Found in Translation

In my previous life, when I served as a priest in a mostly Spanish-speaking congregation, I prayed every day for a Pentecost miracle. Quite aside from the fact that translating my sermons took up a distressing amount of time, there was always so much in our shared life that got lost in translation – often due to my imperfect Spanish. There was the time I scandalized the altar guild by thanking them for washing, not the altar linens – but the altar diapers. Or the time when I asked my confirmation students to please pass me their eyeballs – instead of their worksheets (thankfully they declined). Or the fact that my inability to correctly pronounce the letter “d” caused me to routinely address my congregation not as “you all,” but “you bulls” (which, to add insult to injury, is a homophobic slur in certain parts of Latin America – and definitely not what I meant). Read more…