinner was late, and I got a second wind; after dinner, I bought a candle in the hotel lobby and walked to the outdoor chapel, a few blocks from our hotel.

The prayer was in a language I didn’t understand, but there was a sung response in Latin, led by a beautiful soprano voice.

When we started to pray the rosary. many different voices took turns leading the Hail Mary: they spoke Portuguese and Spanish, French, Italian, German Filipino, and several Asian languages,

We knew the prayer by heart, so everyone responded in their own languages. We were united in a shared prayer that transcended our differences.

This experience of Church reminded me of the day of Pentecost, when the church first found its voice to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.

As Christians, we place great stock in language.  Like our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters, we are a People of the Book.  In the opening words of the book of Genesis God births the very cosmos into existence by speaking: "And God said."  

The Gospel of John mirrors the book of Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word," 

We believe that language has power.  Words make worlds.  And unmake them, too.

“When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus tells his disciples “he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.”

Something happens when we speak each other's languages.  We experience the limits of our own words and perspectives.  We learn curiosity.  We discover that God's "great deeds" are far too nuanced for a single tongue.

“To attempt one language instead of another” Debie Thomas writes, “is to make oneself a learner, a supplicant.  It is an act of exploration and of hospitality.  To speak across barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, culture, or politics is to challenge stereotypes and risk ridicule.  It is a brave and disorienting act.”

Pentecost is often interpreted as the reversal of Babel. The biblical depiction of a stone tower reaching to the heavens captures the notion of language set in stone as the avenue to God and life. 

It is not a problem that people speak, make laws, and build towers; it is that they imagine their arbitrary and limited understanding is of eternal, life-giving significance.

At Pentecost the Spirit declared all languages holy and equally worthy of God's stories.

From its very inception the church needed to honor the boundless variety and creativity of human voices.

Like the wind, the spirit was uncontrollable. As Jesus said to Nicodemus: “you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with all who are born of the Holy Spirit.”

Willie Jennings’s hears an echo of Mary learning the Spirit had “overshadowed her.” “The Spirit transforms not just the ears, but mouths and bodies. God is like “the lead dancer, taking hold of us, drawing us close and saying, Step this way.’” 

Fr. David Neuhaus, a Jesuit priest, is an Israeli citizen and scripture scholar teaching in Jerusalem.

David was born in South Africa, the grandson of holocaust survivors.

David had no interest in religion as a youth, but at the age of 15, he went to Jerusalem for the 1st time, lived with a muslim family and met an Orthodox Nun whose joy was so contagious that it started David on a spiritual journey which culminated in his Baptism in the Catholic Church.

I first met David 18 years ago when he came to teach at our summer scripture conference. Whenever we were in Jerusalem, we would usually meet.

On one pilgrimage, our guide, a Palestinian Arab Christian, called Fr. Neuhaus on his cell phone to set up our meeting. They both spoke English, but they were speaking Hebrew.

When our guide addressed David as “Father,” - using the Arabic word for priest, Abuna - David immediately switched to Arabic.

David points out that this war is being fough both with weapons and with words, to control public opinion at home and abroad. “The rhetoric used on both sides basically denies the other side’s humanity.”

“The church has no armies and little political influence, but it has a tool of utmost importance: the word.” 

The church’s role, David insists, “is to speak a prophetic language that reveals the alternatives beyond the cycle of hatred and violence.” 

“This language refuses to attribute the status of enemy to any of God’s children; it is a language that opens up the possibility of seeing each one as brother or sister.”

In recent interviews, David questions a two-state solution because it does not derive from “a language of encounter, dialogue and reconciliation, but rather from the language of separation and division.”

“Amid this war, where hatreds run so deep, any culture of encounter seems like a dream.” 

David, who was born during apartheid in South Africa, hasn't given up hope.

“So why not dream wild,” he said, of the day after Jew against Arab, of a day when Jew is with Arab?”

Just as the mighty wind filled the house and drove the disciples out into the world, so, too, we are filled with the power of God’s spirit and sent out  to speak a language that all the world understands. A language of tenderness and kinship.

Imagine what happens if we allow ourselves to see others through their eyes. When they tell their own story we hear them in a new way, instead of the way we have always thought of them.