Do you have a priest with a non-American accent? We’ve had several in our little parish over the years. That’s not surprising, even in our very white, very homogeneous region, because according to a recent study, about a quarter of seminarians in the United States are foreign-born.
When Catholics hear a thick accent coming from the pulpit, they tend to respond in one of two extremes: either with a cranky dismissal, with undertones of “Why don’t these people go back where they came from?” or else with a warm, self-congratulatory welcome of ethnic diversity — which lasts until the own-back-patterns discover this new priest doesn’t omit the bracketed section for shorter reading.
But I heard a new take the other day, a rather bracing one for native-born Americans like me.
Father Ryan Hildebrand wrote on X: “‘I can’t understand my foreign priest’s accent!’ Instead of belittling you for not sending your sons to seminary (like I normally would), I’ll give you a helpful tip: Go to YouTube. Pull up BBC [his country of origin]. Watch it for a few minutes each day. That’ll help.”
He’s right, it would! It really is the kind of thing you can get better at with practice.
I loved the advice itself; and I loved the implication that a priest’s hard-to-understand accent is a problem for the listener to solve, and not only for the priest or the pastor or someone else. It’s certainly not something we should be mad about, because a foreign accent is the sign that someone has been brave and persevering, and willing to do hard things to serve God and us. But it’s also not something we should be passively, contentedly tolerant of, without trying to make the situation better. It’s something we should work on, from our end.
Remaining open to God
The Word — every word, but especially the Word of God — is meant to be heard and understood, and we should do what we can to help that happen.
How many problems in the world actually have a simple, at least partial solution, but it never occurs to us to discover it, because we don’t consider the problem ours to solve? Probably about as many problems as we drive ourselves crazy trying to solve, even though they’re not our responsibility or not under our control.
Sometimes the best way to help the Word be understood is to get out of the way.
Here is another scenario: My friend’s father is 80 years old. He had a stroke, and since then, he’s had a hard time processing language. He can hear it, and he can think, but there is a disconnect or a scrambling, and no matter how much speech therapy and occupational therapy he works through, he sits in the pew and the sermon comes at him, and he can’t make sense of it.
So instead, he sits there and prays.
He is accepting (how graciously, I don’t know) that his disability has put a barrier between the priest’s words and his mind. But rather than sitting there killing time or lying fallow, he opens another channel for the Holy Spirit (which is what we do when we pray). Here is a tremendous example of someone understanding that a problem is not his to solve — and thereby remaining open to God.
Talking with God
The example I opened with is especially compelling to me, though, because it’s about communication; it’s about words. In fact, it’s about the Word, who is Jesus. That is why we go to Mass: to worship by being in the presence of Jesus, to present ourselves to Jesus, and to receive Jesus in whatever way we can.
It is, like all forms of communication, inherently reciprocal, if not symmetrical.
When one human communicates with another human, there is always inherently some loss, some degradation of meaning, that occurs between speaker and listener. We cannot communicate purely; our humanity, with its subjectivity, gets in the way. This happens most obviously with situations like unfamiliar accents, but also because of things like avoidable and unavoidable prejudice, memory, ignorance, crankiness, distraction, and also things like acoustics and the health of the body.
But when God communicates with a human, there is always the potential for gain, for increase: for what happens between them to become more than it originally was. The gracious generosity of God magnifies our efforts, and the gracious creativity of God makes us fertile ground for small things he gives us to become large.
God is so gracious that even when we do nothing, with a good will, he makes something of it.
Communication within the Trinity
Here’s a question: Did Jesus, the God-Man, ever find himself trying to decide which category to put problems in? How did he decide which problems should be solved by him, and which were better reconciled by the Holy Spirit? In the 33 years he walked on earth, there certainly wasn’t any problem he couldn’t solve, because he was (and of course still is) God, omnipotent. But there clearly were problems he didn’t solve — not because he couldn’t, but because he chose not to.
He had normal, everyday problems like any human being: being tired, being thirsty, needing food, needing sleep; and also unique problems, like being misunderstood by literally everybody in the world, being arrested despite his radical innocence, being killed despite being God. Sometimes he shrugged off human limitations and made water into wine, walked through walls, strode across the waves, healed the blind. Sometimes he didn’t, like when he was clearly frustrated or annoyed at his disciples for being dense. Or when he died.
I’m not trying to be glib. This is a profound mystery: the question of how, exactly, the divine will and omniscience and omnipotence of the eternal God could also be made a real human man. How he could be both the speaker and the listener, the subject and the object of divine love.
But one thing I know: he didn’t do it alone.
You cannot understand anything about Jesus unless you remember constantly that God is a trinity. He is, by definition, living in relationship. Jesus speaks and acts like someone who is not alone. He speaks to the Father; he entreats the Father; he pleads with the Father; he offers himself up to the Father. And sometimes the Father audibly answers. There is clearly a reciprocal action going on between the Father and the Son.
The Father speaks and Jesus is the Word, and the Holy Spirit is (and I hope this isn’t heresy) both speaking itself and hearing itself. Speaking and hearing in the form of love so intense, it is a person.
When we try to communicate — and most profoundly, when the thing we’re trying to communicate is the Word of God — then the Holy Spirit is there, in the act of speaking, and in the act of listening, but also in the act of understanding that sometimes we cannot receive or understand or fix things in the way that we want. Sometimes stepping back and admitting defeat is a kind of communication, or at least a kind of communion.
There is only one moment when he seems to feel that Jesus is alone, one problem he seemingly cannot solve: at the actual moment of his death, when he asks the Father why he has abandoned him. He seems to feel that the Father has not heard him, that they are not communicating and are not in communion with each other.
And so what he does in this moment is offer himself up to the Father. He gets out of the way, surrenders, gives up. Dies.
So, this is how we can be like Jesus: either to always be aware that the Father is with us and to act on it, or, when we don’t feel like he is, then to throw ourselves at him. In some small way, to die. All of life is either problems we can solve or problems we can’t. Either way — by working hard or by surrendering entirely — is a way of becoming open to the Holy Spirit.
