"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
You
know how parents spell when they have to say something they don't
want the kids to hear but the kids are present? "Are you
going O-U-T?" My oldest daughter and her husband use it
for the dog, "Are you going to take her for a w-a-l-k?"
they’d say, because if she heard the word “walk”
she was instantly and insistently at the door.
It
doesn't work very long; kids figure out how to spell the simple
stuff. Even the dog picked up on w-a-l-k, so now they ask if
she has been taken for a “w” yet today, and can get an
answer without having a frantic pet.
My
parents had an advantage which lasted longer. When spelling
wouldn't work anymore, they had French. My mother said that the
reason she didn't lose the French she studied was that she married my
father, good returned French missionary that he was, and then he had
business dealings in France and she had to host the occasional
visitor. What it boiled down to was that she had continuing
practice.
Every
single one of us took French. I'm sure that other languages
were offered at our schools, but I don't even remember which ones.
There was incentive to join the grownups and share the common
additional language; to be part of the insiders, to share the jokes.
My kids have studied Spanish, French, German, and Russian, but I and
all of my brothers and sisters chose French. Upon reflection,
we also knew we could actually get help with our homework! In
fact, I was part of an experiment to start language study in
elementary school, beginning in the fourth grade, an idea everyone
acknowledges is much better than beginning in your teens. They
at least start in middle school now, not just high school.
Luckily, the language chosen for us in this program was French, and I
was able to continue all the way through high school. I continued in
college, the first two years, but sadly, my skills have now rusted
away.
There
are a lot of good reasons to learn another language besides our
native tongue. The United States is generally woeful on that
score. It gives us a better sense of the rest of the world, exposes
us to other cultures and patterns, other countries, and hones our
communication skills.
But
I think there is another, non-scholastic reason to learn another
language: it helps us understand how revelation works.
I
was never fully fluent, but I had the opportunity to go with my
father to Europe when I was a senior in high school. (I
celebrated my 17th birthday by going up the Eiffel Tower; how cool is
that?) It was a business trip for him, and I got to go along, for
three weeks in Paris with a road trip through Switzerland to Venice,
and the last week in London. The road trip was with a French
art dealer and his wife in their car, so French was the language I
had to use. It was a mostly-immersion situation, I could ask my
father for help, but unless we were alone in our flat, I had to speak
in French, and I didn't manage too badly. I gained confidence
as I went along. I got to the point that I was thinking in French, at
least part of the time, rather than thinking in English and thinking
how to translate that into the French. If I had possessed a
farther-ranging vocabulary, I would have been fairly well set.
Now
maybe my dad is smiling at this and thinking no, I was way less able
than I thought, but the important point is that I was starting to
think in French. My brain shifted gears. There are
patterns in any language which don't match up with other languages.
(I am so grateful that English doesn't have genders for common
nouns. You don't have to learn that a table is feminine or a
pencil is masculine.) Russian has no articles--no equivalent for
'the, a/an' that are so automatic to us. German has more cases to
keep track of, the Romance languages (those derived from Latin) have
genders for common nouns, and so forth.
In
French, word order is different. In a sentence, a noun comes
first, followed by its adjective. Thus, in English, we have a
'green bean' and in French the same item sitting on our plate is un
(masculine) haricot (bean) vert (green). This
doesn't matter, except that if you are thinking in English, you have
to stay aware that the 'green' has to go after the 'bean' or you
sound like an illiterate idiot...and you can't call it une
haricote verte either, because
that would make it feminine. When you start thinking in the new
language, your mind doesn't stop to worry about that any more, it
just flows in the right patterns. Whichever pattern of words we
use, we all recognize the vegetable in the dish before us, and can
agree as to what it is.
And
that's where it struck me that the experience of revelation is a
similar thing. What Joseph Smith called 'pure intelligence'
comes into our mind, and we have to let it speak to us according to
our own understanding. Like a language, we can learn to gain
clarity without having to strain at every little bit. We can
also understand that it's not necessarily going to come out as the
identical expression from someone else, because the Holy Ghost speaks
to our mind and heart. Comprehension can be very exact, but it
requires us to learn how to 'translate.'
Spiritual
experience has its own tongue, and our human languages of
communication may only approximate its clarity. Language alone
wrestles with the abstract or infinite—think how many arguments
there have been about defining “love,” a concept we all
agree is real. The experience of the Spirit actually makes those
abstracts clearer to us, because it touches us with the Infinite,
speaking to memory underneath the veil of mortality. Words are
simply not perfect, not fully adequate, to define what we feel and
know; but someone who has experienced the same thing--or is sharing
the experience with us--will be able to comprehend on a level deeper
than words. To be in a room that fills up with light, because
the Spirit is present so purely and lifts every heart there, is a
blessing of joy. It’s unmistakable. Words are powerful,
but truth runs even deeper. Perhaps it cannot be perfectly
captured. The more we comprehend the spiritual, though, the
more precise our understanding of its words will become.
Marian J. Stoddard was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in its Maryland suburbs. Her
father grew up in Carson City, Nevada, and her mother in Salt Lake City, so she was always
partly a Westerner at heart, and she ended up raising her family in Washington State. Her family
took road trips all over the United States and Canada, so there were lots of adventures.
The adventures of music, literature, and art were also valued and pursued. Playing tourist always
included the local museums as well as historical sites and places of natural beauty. Discussions
at home, around the dinner table or working in the kitchen, could cover politics, philosophy, or
poetry, with the perspective of the gospel underlying all. Words and ideas, and testimony and
service, were the family currency.
Marian graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, and attended the
University of Utah as the recipient of the Ralph Hardy Memorial Scholarship, where she was
graduated with honors, receiving a B.A. in English. She also met the love of her life, a law
student, three weeks after her arrival; she jokes that she had to marry him because her mother
always wanted a tenor in the family. (She sings second soprano.) They were married two years
later and have six children and six grandchildren (so far). She treasures her family, her friends,
and her opportunities to serve.
Visit Marian at her blog, greaterthansparrows. You can contact her at
bloggermarian@gmail.com.
Marian and her husband live in Tacoma, Washington. Together they teach those who are
preparing to go to the temple for the first time, and she also teaches a Stake Relief Society
Institute class.