The dialect of faith

1471 words, 7 min read

At the beginning of this year, pope Francis baptised 34 babies in the Sistine Chapel and afterwards addressed their parents with the following opening line: “There is just one thing I want to tell you, something that is up to you: the transmission of the Faith can only be done in “dialect”, in the “language” of the family, the “dialect” or “language” used by the father and mother, the grandfather and grandmother.”

I immediately liked the way Francis framed the question of how faith is transmitted - a topic that has been, and in many cases still is, fraught with difficulty and plagued by pathological perversions like proselytism - and thought that his likening it first to language and then to dialect was a stroke of genius. Also, I couldn't help but hear "language" in my own "dialect", which, naturally, speaks with a Viennese accent and thinks in the categories of the later Wittgenstein. I couldn't help but think about his concept of the language-game ("Sprachspiel"), its setting in an infantile context and its complete rootedness in participativeness, self-othering and community, all of which fit Francis' intentions like a glove.

More recently I have been thinking about what this dialect of faith is like that has been passed to me in the games my family played when I was a kid, which is what I'd like to reflect on in this post.

For a start, a bit of context: I grew up in a communist country, in a family that was deeply involved in the life of the underground Catholic Church. This gave its dialect a distinctly edgy and adventurous twang. My mum and dad took great risks for the sake of the language game of faith, which made progress the more rewarding and the stakes scarily high. As is the case with most kids though, my siblings and I were, thankfully, not fully aware of the dangers at the time. Our parents took us to events organised by a then very young movement in the Church, whose activities - like any other non-commumist-party-organized group activities at the time - were wholly illegal. This lead to the need for elaborate ruses, like pretending that it was someone's birthday (and everyone knowing whose birthday it is supposed to be in case the police arrived) when the actual purpose of a gathering was to read the Gospel, share experiences of putting it into practice and encourage each other in doing so even under the extreme circumstances at the time.

Not only did we participate in such events, but my dad deliberately built our house to allow for large meetings to take place there. Our living room has always seemed excessively large to me, until I discovered that my dad built it (no, not "had it built", "built it") with a floor especially reinforced to hold the groups of 60+ people who often met there. Looking back, this was made even more reckless and dangerous given who our neighbour was - a veteran and hero of the communist resistance army from WWII and a zealous party member, who could have denounced us to the secret police in a heartbeat.

Miraculously, my dad at one point got a job in a neighbouring, non-communist country - an event reserved for the very few and only for the party faithful. My dad getting the job with all he was doing in secret and with his brother being a priest was baffling and lead to even greater risks. My mum and dad immediately saw this as an opportunity for serving the underground community they were part of by connecting it to its members on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They regularly smuggled books and audio recordings across the border for which they would have been sent to prison. One of my most vivid memories from that period is crossing the border, which was quite an elaborate game! You'd first get stopped some miles from the border itself at a barrier with armed soldiers, who would check your papers, telephone the border post and after what seemed like half an eternity, raise the barrier and let you enter the barren no man's land behind the barbed wire fence - a stretch of land dotted with guard towers. At the border, papers would be checked again, questions would be asked, the underside of the car would be inspected with mirrors and dogs would put their olfactory senses to official use. Our parents always told us to not answer any questions whatsoever - just to say we don't know and say that they, our parents, would answer. We, kids, found this rather odd and asked: "What if they ask my name?". Sometimes the game at the border involved having the car practically disassembled - seats being unbolted and removed, knives being stuck into any food we were carrying to make sure they didn't contain the seeds of the communist regime's destruction.

At the same time those "seeds", sought so diligently by the communist regime were there, for everyone to be seen in plain sight: my dad's constant kindness and politeness when dealing with the border guards. Over the years he'd learn their names, strike up conversations and do precisely what the game of our Christian faith was all about: to love all like Jesus loved us. This, in fact is the first and most persistent rule of the dialect that was spoken in our home.

What sticks most vividly in my mind here are the first minutes of pretty much any car journey we took from home. No matter where we were going, whom we were going to visit or what errand needed to be run, by the time we go to the bottom of the hill my mum and dad's house is on, my dad would - following the implicit rules of our game - ask: "Why are we going to [visit X / do Y / or travel to Z]?" And we, who played the game well too, would answer - sometimes enthusiastically, at other times out of a sense of obligation - "To love whomever we meet there!" It didn't matter what were about to do, this "handshake" was a tuning of our instruments, a directing of our minds and wills towards the good of those we were going to encounter.

Now, for the game to be effective the "rules" had to be practiced and their application had to be demonstrated. And there was no shortage here! My dad would give his hat and gloves to a man guarding a car park in the middle of winter (and winter where I come from is winter indeed, with temperatures down to -20°C), would let a homeless man stay in our basement, providing him with clothes and food too; my mum would visit sick friends or acquaintances in hospital, cooking the most delicious meals for them and care for them at times when others could or would not visit them. My parents would be the ones there at the ends of their lives. Our house was always a cross-roads of people staying for shorter or longer periods, coming for advice and support (including a student whose priestly vocation was sustained by my dad during his military service and who is now a bishop), not to mention the hundreds of people over the years for whom my dad helped find work, a service so central to what it is to be human, as Pope Francis frequently emphasises.

Like all good games, the one we were taught was not a walk in the park or even just a challenge that took hard work but where the rewards were sure to follow. There was plenty of misunderstanding, clashes of personalities and even downright slander and ill will. A painful example here has been the expulsion of my dad from the heart of very community for which he risked his and his family's freedom during the communist regime and to which he gave so much over many decades. Yet, this was also an opportunity for him to show us, his kids, how the game of the Gospel is played, with what dialect it is spoken in our family. In spite of the injustice done to him, he never turned on those responsible for it and has instead been both on the look-out for continuing to participate, albeit at the periphery, and supportive of us - his children - to continue being involved in it.

Thinking about my childhood, but also my adult life, I can see clearly how it is the Gospel that my mum and dad have made the language, the dialect of their family. The Gospel, where God's self-noughting, self-othering love draws humanity into itself and where humanity, like a child, giddy with enthusiasm at times, nursing its wounds at others, learns and re-learns to take wobbly steps towards its family, the Trinity.